Marianne Faithfull
Cast Your Fate to the Wind: The Complete UK Decca Recordings
ABKCO
Before her comebacks of 1979, 1987, 1995, 2002, and 2021, Marianne Faithfull was a British “it” girl with a confident but gentle voice singing baroque London pop and Anglophiliac rural folk songs. While the lion’s share of Faithfull publicity has been given to her latter-day, rough-hewn vocals and their often-autobiographical, crushed-velvet-morning lyrical real estate—no matter who wrote down the details, from Tom Waits and Beck to Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker—the early-career sound of her voice was uniquely world-weary, almost as if she’d read the tea leaves and knew her fates.
For the first time, her original Decca albums Marianne Faithfull, Come My Way, North Country Maid, and Love in a Mist have been reissued along with a double LP of her collected singles, B-sides, and rarities from the era. Gathered together in this six-CD box set, Faithfull’s Fate casts as much of a magical spell tangled up in spiders’ webs of strings, plucky bass lines, and spare percussion as it does portend a more ominous, lyrical set of future circumstances. From this box’s hungry, punchy version of Come My Way’s “Lonesome Traveler,” to her dry, icy interpretation of The Beatles’ “I'm a Loser,” to her unpsychedelic take on Donovan’s “Young Girl Blues,” someone should’ve known things weren’t going to go well for Faithfull—that she’d still sound regal while on that road to perdition.
Straddling the line between then-new Loog-Oldham/Jagger/Richards pop and creaky, woodsy trad-folk, Faithfull spent 1965 releasing her first two albums simultaneously, leaping from the handsomely wiry “As Tears Go By” to the oddly Nico-esque version of the chipper Petula Clark hit “Downtown” while leaving room for her own compositions. If Love in a Mist is only half-good as an album, with limp, overly grand songs like Lennon/McCartney’s maudlin “Yesterday” sung listlessly, pitted against inventive mood swings such as Jackie DeShannon’s “With You in Mind,” the North Country Maid album is all-great. Recorded and released two years before acoustic-psych marvels from freak-folk godfathers Pentangle and Fairport Convention, Faithfull’s wispy, impertinent vocals and off-beat, gossamer arrangements on traditional fare (“Scarborough Fair”), Dylan contemporaries (Tom Paxton’s “Last Thing on My Mind”), and the sitar-filled likes of “Wild Mountain Thyme” are bizarrely wonderful—especially now in remastered form.
Anyone currently in love with Lucy Dacus, Rhiannon Giddens, Billie Marten, and Amythyst Kiah will enjoy reaching into Marianne Faithfull’s pre–Broken English back pages.
