Marianne Faithfull : She Walks In Beauty : Album Review with Now Spinning

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Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis : She Walks in Beauty: 2021
BMG Records
This is a beautiful little package so in the video I will go through it so you can see it yourself.

This is really a poetry book which comes with a CD. It has been put together with a lot of thought and attention to detail.  The paintings by Colin Self are just gorgeous. The poetry is printed on the other side of the paintings and works really well. If you're a collector of really well designed, CD packages this will be right up your street.

As much as it is a musical release it would not be out of place in Waterstones.  The music is written and composed by Warren Ellis and also features Nick Cave on Piano and Brain Eno also appears on a couple of the tracks.

The album was recorded just before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown – during which Marianne Faithfull herself became infected and almost died of the disease.

She was halfway through recording the album when she fell ill so there is a feeling that the tracks she did after recovering carry a sense of personal mortality. This album means a lot to her and this really come across.

The album draws on her passion for the English Romantic poets, a passion she fostered in her A Level studies at St Joseph's Convent School in Reading. Her career took off as she met Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. In the late 1970s she became a successful artist with Broken English, an album that featured her setting to music Heathcote Williams’ poem of eviscerating rage, Why D’Ya Do It? 

So as I have mentioned the physical product gets 10/10 as it shows exactly what streaming cannot give you. This really is something to sit down with a glass of wine and follow the words as Marianne reads them out.

On many levels, the music and words work really well especially on tracks like Bridge of Sighs but on others like The Lady of Shallot, where there are a lot of verses it can feel a bit one dimensional. I feel it would have benefitted from being broken up with some more instrumentation and especially some acoustic instruments such as Violin, Cello or piano.

For example on the track The Prelude there is a violin solo that starts to emerge towards the end and I felt that this could have really just carried on for a lot longer. Having more classical instruments on the longer works would have added to the atmosphere that Marion Faithful is creating,

This is an album that works as a music project and as a book.

Phil Aston
Now Spinning
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