Marianne Faithfull • Broken English (Deluxe Edition)

January 28, 2013 | UMC/Island | iTunes | Amazon

8/10• Broken English
• Witches’ Song
• Brain Drain
• Guilt
• The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan
• What’s The Hurry?
• Working Class Hero
• Why D’ya Do It?
• Broken English (orig.)
• Witches’ Song (orig.)
• Brain Drain (orig.)
• Guilt (orig.)
• The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan (orig.)
• What’s The Hurry? (orig.)
• Working Class Hero (orig.
• Why D’ya Do it? (orig.)
• Sister Morphine
• Broken English (7″ version)
• Broken English (7″ remix)
• Broken English (12″ remix)
• Why D’ya Do It? (12″ remix) Back in 1978 if you’d predicted that Marianne Faithfull was about to reinvent herself as the elder stateswoman of the punk movement, people would most likely have assumed that you were on as many drugs as the singer herself. The ’70s had not been a kind decade to Faithfull, who had swapped a twisted kind of domesticity as a Rolling Stone girlfriend for a heroin habit and spells of sleeping on the streets. Ever a diffident kind of popstar, even at the height of her first brush with fame in the early ’60s, she had become less an artist than a cautionary tale of what too much fun and indulgence can do to a girl. That all changed with the release of Broken English in ’79. Not only did Faithfull spit a generation’s worth of received notions about what female artists can and should do right into the faces of her doubters, better still she achieved it in two remarkable ways: first with shock tactics, and second by making an album that – appropriately enough for someone who saw peace and love die, live and in full colour – perfectly captured what it feels like for your dreams to wither.

The initial shock lay in that voice. Faithfull may now be a byword for a gritty, lived-in style of singing, but hearing the change in her voice for the first time with Broken English must have been a palpable shock. Drugs, heavy smoking and hard living had filed the pleasant, if bland, voice that had graced her first records right down to its stumps. Only the hauteur that had originally marked Faithfull out as an aristocrat among pop musicians (itself a myth given that Faithfull was brought up in genteel poverty by a single mother) remained, casting an air of ironic detachment over the album’s second shock: its determination to stare into the abyss. Broken English is a bleak record. Its songs deal in despair, whether exploring the baffling nihilism of the Baader Meinhof gang (‘Broken English’), the impossibility of goodness (‘Guilt’) or savage sexual jealousy (‘Why D’Ya Do It’). Even its few bright spots, such as the Wiccan baccante described in the beautiful ‘Witches’ Song’ are overshadowed by a knowledge that any kind of joy must be paid for in despair. And perhaps most poignantly of all in ‘The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan’, a song about madness in suburban America that reminds us that, while the wages of sin are death, the path of cosy domesticity is still a means to the same end.

Listening to the record long after the voice, the uncomfortable subject matter and the shock of a woman unashamedly shrieking ‘cunt’ have faded, what comes through clearly is how gorgeous Broken English still sounds. The punk aesthetic that had ruled the second half of the decade is nowhere to be heard as Mark Miller Mundy’s glossy production acts to counterpoint the rawness of Faithfull’s vocals. Stevie Winwood’s keyboards shimmer right through the album, from the ‘Blade Runner’-esque trill that opens the title track to the chilly synths that somehow fooled listeners into mistaking ‘The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan’ for a pop track and giving Faithfull a rare opportunity to appear on ‘Top Of The Pops’. Elsewhere, the arrangements veer dangerously towards adult-oriented rock. The airy darkness and perfectly judged saxophone solo of ‘Guilt’, for example, feels almost like a companion piece to that antithesis of all things punk, Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’.

Broken English, while always fascinating, is not a perfect album. ‘Brain Drain’ drags and a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ rings hollow when Faithfull gives it the same detached treatment that in subsequent years would make her one of the world’s mot impressive interpreters of Brecht and Weill. Nor has the album’s most controversial song, ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ aged well, its frank sexual language and cod reggae backing making it more comedic than effective. Where the album does still hit its target, however – in the title track, ‘Witches Song’, the propulsive ‘What’s The Hurry’, and most of all in ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ – Broken English is a record out of time, looking forward to when Peter, Paul & Mary are displaced by PJ Harvey. Desolation has rarely sounded as sleek.

In the ’60s, Marianne Faithfull was at best a footnote. In 1979 she became an artist, and Broken English is her flawed but thrilling magnum opus. Don’t buy this record for the extras, which are mostly incidental mixes. Buy it for itself; it’s worth it.