Marianne Faithfull, ‘As Tears Go By’ Singer Who Infused Dramatic Depth in Pop, Dead at 78

Marianne Faithfull, a pioneering artist who transcended “it girl” status in the Sixties for a stunning second act as a singer-songwriter with great depth, died Thursday at age 78. 

“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” the singer’s rep said in a statement. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family.”

Faithfull became a breakout star in 1964 with her first single, the ballad “As Tears Go By.” The beloved track would be the first song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had written together. Although she was only 17 and her voice sounded frail and young, she sang the lyrics about feeling left out with a conviction that would guide her later work. She continued to score hits throughout the mid Sixties, before disappearing from the spotlight in a haze of heroin addiction (trials she chronicled in the lyrics to “Sister Morphine,” which the Rolling Stones also recorded).

She reemerged in 1979 with the jaw-dropping Broken English, an album that drew musically from punk and New Wave and showcased her newfound dark, sometimes vulgar outlook. Its songs, like “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” “Guilt,” and a cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” perfectly fit the way her voice had deepened during her time away. (Faithfull would earn a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.) Over the next 40 years, she stayed the course, singing about love and relationships against dramatic, musical backdrops. In recent years, she recorded songs by PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, among others. Her most recent album, Negative Capability, came out in 2018, and Rolling Stone lauded it as a “late-career masterwork.”

Thrown into fame at a young age, controversy overshadowed much of Faithfull’s early career. She was in a relationship with Jagger from 1966 until 1970 and was pilloried by the press after police raided Keith Richards’ flat for drugs and found her nude, save for a fur bedcover in 1967. Toward the end of the decade, she was homeless and addicted to heroin. After the death of her son, she attempted suicide. She eventually cleaned up in the mid-Eighties, just before redefining herself again with the 1987’s jazzy, cabaret-influenced Strange Weather, which featured a new rendition of “As Tears Go By.”

In recent years, Faithfull battled a number of health setbacks. In addition to a hepatitis-C diagnosis, she received treatment for breast cancer in 2016, and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery two years later.

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At various points of her career, she revisited “As Tears Go By” several times, and marveled in an 2014 interview with Rolling Stone about how profound the song was. “I still sing it every night,” she said. “I still think it’s a beautiful song. I’m still very grateful that Mick and Keith gave it to me and wrote it for me. I suddenly really understood it myself when I was about 40, when I realized it was another version of [poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ballad] ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ It hit me during one of my moments of clarity, which I’ve told you seem to happen periodically. That moment of clarity was when I got clean.”

This story is developing.