Marianne Faithfull

Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women’s rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending ‘Flapper’, who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales.Meanwhile, London’s Bohemia was ruled by the ‘Queen of Clubs’, Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking ‘Tiger Woman’, Betty May; the original ‘Chelsea Girl’, Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the ‘Euston Road Venus’, Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse … to name but a few.Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one’s self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.

Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women’s rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending ‘Flapper’, who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales.Meanwhile, London’s Bohemia was ruled by the ‘Queen of Clubs’, Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking ‘Tiger Woman’, Betty May; the original ‘Chelsea Girl’, Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the ‘Euston Road Venus’, Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse … to name but a few.Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one’s self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.

This book is a more personal history than has ever before been written by or about Marianne Faithfull. Anecdotal, conversational, intimate and revealing, this is her no-holds-barred account of her life, her friends, her triumphs and mistakes. A decade after the publication of ‘Faithfull’, one of the most acclaimed rock autobiographies of all time, Marianne Faithfull is back, vowing periodically leave her wicked ways behind and grow up, but finding that somehow strange things keep happening. A wry observer of her slightly off-kilter world, Marianne muses nostalgically about afternoons languishing on Moroccan cushions at George and Pattie's, getting high and listening to new songs. She fondly recalls the outlandish antics of her Beat friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; is frequently baffled at her image in the press (opening the paper to read of her own demise: 'Sixties Star in Death Plunge'); terrified by the curse sent by Kenneth Anger; mortified by her history of reckless behaviour; not to mention her near-death experience in Singapore while looking for an opium den. Marianne peoples her anecdotal memoir with legendary characters one can imagine only Marianne assembling around her, both the eccentric and the beautiful, from Henrietta Moraes and Donatella Versace to Sofia Coppola, Juliette Greco, and Yves St. Laurent's dog. Here is Marianne on the dark side of the sixties and the bright side of the nineties, which saw her collaborating with the likes of Blur and Jarvis Cocker; compelling recollections of an unconventional childhood in her father's orgiastic literary commune to a hilariously decadent few days at Lady Caroline Blackwood's deathbed. Here she is her blossoming movie career, on her records as subliminal autobiography. This is as intimate a portrait as we've ever had of Marianne, as she meditates on sex and drugs, confronts her alter-ego, the Fabulous Beast, and faces her own mortality in her battle with breast cancer. Since her last book Marianne has, in her own words, 'made quite a few records, gone on many tours, tried to play it straight, and… Well, the rest is the subject of this book.'

Marianne Faithfull singer, dope addict and lover of Mick Jagger and other rich and famous people tells us her story, in a frank, revealing autobiography.