The title is a neat steal from a book of William Blake’s poems. It’s interesting once, but you wouldn’t want to share a bathroom with it. “Why’d Ya Do It?” remains an extreme song, with a jealous Faithfull snarling through a litany of sexual grievances (cock-sucking, snatch-spitting, cobwebbed fannies). The actual stand-out from Broken English is “Why’d Ya Do It?”, which is a bit reggae, somewhat rock, a lot Grace Jones (though Jones was still in the business of perfecting her brand of Island ice). The guitar sounds like a bear taking a chainsaw to a barbed wire fence. The broken English thing is Faithfull, but the album’s title track – here in the 1980 single version – has a lyric which reportedly admonishes Ulrike Meinhof of the terrorist Red Army Faction, though the lyric evinces a more general mood of Cold War world-weariness. What makes the record work is the surprising harshness of Faithfull’s voice colouring the proud alienation of the songs. Those squelching synthesisers go in and out of fashion, but they have a whiff of post-punk cosplay, just as Mark Miller Mundy’s production is identifiably from the Island Records colour chart with its understated insinuations of reggae and roots. While it’s true that the 1979 LP marked a clear kink in the road and is widely considered to be Faithfull’s masterpiece, it now sounds like a time-stamped product of the new wave era. The good album in Barber’s reckoning is Broken English. In which case, why does she continue to fascinate? She has dismissed her early recordings as “cheesecake”, though her habitual flintiness has prompted others to diminish her achievements too: in a famously combative interview with Lynn Barber, the journalist tried to extract some small revenge by suggesting that Faithfull was “a singer with one good album”. If Faithfull sounded damaged – vocally, she did – the point was underlined. In the clichéd telling of it, Faithfull was manipulated and underestimated, if not exploited, during her pop career, before clambering from the wreckage and finding her own voice. ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut.Though she’s now revered as an elder stateswoman and a valued collaborator – Warren Ellis is her latest pet – this compilation explores the first two acts of Faithfull’s career.
Throughout her storied life, Marianne Faithfull has been in a tussle with her reputation.
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