Marianne Faithfull is perhaps the most over-admired, least listened-to and sometimes most tuneless singer of our time. Even those who profess to love her might be pushed to name her last two albums (Easy Come Easy Go in 2008, Horses and High Heels in 2011).
She's never been short of high-profile collaborators and guests, and this late-career high is a who's who: Steve Earle (who co-wrote the title track on which Warren Ellis and Mick Jones also appear); Ed Harcourt (co-writing and appearing); Tom McRae, son of Dave and Anna Calvi on a slightly rocking treatment of the Everly Brothers' mid-60s Price of Love ...
Nick Cave wrote Late Victorian Holocaust for her and it sounds like a poetic version of her harrowing autobiography of those lost years; and the astonishing Mother Wolf ("that cub in your mouth isn't one of yours"), co-penned with Leonard Cohen co-writer Patrick Leonard is a bitter disabusing of our brutally political overlords and religio-assassins.
Not sure about her treatment of Hoagy Carmichael's I Get Along Without You Very Well though.
Faithfull hasn't sounded this connected to her past and the present in a decade, maybe more.
