Marianne Faithfull - Broken English


Comeback albums. Back in Black and Californication spring to my mind, but everybody probably has a list of their own. You know what's not on any of them? Marianne Faithfull's Broken English. It's a doozie of an album though. 

She was a 60s pop idol, like Eric Burdon and Dio. She came from the Rolling Stones camp, she was Jagger's girlfriend, but she had a legitimate career with crossover hits. But, the drugs took their toll. She got noticeably raspy, and eventually anorexic, homeless, and heroin addicted. The preceding two albums were folk rock that nobody liked, she hired an aspiring producer who convinced her to go full on new wave synth punk by hiring Steve Winwood to keyboard all over it, and it's quite a shock to the system. 

If Lord Sutch is my spirit animal, then this is definitely the Bottle of Beef soundtrack. It's not a concept album, but very clearly the concept is "you wanna know what i think? Never mind the bullocks, here's a little slice of real for you to choke down." 

This is a complicated album, and it is raw. It tackles the structural schism head on: the continuing saga of WWII, surviving that trip to the bottom of the barrel, being fed into the middle class machine, and cutting through the BS of the facade like a hot knife through a birthday cake. It's the kind of album that needs an "i've seen a lotta things" voice like Marianne's to drive home. All that said, it's easy to interpret wrong. In fact, how you interpret it says a whole lot more about your own bias than anything else, because not very many people survive to talk about it. Not many people step outside the war and see it as the pointlessly childish game it really is. Neither side of the fight is good, and everybody suffers for it. What ARE you fighting and dying for? Why do we instill guilt and fear into our children? Why can't you see that you are still peasants in the eyes of the elite? Why DID you do it, and why do we keep doing it to each other? 

Impressive comeback, to say the least.

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