Читать книгу Memories, Dreams and Reflections - Marianne Faithfull - Страница 7

Listening to Revolver always brings back memories of when we were all much younger and madder. Any excuse to get together, get high, get dressed up, or play each other our latest faves. In and out of each other’s houses and at many different clubs, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton dropping by Cheyne Walk, Mick and I visiting Brian Epstein; day trips to George Harrison and Pattie Boyd’s multi-coloured hippie cottage, evenings at Paul McCartney and Jane Asher’s.

Sometimes a tiny little moment, a gesture, will catch me unawares and transport me back to the sixties. One day I was waiting for a taxi after the Versace show, and suddenly there was Stella McCartney knocking on the window. As I turned and peered out, Stella gave me a wink and a thumbs up. And I had this sudden flashback to her dad, Paul, because that gesture and the wink is just what he used to do in those days. Kind of a corny music hall cheeky-chappie thing. So there was dear Stella by Starlight, who looks quite like the old man anyway, giving me Macca’s sign! The sixties was a great motley cast of characters in an ongoing operetta with multi-hued costumes to match. What I remember most is how beautiful everybody was, and, of course, the beautiful clothes: we dressed up like medieval damsels and princes, pirates, pre-Raphaelite Madonnas, popes, hussars, mad hatters and creatures visiting from other planets.

And then there were the courtiers and spear-carriers – all those strange characters around the Beatles and the Stones: the roadies, the hustlers, and instigators. George’s personal assistant Terry Doran, the ‘man in the motor trade’, somehow getting hold of Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce and ending up with a top job at Apple Corps. There was the sublime Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ publicist and agent provocateur; the sinister Tom Keylock, Andrew Oldham’s homicidal chauffeur; Brian’s thuggish builder, Frank Thorogood, and his deathbed confession of how he murdered Brian Jones.

Then there were the Beatles’ old roadies Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans. Big, benign, boyish Mal shot by the LA police during a misunderstanding. And Stu, Ian Stewart, the Stones’ original piano player. I loved Stu! I remember for my twenty-first birthday Mick wanted to buy me a car and Stu was given the mission to find it. He turned up with the most beautiful car imaginable, a 1927 Cadillac, a Bonnie and Clyde car in an incredible beige colour with a red stripe across it where the doors opened. How cool was that? But despite Mick’s efforts I never learned to drive. It was like driving a tank in the First World War, it had a gear stick and all that stuff, I could hardly see, my nose only just reached the windscreen.

Stu did me another great favour. Mick hated the Stones’ performance in The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. He just wanted the whole thing to go away. It was like the scene from Snow White where the Wicked Queen says to the huntsman: ‘Go! Take her into the forest and destroy her!’ with Mick as the Wicked Queen and Stu as the huntsman. Except that it wasn’t me he was talking about, it was the cans of film of my part in Rock and Roll Circus. He wanted those tapes destroyed. Burned. Thrown into the Thames. For ever eliminated. And Stu said, ‘Yeah, okay, Mick, will do.’ But he couldn’t do it! ‘Where can I put these cans of film,’ Stu thought to himself, ‘where Mick will never think to ever look?’ And so he took them to Eel Pie Island and said, ‘I say, Pete [Townshend, this was], I’ve got these old cans of film. Do you mind if I leave them in your garage?’ And Pete said, ‘No, Stu, go on. That’s fine, you know, I don’t mind, don’t use it, there’s nothing really in there.’ And there they lay, mouldering away, for twenty-five years, until one day, God knows, Pete, clearing out the garage, found the film and it said Rock and Roll Circus on it! And he goes, ‘Oh, hey, what’s this?’ And being incredibly smart, he put it on his home projection and watched it, and every single shot was of me for the Rock and Roll Circus. He called Allen Klein and said, ‘I’ve got something you’ll be very interested in. I’ve found the lost Marianne film from the Circus. What do you want me to do with it, Allen?’ And Allen said, ‘Hallelujah! I’ll send a courier.’ And he did. He sent his daughter, Robin Klein, to pick it up. Townshend knew about this problem because of course The Who were very much involved with the Rock and Roll Circus – and he also knew that one of the reasons the show hadn’t come out was because they appeared to have upstaged the Stones. They really didn’t, but, anyway …

And there it all was, except for one really beautiful crane shot. I don’t know what happened to that. Maybe Mick was so angry that he just had one roll of film out of a can, tore it into a million pieces and burned it in the back garden as he and Bianca danced around it hooting like owls!

I loved Mick, I really did, you know – but if I had stayed in that situation with Mick, all that money, going to the South of France, Keith and Anita Pallenberg, blah-di-blah, Goat’s Head Soup, I’d be dead, and I knew that. And if I was going to go down, I wanted to go down my own way! Not with some adjunct decadent ringleader and his scurvy crew!

When I split with Mick and left with Nicholas, I took a beautiful Persian carpet and some Ossie Clark dresses and all my Deliss silk clothes. So these were the clothes I was wearing when I was living on the street, a wraith-like vision, an anorexic waif, feeling no pain, and not feeling any cold either, of course, you see, because of the smack.

At this point, I’m sort of an honorary Rolling Stone, a situation I’m a little ambivalent about. I love them and we had such great times, but it was a really hard scene to be in. I was never going to be good at functioning in that bitchy world, with all those betrayals. Now, when I go to see them backstage or at the George V Hotel, it’s lovely to see Keith and Ronnie and Mick and Charlie. Charlie’s always been a delight. I love to go and hear him outside of the Stones environment when he plays his jazz shows in London.

I’m still scared of the Stones because I always have this feeling – and it’s not just an illusion – of being sucked in again. Unlike Anita, I don’t have any immediate connection with them. I’m a free agent, and yet, when I see them, I suddenly feel drawn in. I go back to their very beginnings. I am part of them. I know that. And that’s okay.

One of the favourite places Mick and I liked to hang out was George and Pattie Boyd’s house in Weybridge. Mick loved George and I thought Pattie one of the most beautiful people ever. I loved the way she dressed, her fantastic sense of style. Psychedelic dresses in beautiful colours or little skirts that showed off her wonderful legs.

During those magical afternoons George would be the perfect host, serving up exotic teas, fat joints, and his new songs like exquisite delicacies offered for our consumption. A little bungalow (by rock star standards) brightly painted in sparkly psychedelic ice-cream colours, very warm and cosy and friendly, like the people who lived there, with a garden full of sunflowers and cushions outside. Just a very soft, gentle vibe, as if this fairy-tale cottage were conjured out of his sweet melancholy songs.

It was always far easier to go and visit people from other bands. You didn’t have all the stresses and strains you do with your own group. At Redlands, Keith’s house in West Sussex, there was always some tension – undercurrents that I couldn’t even put into words. Subterranean stuff, which I think is always lurking about in any band. What makes an interesting band is that incongruous combination of people at odds. The tension makes for great music, but it doesn’t always make for the easiest social situations.

Clearly there were similar issues with the Beatles, but any raging insecurities or problems within the group were never apparent at Weybridge on a sunny afternoon, with George sitting cross-legged on a kilim playing us his songs.

So being with George and Pattie was very relaxing. Mick and I were able to lie back on Moroccan cushions, get high and float away listening to George’s new songs. When he wasn’t playing his own stuff, he would be playing Ravi Shankar on those beautiful green discs we all used to have. I do think he very much brought all that into our world.

Mick loved George’s songs – those wonderful songs on Revolver – but George never felt that anybody appreciated his songs, really, or thought they were as good as John and Paul’s. George was racked with doubt about his work, but it’s now obvious what a great songwriter he was. ‘Beware of Darkness’ is as good as anything anybody ever wrote.

In a way, Brian Jones was George’s counterpart in the Stones. But there was a big difference in their personalities. The thing about George – and we all feel it strongly now that he’s gone off and left us – is that he plunged into things. Whatever he got into, whether it was the sitar and Ravi Shankar or the Maharishi, he walked right in and never looked back, and that takes a lot of confidence. Brian, on the other hand, was all flash. He loved to astonish – and then on to the next thing. Sometimes I’d get the eerie feeling that – like the positive and negative in a photograph – George was the positive version of Brian. They were quite similar in many ways; both could play a lot of different instruments and were hugely talented. But of course one huge difference was that Brian was unable to write songs. His perpetual upsetness and unhappiness and paranoia and low self-esteem all worked against him. It was tragic because he wanted to be a songwriter more than anything. I’ve watched the painful process, Brian mumbling out a few words to a twelve-bar blues riff and then throwing his guitar down in frustration.

I think in Brian’s state writing a song probably wasn’t possible. He could only do it through another medium, through Keith. I guess the closest he came to it was ‘Ruby Tuesday’, where his melancholy recorder wistfully carries that sense of irretrievable loss. ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was a collaboration between Keith and Brian. It’s one of the few cases where Mick had nothing to do with a Stones song, neither the lyrics nor the melody – but he and Keith got the writing credit. Without Brian, there wouldn’t be a ‘Ruby Tuesday’.

It’s funny how each drummer was so perfect for the band they were in. Mick admired Ringo’s drumming – it was so simple, so spare, so incredibly on the money – but it wouldn’t have fitted into the Stones at all. You couldn’t have taken Ringo and put him in the Stones; you couldn’t have Charlie Watts drumming for the Beatles. As for Keith Moon, his drumming would have got too much in the way of the guitars and the vocals in either the Stones or the Beatles, but could there have been a more perfect drummer and maniac for The Who than Keith Moon?

I’ve heard this funny theory that Mick wanted to be a Beatle and that John wanted to be a Rolling Stone, but I think it misses the point by a mile. Mick loved the Beatles, of course, and obviously there was a bit of natural competition going on there, but I don’t think that was unhealthy at all – they sparked off each other.

You know, people have said, with a little truth to it, that the Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen, whereas the Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs, and this is where it all gets so interesting when we talk about the music, because you’ve got those contradictory aspects bleeding through. They’re very subtle, but they’re there, and that’s what makes the music so compelling, the rent in the temple cloth.

The thing about the Stones is that they were very intense about everything: about writing, recording, and performing. The Beatles had a similar intensity in the studio, but they were never able to transmit that on to the stage. They were so unlucky with what they went through in the early days; not being able to hear themselves play. It was a complete fuck-up that we have to lay, I’m afraid, at Brian Epstein’s door.

One of the things a manager must do is make sure that theb technical aspects are taken care of when the musicians go on stage. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp did it for The Who, Clapton’s crew looked after Eric. The basic responsibility of people who take care of any band, including mine, is to make sure that the sound is right so that the musicians can enjoy the experience. That’s vitally important, and Brian Epstein just didn’t get that together. He never made that leap from playing small venues in the north of England to playing Shea Stadium. It’s tragic to see the Beatles on stage with their tiny amps, unable to hear a thing. And naturally, after that last tour, they came back from all that and said, ‘That’s it! We’re never going out again!’ And then Brian Epstein got really depressed because he realised he was almost out of a job.

The Beatles completely evolved from the pop business. The Stones began as a Brit Chicago R & B group and then lurched into a more raunchy rig than the Beatles ever managed. When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 they were still the lovable Fab Four – they were rock’n’roll muppets. The Stones were menacing and sexy. A lot of that had to do with the kind of music they played, with Andrew Oldham, their manager, pushing their bad-boy image and Mick and Keith’s natural bolshiness. But much of it, too, had to do with Mick’s savvy on the business side. They never had a manager in the sense of a daddy figure like Brian Epstein telling them what to do – Andrew was younger than they were and more reckless. They weren’t dependent on Allen Klein or Andrew – they were their own gang. Also, you have to take into account that the Beatles were the pioneers and nobody had invented proper speakers yet. It was so early on that nothing had been sorted out yet.

Mick might, very occasionally, put the Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction. But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.

Anyway, when you listen to the Beatles carefully, and the John Lennon stuff in particular, they aren’t all sweetness and light. There’s an edge to their music; there’s a real soggy, dark, dirty bit in it that bleeds through. Their sweetness is very superficial. You hear the undercurrent in Paul’s bass playing, you hear it in John’s harmonies, you hear it in the call-and-response stuff. Maybe not the first couple of records, but when you get to Revolver and Rubber Soul, things begin to darken. And there’s something very weird about Sgt Pepper, too. It’s not at all what it appears to be. I’ve found subsequently that listening to Sgt Pepper can be a bit of an unsettling experience. Pet Sounds still comes across as very beatific, so innocent and yearning, whereas Sgt Pepper really doesn’t.

Brian Epstein didn’t seem to get it that one of his jobs was to make sure that his precious boys were happy onstage and could hear each other and that they weren’t torn to pieces all the time by crazed fans. The most basic of needs, you know, just to make sure they weren’t being hounded day and night by cameras and reporters, with absolutely no time to themselves. These awful things kept happening and he wasn’t able to deal with them. That’s one of the reasons why Derek Taylor, their publicist, was so handy, because he was such a gentleman, and a hipster plus he had that ability to make people snap to attention. Invaluable, since Brian Jones would go missing in the middle of tours, recording sessions, negotiations, and nobody could find him. Epstein was a handy front for the Beatles in the beginning, because he seemed to be a gentleman – in appearance he was upper middle class. At first he was able to keep that together and where he did fall short he wasn’t that different from many of the early managers. It was new territory and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

Brian Epstein was so talented and had so many gifts and yet in many ways it was as if he really wasn’t paying attention. He fucked up. Beautifully. He was eaten up by what he called his ‘problem’. This was all long before it was cool to be gay. He was wrestling with real demons there, boy, as much if not more than our Andrew. But the difference was that Andrew seemed to enjoy his demons, let’s put it that way. Andrew embraced them, whereas poor Brian just beat himself into a bloody pulp over it. Nobody guessed that he was so terribly depressed and desperate. I had no clue anything was awry. The many times that I went down to see him in his lovely country house, they were beautiful idyllic afternoons. He seemed happy, and put up such a front you could never guess what was going on in the dark corners.

We talked and talked, about ballet, opera, the theatre. We talked about Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith’s production of Miss Julie. At that time Brian was agonising over Up Against It, the Joe Orton script that he wanted the Beatles to do. He was worried it was too far out.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, flipping through the script. ‘Some of it is extremely provocative and nasty.’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ I said. ‘It’s Joe Orton; they’ll eat it up.’

‘Well, the Archbishop of Canterbury turns out to be a woman, the boys get dressed up as women, commit adultery and murder, and are involved in the assassination of the Prime Minister. Do you really think audiences can stomach this stuff?’

‘It’s farce, Brian,’ I told him. ‘And, let’s face it, at this point the Beatles could do with something edgy.’

I hadn’t, of course, actually read it, and when I did, I saw how tricky – unfortunately – it would be for the Beatles (with the exception of John). There were wonderful outrageous lines. The Archbishop of Canterbury was pure hysterical camp: ‘I’m Princess of the Church. Let me pass. I’ve some hard praying to do.’ The Stones maybe could have got away with it, but for the Fab Four it would’ve been a bit of a stretch.

Orton rightly anticipated that it would be turned down. In his diary he wrote scathingly of Epstein: ‘An amateur and a fool. He isn’t equipped to judge the quality of a script. Probably he will never say “yes”, equally hasn’t the courage to say “no”. A thoroughly weak, flaccid type.’

Too bad. I think if the Beatles had done Orton’s script, it would have really helped Brian – moved him up a level. Although Joe Orton made an unfortunate choice in a lover (who killed him), his take on the Beatles was spot on. He had the right cheeky attitude to the whole thing, and he came from the same milieu as the Beatles. It would have been brilliant if they’d filmed Orton’s script. Would have helped Brian exorcise some of his shit, too.

I know Brian Epstein really liked me because towards the end of one of these teas he asked me to marry him; not that he was exactly serious, but for a second I actually considered it. Come to think of it, I know exactly what stopped me. It was our Mick walking in and saying, ‘Come on, darling, we’ve got to go home now.’

Kit Lambert, who along with Chris Stamp managed The Who, was a wonderful maniac. I remember in the early seventies visiting Kit in some really dreadful, scabby flat in Notting Hill, before Notting Hill became fashionable. It was a trip, I can tell you, both of us doing lots of heroin and coke and alcohol – Kit loved alcohol. We had a whale of a time as Kit regaled me with stories about his dad Constant Lambert, the composer, acting out scenes from operas, scenes with divas and soirées with princesses and rent boys. I didn’t know Kit in his heyday; I only got to know him on the way down, which was more interesting I think, because in an odd way that’s when he was truly in his glory – he was a connoisseur of the lower depths, an area in which I am also somewhat of an expert. The only good thing you could say about Kit’s self-demolition was that he had a perverse kind of pleasure in all of it. He was such a fascinating pervert with a classical education. He used to say things like, ‘The destruction of Pompeii … one of the most magnificent events in history. Those two naked boys preserved in flagrante delicto for all eternity!’

Kit liked building things up, like a child with a sand castle, and then, oh, the mad joy of tearing them down. He enjoyed seeing everything in turmoil, going up in flames. Like Nero, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Pliny the Elder, he loved a great catastrophe – especially if he’d engineered it himself. He loved talking about his disasters – few understood that he relished them as perverse works of art.

I remember once he wanted to take me on a lig to the Cannes Film Festival on a yacht with lots of drugs. In spite of his fallen state he was always very posh. But I wasn’t in any condition to go to some fancy international event and display myself in my wretched condition, so regretfully I declined. Thank God. I would have made the most awful fool of myself, and in public. I had been doing that far too much in front of people as it was – along the lines of the famous Mandrax head-in-the-soup incident. Kit went and made a fool of himself in the grand manner, but then he was a man for whom flamboyant bad behaviour was a fine art. One of the curious things about Kit, of course, was that his father had been a great composer; and that leads us directly to Tommy, The Who’s rock opera. You can see why Pete with his transcendent – and overweening – approach to rock would have been so receptive to Kit’s idea, and I do think it was Kit’s idea – writing a rock opera. After Sgt Pepper everybody wanted a crack at the rock Gesamtkunstwerk, but it was not on. The only person who managed anything like it, and, in fact, preceded it, was Brian Wilson with Pet Sounds. And it was Pet Sounds that helped give Sgt Pepper wings.

Kit came to a sad end, alas. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage after falling down the stairs of his mother’s house in 1981.

Visits to Paul and Jane Asher weren’t quite as relaxed as those Mick and I spent with George and Pattie. With hindsight I can see that they were rather uptight. There were constant little frictions. Mick and I were very close and we would never have done anything like fret about windows being open or closed, or anything as petty as that, but this is what happens when couples start to come apart. In any case I was in a very different position to the one Jane found herself in. I’d done what Paul wanted Jane to do, and given up my career. I wasn’t going on tour with the Old Vic; I wasn’t taking any more movie roles and very few parts in plays. I gave up everything I’d been doing, apart from a little bit of theatre. Jane was a serious actress and wanted to continue her career, but Paul had other ideas. That’s why Linda was so perfect for Paul; she was just what he wanted, an old-fashioned Liverpool wife who was completely devoted to her husband. In a way, that’s what Mick wanted, too, and for a while I acquiesced, but in the end it kicked back very badly. On the other hand, Paul isn’t exactly the regular bloke he appears. For one thing, he was always intellectually curious. Not only was he into electronic music and Stockhausen and all of that, but he was into Magritte, pop art, the Expressionists and even avant-garde theatre. I believe it was Paul who first thought of Joe Orton as the screenwriter for the next Beatles movie. He’d been to see Loot, Orton’s outrageous phallic farce, and liked it. He encouraged Brian Epstein to arrange a meeting with Orton, and in Orton’s diary he describes getting on famously with Paul.

Arrived in Belgravia at ten minutes to eight … I found Chapel Street easily. I didn’t want to get there too early so I walked around for a while and came back through a nearby mews. When I got back to the house it was nearly eight o’clock. I rang the bell and an old man entered. He seemed surprised to see me. ‘Is this Brian Epstein’s house?’ I said. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and led the way to the hall. I suddenly realised that the man was the butler. I’ve never seen one before … He took me into a room and said in a loud voice, ‘Mr Orton.’ Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was introduced to one or two people. And Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs. Only he’d grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles record, ‘Penny Lane’. I like it very much. Then he played the other side – Strawberry something. I didn’t like this as much. We talked intermittently. Before we went out to dinner we agreed to throw out the idea of setting the film in the thirties. We went down to dinner. The trusted old retainer – looking too much like a butler to be good casting – busied himself in the corner. ‘The only thing I get from the theatre,’ Paul M. said, ‘is a sore arse.’ He said Loot was the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end. ‘I’d’ve liked a bit more,’ he said. We talked of the theatre. I said that compared with the pop-scene the theatre was square. ‘The theatre started going downhill when Queen Victoria knighted Henry Irving,’ I said. ‘Too fucking respectable.’ We talked of drugs, of mushrooms which give hallucinations – like LSD. ‘The drug, not the money,’ I said. We talked of tattoos. And after one or two veiled references, marijuana. I said I’d smoked it in Morocco. The atmosphere relaxed a little. Dinner ended and we went upstairs again. We watched a programme on TV; it had phrases in it like ‘the in crowd’ and ‘swinging London’. There was a little scratching at the door. I thought it was the old retainer, but someone got up to open the door and about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped this was the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t, though. It was a pop group called The Easybeats. I’d seen them on TV. I liked them very much … A French photographer arrived … He’d taken a set of new photographs of The Beatles. They wanted one to use on the record sleeve. Excellent photographs. The four Beatles look different in their moustaches. Like anarchists in the early years of the century. After a while … I talked to the leading Easybeat. Feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety girl. And then I came over tired and decided to go home. I had a last word with Paul M. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d like to do the film. There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.’ ‘You mean the bread?’ ‘Yes.’ We smiled and parted. I got a cab home. Told Kenneth about it. Then he got up to make a cup of tea. And we talked a little more. And went to sleep.

JOE ORTON and JOHN LAHR, The Orton Diaries

While Brian Epstein came off as a shadowy, pathetic character.

Somehow I’d expected something like Michael Codron. I’d imagined Epstein to be florid, Jewish, dark-haired and overbearing. Instead I was face to face with a mousey-haired, slight young man. Washed-out in a way. He had a suburban accent.

Mick was initially supportive of my acting, but I sensed it was something he’d rather I not do. I was the consort – my career would distract from the image he wanted to create. I had absolutely no wish to compete with him, but eventually I decided acting would be okay since it was far enough away from what he did. I thought it wouldn’t affect him, but, fuck me, then he wanted to act, too! He can’t help it; he’s just got to compete.

I stopped working, but then other issues began to raise their ugly heads. The Devil, as we know, makes work for idle hands. I got heavily into drugs in spite of all the warnings, which, again, I can only see from a distance. The biggest warning of all should have been Brian’s headlong plunge, but I didn’t realise it, and by the time I did it was too late. I had my overdose in Australia, and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me. It’s easy enough, after all, to rationalise how other people’s problems are different from our own, and honestly there was no logical reason why I would’ve compared my fate to Brian’s.

Some very odd things happened to me in Australia when I OD’d on all those sleeping pills. It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me. I always thought that I came through that with no damage, but I know that when I had my biopsy last year the results showed very old scarring on my liver – apparently the 150 Tuinol and six days’ unconsciousness caused serious liver damage. Other bizarre things happened. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn’t. An entire language had somehow got lost.

I’m always amazed at how scenes from the past get congealed into rabid set pieces. There’s the whole Redlands business. It’s so complicated and has an endless life of its own. Almost immediately it became an emblematic part of Stones history, but my position was much dodgier – my role was ambivalent and eventually had disastrous effects on me and on my relationship with Mick. It was a horrible ordeal, but initially it created a bizarre bond between us. I took the poison-pen letters and all those dreadful things in the papers too hard. I was too young and insecure to have all that hatred directed at me and didn’t know how to deal with it. I turned it all on myself. Mick’s attitude was much, much healthier. Like, ‘Well, they’re just idiots. I’m not gonna let this get in my way!’ Which should have really been mine, too, but I wasn’t grown up or secure enough to do that. Also I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug, while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.

The 1969 festival at Altamont, the Stones’ infamous free concert outside San Francisco, is now seen as a rock’n’roll Black Mass. So many things about Altamont that now seem inevitable just weren’t at the time. Mick may have sung his pantomime songs about the Devil and the Midnight Rambler, but he was in a total hippie mood when he went out there to do that concert. He wanted more than anything to be part of the counterculture utopia. ‘Brothers and sisters, we are creating the blueprint for a new society’ and so on. That’s how it was, actually. People imagine the Stones came to Altamont to incite murder, to summon up Beelzebub and his satanic crew from the bowels of the earth. Not at all! It was meant to be a Hippie Love Fest. It’s one of the saddest things that it turned into its opposite.

Mick must have realised when ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ started that it was a mistake. Every time they’d play it on that tour, he’d say: ‘Something funny happens when we start this.’ He got off on it – as if something might happen if he said it. And then suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. It’s the same old thing: wanting to have power over people. And often they don’t think about whether it’s good power, whether it’s positive or negative – it’s part of being young and stupid. Something happened to him out there on that tour. He’d always been so sweet and gentle – he began to get harder after that. The fact that I’d gone off to Rome with the painter Mario Schifano while he was gone didn’t exactly help his mood when he returned.

All these things eroded our relationship, but there were other more fundamental problems. As much as I loved Mick, the actual life, the big rock star life, wasn’t really for me. Mick, however, couldn’t live any other way, and I wouldn’t expect him to, it’s just part of his nature.

I love Bob Dylan’s attitude to the sixties. ‘I am the sixties. You want ’em? You can have ’em!’ Oh, God, that made me laugh so much! But, you must know by now he’s a sly dog and as slippery as an eel. He’s like some sort of creature that, as soon as you identify what it is, it turns into something else – a chameleon! Bob has a clever, oblique way of talking about himself. And because he’s so mentally agile he can see-saw about the sixties as much as he likes. He knows you can never take him out of the sixties, however much he grumbles, so his ambivalence about his decade is just a prank. If you take him out of the house of cards it would collapse. He just wants to be the Joker in the pack.

Bob’s old records are so embedded in our lives everybody gets nervous when a new Dylan record comes out. There’s so much expectation. When Modern Times was released, I talked to Polly Harvey and I told her how wonderful it was and she said, ‘But, oh, I’m scared! I’m scared!’ And I said, ‘Don’t be! It’s all right! It’s more than all right!’ We always hope it’s going to be this great thing – and there have been some clunkers, haven’t there? Some real downers, too. Time Out of Mind was very negative, but, as always, there were a couple of great tracks I loved, like ‘I’m Sick of Love’. I know that feeling – you want it but you get so sick of that old roller coaster.

Bob’s been competing with himself since 1966, trying to outdistance his own mythology. I was listening the other day to his radio show. He was talking about fathers and there was this bit where Bob says, ‘Well, you know, manic depression and depression and bipolar disorder, these are really all just the blues.’ He sees everything in a mythical context. The contemporary world is ersatz, a fallen model. And then he played Lightning Hopkins. It was a wonderful moment. I thought, ‘Yeah, man, that’s exactly what these people are doing, taking away the lightning, taking away the blues.’ The blues have that wonderful irony. I’ve naturally got them, I’m never going to be able to be rid of them – I couldn’t bear it, I wouldn’t be me.

On his show, Bob does his radio voice, the smooth, soft-talking deejay. Old possum Bob. That’s what I like so much about the Dylan radio show, that he’s playing a character – I love that he’s gone to the trouble to create a new persona. Of course, he’s always been good at manufacturing personae – brilliant. I love to see that he hasn’t lost his touch. I keep thinking that I want to send him an e-mail from Marianne in Paris saying: ‘Love the radio show, love the character. Don’t change a thing!’ But what Bob really likes to hear is young people criticising him. Because he loves saying what he really thinks. They’ll say: ‘Why don’t you play more new music, Bob?’ And he says things like: ‘Well, Scott from Arlington, the thing is, there’s a lot more old music than there is new music.’ That’s an argument I wouldn’t have thought of, and so very typical of him. He basically thinks modern music is crap, but he does play it occasionally. He played a Blur track the other day called ‘Coffee & TV’, but most of what he plays is stuff you’ll only hear on some old hipster like Hal Willner’s answering machine, the wildest, oldest stuff you can imagine.

Bob still thinks of me as the angelic Marianne of the mid-sixties and whenever he sees me drinking and smoking he gets a bit cross. I’d like to say I’ve reformed – I have actually, I hope that doesn’t disappoint – but unlike Bob I haven’t found God in the process. Bob is very religious but when it gets to God and all that, I feel I have to say to him: ‘You know, Bob, I’m really not religious actually.’ I know I shouldn’t say those things, but I feel I have to. I’m not a pagan or a witch or anything dark or satanic, I’m just a humanist like my dad. But it’s all over the place. Religion, God, Christ on the cross. And if they’re not Christians, they’re Scientologists. Look at Bono, too, with his big cross and everything. I understand that people have to do what they have to do to get through, but I don’t think you have to impose your thing on other people. But I do know that when you make that kind of statement to Bono, you’re kind of left out, they cut you out of their plan. ‘Oh, well, if she’s not Christian …’ They look askance. ‘Must be something wrong there.’ That’s such nonsense. Christians have always done that. If you’re not part of them, then you’re against them, and I’m not against them, I just don’t want to be them.

My 2002 tour promoting Kissin’ Time ended in Australia, which is where Bob Dylan was just beginning his tour. We sat together on his balcony with a full moon shining over Sydney Harbour, talking about music – and ourselves – with a smattering of light flirtation. He told me he’d listened to my recent record, 20th Century Blues, and that he loved Kurt Weill’s chords, and he would eventually use them in those thirties-type songs on Modern Times. Kurt Weill took many of his melodies from music he heard in the synagogue and I’m sure Bob knew that.

I love to hear Bob talking about the blues and how we’re all linked to that music. That was very good for me to hear. And folk music. How you take that music and change it by running it through your own temperament.

Bob understands my voice because he’s got a funny voice too. I saw him backstage when I was about to start work on Vagabond Ways with Mark Howard and Daniel Lanois and he’d just worked with them. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine with them. People like us with funny voices, they’ve only just now figured out how to record us, and the way is not to use digital. You have to use analogue recording equipment.’

I love the way Bob uses his voice to create a persona. On his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, you have Ellen Barkin saying, ‘It’s night time, a cat howls, the high heels of a prostitute clicking down the street, the moon shows for a second and disappears behind the clouds. Here’s your host, Bob Dylan.’

What amazes me about the sixties, because, in my mind, of course, it’s only yesterday, is how historic it’s become. We’ll soon be lumped with the Battle of Culloden, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Armada, and the invention of the loo. Over forty years ago! Longer! The strangeness of the whole passing pop parade – from Mod to Hippie to Glitter to Punk – will soon be part of the Ancientness of Olde England. It’s odd, too, that the sixties, with its grand image of itself, ended not with a whimper but a bang – and woe betide any who got in the way of its thrashing apocalyptic tail.

Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad idea to go to the country like Paul and Linda and not see anybody after the sixties. It was rather a wise thing to do because there was this dark cloud looming. It’s like that song of Roger Waters that I sing in my show:

Do you remember me?

How we used to be Helpless and happy and blind?

Sunk without hope In a haze of good dope and cheap wine?

Laying on the living-room floor

On those Indian tapestry cushions you made

Thinking of calling our firstborn Jasmine or Jade.

And then that ominous chorus:

Don’t do it

Don’t do it

Don’t do it to me!

Don’t think about it!

Don’t think about it!

Don’t think about what it might be

Don’t get up to open the door,

Just stay with me here on the floor

It’s gonna get cold in the nineteen seventies.

And that was written in 1968! That was prescient, if not your actual prophetic vision. Whatever we thought of Linda, and she didn’t make that great an impression on me, I think it was a credit to Paul that he didn’t marry a model. A module. Because that’s what all the others have ended up doing, they’ve married these modules. And they have children who also become modules.

I heard a track from Paul McCartney’s album Ram the other day on the radio. And with an almighty whoosh it just took me right back to those times I spent living on the streets, and then I found myself thinking about dear old Mike Leander who had been my producer on the early albums. Mike talked me into making that record that was released in 2002, called Rich Kid Blues. Hysterical! In fact it was never finished, and I never really liked it because it was made during my heroin addiction. This was 1972, and I was very, very sick indeed. But listening to this album now, all these years later, I think it’s really rather lovely, even though my voice is very weak. What the record represents is a very important moment in my life, when I, as a junkie, was shooting up on the streets, and then suddenly this really nice man, Mike Leander, comes and finds me hanging out on some corner and makes a record with me. He somehow managed to scam some money and took me into a really cheap studio somewhere in Soho with just a guitar player. Mike played me some songs and then asked what I was listening to. I was really into Cat Stevens’s haunting Tea for the Tillerman album, which every woman in the world seemed to love back then.

I remember that Mike played me Paul McCartney’s Ram and I thought it was just brilliant. He said, ‘Let’s try and do something like this record.’ And then he gave me some money to get me off the street. I actually remember leaving the studio that day with a copy of Ram tucked under my arm and all this cash to get some digs. That very day I managed to find a little flat and I set up home listening to Macca’s wonderful record. Even now Ram brings a tear to my eye whenever I put it on. Rich Kid Blues is a sweet, folksy collection that is very redolent of the period – you know, James Taylor, Melanie and Janis Ian, that short-lived era of singer songwriters. I hoped it might fly, but then suddenly Glam Rock came along – which, as irony would have it, Mike was instrumental in because he was Gary Glitter’s producer – and my poor little record was consigned for nearly thirty years to the dustbin of oblivion deep in the vaults at Gem Records. Now it seems that the record is regarded as Marianne Faithfull’s ‘lost album’, and I guess in many ways that’s right, because this album is the missing link between my early work and Broken English.

Sometime late in 2000 I received the proofs of a book through the post called Turn Off Your Mind, Relax, and Float Downstream by a member of Blondie. It’s about the ‘mystic sixties’, and it really does capture the light and the dark side of the decade. And there was a lot of dark, creepy stuff in the sixties, I can tell you: The Process, Kenneth Anger, Mel Lyman, Manson, Anton LaVey, and L. Ron Hubbard. Those people were always trying to get hold of me. Somehow I managed to negotiate my way around them quite successfully. I didn’t get involved in any cults, apart from going up to Bangor for that regrettable weekend with the Maharishi and the Beatles, the weekend that Brian Epstein killed himself.

It’s so odd that few of my friends see anything negative about the sixties. Most of them from back in the day say, ‘Oh but, Marianne, I don’t remember the sixties like that at all … it was wonderful!’ When I hear things like that I question myself, wondering if I got it all wrong and am mad. But I think I have been completely sane all along. Back in the sixties I certainly did seem to attract the most dreadful people: fringe types, cranks, weirdos, people who were after power. It was all so creepy …

This reminds me about the time at the tail-end of the sixties when dear Henrietta Moraes – about whom much more anon – wrote an investigative article for the Daily Telegraph colour supplement about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Scientology religion. She infiltrated meetings in order to write her piece, which went into great detail about what she saw as the dark rotten core of what Hubbard did. She wrote all this stuff about how his partner, Mary Sue Whipp, was a homunculus with three breasts, and how he planned world domination through the power of the spirit. Hen was sure he was all about mind domination, and about muscling in on you immediately and filling your head with all this nonsense, isolating you from family and friends and brainwashing you. So of course he was furious when the Telegraph published Hen’s article. She became convinced that people were following her around and waiting outside her house, and got so terrified that she eventually went to the police.

I wanted to leave the sixties in a blaze of glory – under a volcano. That would be the Vesuvio, Spanish Tony’s Million Dollar Bash, almost emblematic of the blithe, hedonistic sixties overweening-ambitions-and-carpe-diem approach to life. Spanish Tony was the dealer to Swinging London’s stars and the jeunesse dorée.

All of London’s rock aristocracy were in attendance the evening Spanish Tony, nefarious drug dealer to the stars, finally opened his nightclub (which had, actually, only one night). Like all dealers, he didn’t consider himself just a dealer, he wanted to be something else, something a bit more grand, a ma?tre d’ to the hipoisie. Thus, the Vesuvio. It was pretty much of a dive, but the people there were just stupendous: le tout Londres hip. All the Beatles, most of the Stones, a few Whos, spangled guitar slingers, mangled drummers were there – in short, everybody who was anybody, or thought they were. The punch had, of course, been spiked with LSD. And in strolls Paul – very casually, very cool, almost whistling, you know, with one of those little smiles on his lips as if he’s got a really big secret. John was already there and seemed to have had quite a bit of punch by the time we arrived. George, too, of course, and Pattie Boyd, the quintessence of Pop chic. So there’s our Paulie, looking rather pleased with himself. He was in fact very cool, a real man-about-town and interested in different things than George. Curious Paul, fascinated with all sorts of strange things – he really was like that. And what swinging scene would be complete without Robert Fraser, Groovy Bob – the title of Harriet Vyner’s biography, a bricolage portrait of the archetypal boulevardier of swinging London. The Robert Fraser Gallery was the place to be. He showed the classic Pop artists of the sixties – Richard Hamilton, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol – and made avant-garde art hip to the rock princelings. He was beautiful, took a lot of drugs, and could always be found where the new thing was happening. ‘More than any other figure I can think of, Robert Fraser personifies the Sixties as I remember them,’ so blurbed Lord McCartney on the back of the Vyner bio. Robert even tried to turn Paul on to heroin, but Paul didn’t care for the experience – that was lucky!

So there we were, all having a wonderful time, really high and even a little bit of alcohol, which to us was anathema. It was punch, which is easy to drink and a rather delicious sort of drunk. Little did we know what was in it. Finally we decide to drink, and it was acid! And then in the middle of all this, Paul, sidling about with his hands behind his back.

‘What have you got behind your back, Paul?’ we are crying out.

‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. ‘Just something, um, we’ve just done.’ Knowing that everyone would say, ‘Oh! Play it!’

Well, the thing about the Vesuvio that was really great was the speakers. That’s where all of our money had gone, on the very best speakers, huge speakers, the biggest that you could possibly get. Everything else was on the floor, of course; just loads of cushions. Come to think of it, the set-up would never have worked as a club, but Tony wasn’t one to get hung up on the details. For a private party, however, it was perfect. So there was a lot of ‘Oh, go on, Paul, please!’ You know, you always had to do that with him, basically.

‘Oh, yeah, all right, then,’ he says. And then he proceeds to put on ‘Hey, Jude’. It just went – boom! – straight to the chest. It was the first time anyone had ever heard it, and we were all just blown away. And then, of course, we couldn’t stop playing it, we just played away, mixed up with a bit of Little Richard and some blues.

What a night! Right then you just knew how lucky you were to live in these times, with this crowd. That song was so impossible to describe or even take in that I didn’t know what to say to Paul, but of course I did go up to him (we were a polite little lot) and probably burbled, ‘Wow! Far out, man!’ The required string of incoherent sounds, but I felt I had to say something even though, the state I was in, I could hardly speak. Even Mick said it was fantastic, because it was. I guess most people would think the Stones may have had mixed feelings at that moment, and perhaps they did. But (possibly due to the laced punch) the main feeling was one of: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive. It was as if only with this group and at that moment could Paul have done it. We had a sense of everybody being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And every time something came out, like ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Visions of Johanna’, or the sublime ‘God Only Knows’ from Pet Sounds, or anything at all, it seemed like we had just broken another sound barrier. Blind Faith, the Mothers of Invention … one amazing group after another. Tiny Tim, anything, we were instant fans! And I don’t think it was just the drugs.

It was one of the most incestuous music scenes ever. And how did they all find each other? And how did they all seem to be in the perfect group for them? Most knew that they were, but some, like Eric Clapton, kept jumping about trying to find exactly his right space and never quite finding it. But even that made sense for him. If not for the peregrine wanderings of Eric we would never have had ‘Layla’ and all that. Experimental Eric, mixing it up with different bands: Derek and the Dominos, Greg Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, Blind Faith. He was in so many different bands – a restless troubadour. In the end, though, all this wandering about from group to group made him into a separate entity: Eric Clapton. He’s his own brand.

The Vesuvio may have limped along for another couple of weeks before it closed. Of course, the whole venture was a very dangerous idea; it would have been a place where people went to score. Definitely needed, of course, but somewhat unwise. How tempting it must have been to all – a sort of one-stop shop: you go to the club and you get the drugs right there. It would have made life easier for Spanish Tony because instead of having to drive down to John and Yoko and then to me and then drive to Robert, he could just lie on his cushions and make money. Convenient, yes, but also quite convenient for the local constabulary!

I think Spanish Tony’s fear of immediate arrest may have been unfounded. Probably the first thing that would have happened would have been the local fuzz saying, ‘Okay, how much are you going to pay us?’

In my mind’s eye the last image of that night is this: John and Yoko, both completely legless, deciding to drive themselves in the psychedelic Rolls over to Ringo’s old flat on Montagu Square. They would’ve crashed and killed themselves. Driving wasn’t John’s forte, never mind the acid. I see Spanish Tony, keeping himself cool on coke and smack, rushing out and putting them in a taxi. He hands the driver a twenty-quid note and tells him, ‘Don’t let them out till you get to 38 Montagu Square.’ There’s a picture in my mind’s eye of Mick and Keith in front of the Vesuvio with its painting of Mount Vesuvius behind them. So very camp. Mount Vesuvius was an apropos image for swinging London. We were all living underneath a volcano, getting high, getting dressed, getting together, swanning about in clubs with witty names while forces we hadn’t even guessed existed were about to fall down on us. Scintillating, vibrating creatures in fantastically beautiful clothes from Ossie Clark and the Antique Market, all frolicking beneath a volcano on the verge of erupting.