"Good Lord, why?" rasps Marianne Faithfull, as she sinks into the hotel's rumpled bedding. “It’s so strange, why would you be a fan of somebody who’s never really done anything until now. A fan of what? A fan of Mick Jagger’s girlfriend?” Without much luck at clarity, I try to explain my devotion to the hypnotic ether that emanated from Marianne’s earliest recordings. “It was new,” she decides at last. “That’s what it was.” She can accept the tentativesingles on grounds of originality, if not for the adulation which greeted them a long fifteen years ago.

In those wildly inventive, mid-60’s gogo years, no one, male or female, was embarrassed at being a Marianne Faithfull fan. She was a real live fairy princess, blonde and with of blonde and blue-eyed, with a wisp of a body and a glimmer of a smile so haunting one easily absorbed the legend of her convent school upbringing and subsequent fame. She deserved to be discovered by Rolling Stones svengali Andrew Oldham, and personified her delicate first single, “As Tears Go By,” the loving creation of a still-innocent Mick Jagger, so the fan mags read. Jerkily adolescent boys who dated hometown girls as consolation prizes dreamed of going out with her. And the girls who stood over ironing boards, pressing staight lines into unruly mops of hair, suffered their beauty agonies gladly if the result might make them look like her.