Marianne Faithfull (born 29 December 1946) is an English singer, songwriter and actress, whose career has spanned six decades. Her early work in pop and rock music in the 1960s was overshadowed by her struggle with drug abuse in the 1970s. After a long commercial absence, she returned late in 1979 with the highly acclaimed album Broken English. Faithfull’s subsequent solo work, often critically acclaimed, has at times been overshadowed by her personal history. From 1966 to 1970, she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with the Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger. She co-wrote “Sister Morphine”, which is featured on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album, and had an early hit with the Jagger/Richards composition “As Tears Go By”. (More from Wikipedia)
The concert event The Wall – Live in Berlin, a July 1990 performance of the 1980 Pink Floyd album The Wall took place at the site of the Berlin Wall that had come down eight months previously. The concert was organized by Roger Waters, who had been the frontman for the band during their hitmaking period in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, though he left Pink Floyd in 1985 over creative differences and attempted to prevent the other bandmembers from continuing to use the name (they settled out of court in 1987).
Roger Waters had said during an interview in July 1989 that the only way he would perform The Wall live again was “if the Berlin Wall came down” – and four months later, it did. Attendance at the concert site itself was a record-breaking 450,000, and it was also broadcast live worldwide. Scorpions opened the concert with “In the Flesh” and also performed on three other songs. Guest artists included Cyndi Lauper, Marianne Faithfull, Thomas Dolby, Sinéad O’Connor, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bryan Adams, and Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band. Tim Curry, Albert Finney, Ute Lemper and Jerry Hall are actors who also performed, mostly during “the Trial” sequence toward the end. As the concert was performed, a gigantic wall (550 feet long and 82 feet high) that appeared to be made of large styrofoam blocks was completed; at the end of the trial, the judge declared: “Tear down the Wall!”, and the wall was pushed over, row by row.
(April 2013)
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Small Faces had a rocky start with Decca Records but eventually began working under one of England’s top producers, Andrew Loog Oldham – who had worked with the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, and others – and signed them as the top act on his new company, Immediate Records. Their first album with that label, Small Faces – a self-titled album like their debut effort with Decca, Small Faces – was an instant hit in mid-1967 and included a song that even made the charts in the U.S., “Itchycoo Park”.
(April 2014)
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Their manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham kept emphasizing to the two of them that there just weren’t that many obscure great songs out there. Although Mick Jagger disputes that it was really this literal, Keith Richards relates their first songwriting experience this way: “So what Andrew Oldham did was lock us up in the kitchen for a night and say, ‘Don’t come out without a song’. We sat around and came up with ‘As Tears Go By’. It was unlike most Rolling Stones material, but that’s what happens when you write songs, you immediately fly to some other realm. The weird thing is that Andrew found Marianne Faithfull at the same time, bunged it to her and it [‘As Tears Go By’] was a f--kin’ hit for her – we were songwriters already! But it took the rest of that year to dare to write anything for the Stones.”
(May 2015)
