Marianne Faithfull: Dreaming My Dreams, Part I

Thoroughly enjoyed Marianne Faithfull: Dreaming My Dreams (2000), a brief overview of the life and times of Faithfull with interviews, evocative archival footage and more contemporary live performances. "Yes, I guess I do have vagabond ways," she sings, noting also this: "The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs." Her mother was of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, a group whose status quo was forever destroyed in the Great War of 1914-1918. Her father was a multilingual English spy during the Second Great World War who afterwards joined the Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research in Oxfordshire (Link to website here: http://www.braziers.org.uk/). Marianne's parents had a rocky relationship that ended in divorce; she was sent to Catholic school, and when she was sixteen, she met John Dunbar at a mixer; he asked her to dance, and soon "a whole doorway opened" as she entered his social world in the early 1960s. He knew William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, looked the part of London hipster on the rise. Things moved quickly from there on out. She met the Rolling Stones and Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager, who directed Mick Jagger and Keither Richards to write a song for Marianne that turned out to be "As Tears Go By," a huge pop hit first for her (in 1964) and later for them (in 1965).

She had more hits, sounding both jaunty and sad, a mix of pop folk and the Kinks. When she became pregnant, she married John Dunbar -- "a completely doomed period of domesticity." Her son Nicholas Dunbar was born in November 1965. Though she mused about living a scholarly family life in Cambridge, John was into the arts scene in London, and Marianne soon found what felt like her perfect match with Mick Jagger.

[To be continued]. 

Today's Rune: Partnership.