Marianne Faithfull
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 1995
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is Marianne Faithfull. Singer and actress, she was the original 1960s wild child.
At the age of 17, when she was still a convent schoolgirl in Reading, she shot to fame with the hit single As Tears Go By; written for her by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. She was Mick Jagger's mistress, she hung out with Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, she was young, beautiful and rich and she seemed to have it all. But the glamorous life of the pop star turned into a nightmare of drugs, homelessness, suicide attempts and broken marriages.
The daughter of an Austrian baroness, her life has been full of myths and legends. She'll be telling Sue Lawley about the years of recovery, how she's found happiness in Ireland and her hopes for a Man Friday on her desert island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Small Axe by Bob Marley & The Wailers Book: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Luxury: Pen from Aspreys with attached magnifying glass
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1995 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a singer and an actress. |
| 0:33.1 | She remains in the public mind, however, not for what she is, |
| 0:36.6 | but for what she represents, the age of the 60s |
| 0:39.6 | and sex, drugs and rock and roll. |
| 0:42.2 | The daughter of an Austrian baroness and an English army officer, |
| 0:45.8 | she went to a convent school, but her waif-like beauty made her a natural attraction for the |
| 0:51.0 | hedonistic pop culture, and she embarked on a life of promiscuity and drug addiction. |
| 0:56.2 | She survived two suicide attempts and three marriages and now she lives alone in Ireland where she says people accept me as I am. |
| 1:05.5 | She is Marianne faithful. I don't mean to imply that you've turned into some kind of none, |
| 1:10.4 | Marianne, but I mean it does sound as if you live in a kind of retreat. It is like that. It's got a big wall |
| 1:17.0 | round it, of what they call in Ireland a famine wall because they were built in the |
| 1:22.0 | famine they were built to give people work and |
| 1:25.2 | there are the great walls that surround the 18th century estates, the great Anglo-Irish |
| 1:31.5 | estates. I live on one of the last of these. So this is a |
| 1:34.8 | cottage on an estate? Yes I it mine is the is a folly actually the original bit is an |
| 1:41.4 | 18th century shell grotto cottage where obviously they would go and |
| 1:46.8 | Have picnics and drinks and tea and all sorts of things probably went on there, but you're surrounded the whole thing is by this big |
| 1:53.9 | wall. The whole state is a thousand acres is surrounded by a wall and at eight o'clock the |
| 1:58.4 | gates are locked. You're shut in? Not really. I have a key of course my best friends all have keys. Why do you say that |
| 2:06.2 | this phrase people accept me as I am? I don't know what it is about the Irish that I don't feel I have to put on an act I think that might be |
... |
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