CD Odyssey Disc 466: Marianne Faithfull

When you undertake to review 1,000 or more CDs over several years there will be days that you’re not feeling up for the fight.  Coming off a late night on Saturday, and with an early start to my work day tomorrow, this is one of those times.

Fortunately, this next album is a good one, so that will hopefully power me through.

Disc 466 is…Broken English

 Artist: Marianne Faithfull

Year of Release: 1979

What’s up with the Cover?  Even in the dimmest of blue lights, Ms. Faithfull wearily shields her eyes from the world.  Thank God for cigarettes.

How I Came To Know It:  My friend Casey loves this album, but he can’t claim introducing it to me, since I’ve owned it since university in the late eighties.  I don’t remember where I heard it – likely at a party – but it stuck sufficiently that I bought it at a time that I had very limited purchasing power.

How It Stacks Up:  Amazingly, Marianne Faithfull has almost twenty albums, but “Broken English” is the only one I own, so I can’t really stack it up.  From what I read, it is regarded as her finest work, but I don’t know her other work, so I can’t say.

Rating:  4 stars

“Broken English” is an album with themes that are as provocative as a rock thrown through a bedroom window, so it is only fitting they are sung by a woman with a voice like broken glass.

This record always impresses me with Marianne Faithfull’s unflinching look at the rotten underbelly of life.  Sexual politics, drug addiction, class warfare and the quiet desperation of a housewife that simply can’t take it anymore, it is all here. 

The title track sets us off with an apocalyptic beat that sets you on edge while at the same time draws you in as Faithfull sets her sights on the small matter of the Cold War (which in 1979 was no small matter at all), and how thoroughly irrelevant she sees the struggle from the perspective of the common man.

It is a theme she develops later with John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” contracting international politics into a much more personal assault on Britain’s class system.  She may be singing John Lennon’s words, but delivered in Faithfull’s raspy, accusatory tone they just seem all the nastier.

Not content with international relations and class warfare, Faithfull also tackles sexual politics with Shel Silverstein’s “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan,” telling the story of a woman so completely lost in her suburban prison that she has a mental breakdown.  On “Lucy Jordan” Faithfull sets aside the bluesy rock of the rest of the album and opts for a more folk-inspired approach, slightly modernized with a synthesizer riff.  Her sultry sandpaper voice takes on a fragile quality as she sings:

“Her husband is off to work and the kids are off to school

And there are o so many ways for her to spend a day

She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers

Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way.”

“At the age of thirty seven she realized she’d never

Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.”

This song always fills me with such a deep sadness, not just for the title character, but for everyone out there that we calmly walk past every day, oblivious to the fact that inside they are screaming in frustration at how their life didn’t turn out the way they hoped it would.  It’s a hard world out there sometimes, and Marianne Faithull isn’t afraid to remind us of it.

Of course the album ends with the nastiest song I think I own, in “Why D’Ya Do It,” about a woman confronting her man after she catches him cheating.  This song is packed to the gunwales with spitting rage, as Faithfull packs almost seven minutes with every sexual swear word she can think of (and she can think of a lot).  This song is now over thirty years old, and I don’t think it could have been any edgier if it were written today.  Infidelity is harsh, and Faithfull wants you to feel that harshness in your very bones.  Mission accomplished.

Musically, all the songs are wrapped up in an ambient production that is reminiscent of Pink Floyd with its big guitar and insistent drum beats that are both groovy and unsettling.  I particularly dig the funky guitar featured in “Guilt” and “What’s the Hurry?”

When looking up some other information for this album, I read that Faithfull battled various addictions for years, including in 1979 when she released this record.  I find it difficult to write well after a second beer, and the thought that she could put together a classic album like “Broken English” while fighting addictions to cocaine, heroin and God knows what else just makes the accomplishment all the more amazing.

This album has been in my collection for over twenty years, and it still sounds as fresh and thought-provoking as the day I first heard it.  Thought-provoking and brutally honest, it is a must have in any music collection.

Best tracks:  Broken English, Witches Song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Working Class Hero, Why D’Ya Do It