1967. Marianne Faithfull has grown up as a well-bred, West London schoolgirl. At the outset of her career and still a teenager, she looks for all the world a picture of Catholic wholesomeness. But she’s ripe for rebellion and falls in with the Rolling Stones. And here she is looking oh so sultry in a scene from Girl on a Motorcycle, a fabulously self-indulgent, quintessentially sixties production complete with psychedelic and erotic reveries.
1967 is a fateful year for Marianne. In February, during a search for drugs at Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ country house, Redlands, police find her wrapped in nothing more than a fur rug. The scandal is salaciously reported, lurid rumours swirl around and the public’s worst suspicions about the decadence of the rock scene are confirmed.
Marianne’s career as an innocent-looking, sweet-voiced chanteuse will never recover from the scandal. But, following a nadir in the 1970s including two years living on the streets as a heroin addict, she will return in 1979 with Broken English, a searing comeback album.
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