LIVE: Marianne Faithfull at the Royal Festival Hall, London (11/29/2014)
Despite shattering both her hip and her thigh bone earlier this year, Marianne Faithfull is touring at age 67 using a walking stick but making fun of herself, telling off rude audience members, doing Tommy Cooper impressions and swearing like a sailor. There’s no doubt about it — Faithfull is something of a trooper, and she still puts on one hell of a show.
The tour is a celebration of two things: her new album, Give My Love To London, easily one of the best records this year, but it’s also to commemorate, amazingly, her 50th year in music. Faithfull was, of course, worried about the tour when she had her fall back in May, but luckily for us, her French doctor encouraged her not to cancel: “‘Go,’ he told me, ‘The work will heal you, the music will heal you, and the love of the audience will heal you!’ And bugger me, it’s worked!”
When she first appears though, slowly and unsteadily creeping across the stage with her walking stick, I wonder if she is even going to make it to the microphone. But make it she does, waving her stick in the air as she dramatically shouts out, “Now is the winter of our discontent!” laughing as she gives us her best Richard III impression. Even Faithfull is aware of how much she looks like an old Shakespearean character at the moment, hobbling along; she’s even got a throne-like, big, wooden, antique chair to sit in during the show, like the queen that she undoubtedly is.
The opening number is, of course, the stomping and anthemic “Give My Love To London.” It couldn’t be anything else, really, given the setting, as she sings about dancing in Piccadilly, raising hell in Kensington and singing Pirate Jenny as “the Tower’s tumbling down.” It feels like a little love note to us, and she tells us that London isn’t all bad — “All the best people in London are here tonight.” Oh, Marianne, you old charmer, you.
And she really is utterly charming throughout, whether it’s confiding with us like old friends about her fall and all her health issues or telling us at length her version of Kipling’s Jungle Book which inspired her fantastic new song “Mother Wolf” (which is a ferocious, primal roar of a song — one of the highlight’s of the new album and the concert). There’s even a great moment when a heckler in the audience rudely berates her for name-dropping and Faithfull cooly retorts, while taking a drag on her ever present electronic cigarette (or as she calls it “cigarette électronique” — she does live in France now after all), “This is my stage, this is my show, and this is not a dialogue, dear!”
She tells us she hasn’t properly smoked in a year, and her voice actually does sound better for it, although it still has that distinctive, sexy rasp, but it’s more commanding now than ever. The old delicate bird-like trill of her youth is long gone, but even during what she calls “Sixties corner,” when she sings two of her most loved hits from that decade — “As Tears Go By” and “Come And Stay With Me” — they sound as fresh and lovely as ever, and it’s a thrill to hear the latter in particular, dug out just for these anniversary shows.
Faithfull explains that she actually consulted her fans about what they wanted to hear on this tour and more than just her greatest hits, they told her they wanted to hear some rarities, and because of this, she provides a few wonderful surprises. The first is a bright and joyful “Witches’ Song” from her Broken English album and then a rare outing for the beautiful “Marathon Kiss” from 1999’s Vagabond Ways. Penned by Daniel Lanois, she gossips that Lanois has been besotted with Emmylou Harris for years and wrote it as a love song to her, “but I got it,” she laughs triumphantly.
There are of course plenty of old favourites too: “Broken English” sounds as dark and bold as ever, and “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan” is still powerful and poignant, but “Sister Morphine” goes on a little too long for my taste as the band gets to let rip but ultimately spoils the overall haunting effect. The newer songs fit in well though, the best being the big sweeping sound of her collaboration with Anna Calvi, “Falling Back,” and the intensely chilling “Late Victorian Holocaust,” co-penned with Mr. Gloom himself, Nick Cave.
The rarest tracks are left to the very end and are among the most striking, memorable moments. There’s the rather sublime and cinematic sounding “Who Will Take My Dreams Away,” written with composer Angelo Badalamenti, which she tells us she has never performed live before this tour. Then, after a very funny anecdote about getting roaring drunk with Blur frontman Damon Albarn while writing the track, she ends, rather appropriately, with the somber “Last Song” from 2005’s Before The Poison.
Backed throughout by a superb three-piece band which featured her producer Rob Ellis on drums and the musical whiz Ed Harcourt on keyboards (an incredible singer-songwriter in his own right), it’s easy to see Faithfull has great chemistry with them all and they are just as fond of her. For instance, it was amusing and sweet to see Harcourt go over to Faithfull and carefully hoist her up out of her chair at the end, like a favourite nephew helping out his old, beloved aunt.
Even confined to her chair for most of the concert, Faithfull’s charm and wit filled the stage, and more than ever, she seemed like a seasoned storyteller, with us gathered around to hear her dark tales and wisdom. For a long time, she’s been dismissed by many as just a rock star girlfriend, but the music she’s been making, particularly in recent years, is far more interesting and relevant than most of her contemporaries. Tonight also proves that she doesn’t even need to move around much to keep her audience enthralled with her words and her music, surely the sign of a true artist and entertainer. It seems that not even a broken hip can keep her down. What a woman and what a night.
(Cover photo via Flickr)
