The Gypsy Faerie Queen - Marianne Faithfull
- unclestylus
- 22 minutes ago
- 2 min read

Marianne Faithfull's 1978 album "Broken English" (see last post) included three tracks co-written by her and on her next album after that all 9 tracks bar one were co-written by her. Thereafter Faithfull's next thirteen studio albums consisted mainly of tracks in which she was cowriter, providing the words with others composing the music, with the exception of four LPs deliberately dedicated to recording covers: "Rich Kid Blues", "Strange Weather", "Twentieth Century Blues" and "The Seven Deadly Sins", the last two of which both feature the songs of Kurt Weil.
The general, rather compelling tone of the Marianne penned tracks is world weary, yet in-your-face, often tinged with a sense of reflective sadness as she gets older. Her vocal style borders on the comical, an older Nico meets Rex Harrison circa My Fair Lady and Doctor Dolittle, yet, suffused in the dignity of experience, and her quintessential Englishness, moves and entrances.
Classically middle class English in fact, half low-aristocratic Austrian on her mother's side as only the true English can be, and very John Le Carré: her father was a British spy in 1930's Germany when he met her mother, an ex ballet dancer who performed in many German avant-garde theatre pieces including original Kurt Weil / Bertoldt Brecht productions and whose forbears, the von Sacher-Masoch family, included an uncle who wrote the classic erotic novel "Venus in Furs" which gives us the words "masochism" and therefore, of course, "sadomasochism".
Faithfull's own theatrical past and her neo-aristocratic thespian antecedents infuse her style of musical presentation with a kind of stagedoor seediness that taps deep into what it is to be English, nevermore so than in her penultimate 2017 album "Negative Capability".
In ""The Gypsy Faerie Queen", co-written with Nick Cave who adds background vocals and piano, Faithfull asserts both of these, in what feels very much like a farewell to, and coming to terms with, her native land, acknowledging her own roles in Shakespearean theatre and identifying herself as a playful Puck, that personification of English goodwill, mischief and magic:
"I'm known by many different names.
My good friend Will
calls me Puck and Robin Goodfellow
I follow the gypsy faerie queen...."
But this is not the contentious St George flag-waving of today, rather a more hopeful, positive outlook from, extraordinarily, only as recently as 2018:
"She walks the length and breadth of England
singing her song, using her wand
to help and heal the land
and the creatures on it".
As is usually the case with so-called true Englishness, Marianne Faithfull comprised a hotchpotch of ancient blood and recent immigrant Austrian, and her co-composer is an Australian. And jolly good it is too.
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