There was never any question that Marianne Faithfull was going to be a major celebrity. That was a view I shared with all my friends, back in the early 1960s, when I was at school at Leighton Park, Reading, and Marianne was a schoolgirl at St Joseph’s convent school down the road.

She was one of the reasons so many of us wanted to join the town’s Progress theatre, or act in our school plays and operas, in which she regularly took part – at least until the English master decided she was a disruptive influence. Even then, she was a fine young actor and a fine singer. We assumed she would become a folk star after watching her at Reading Folk Club, singing Spanish Is the Loving Tongue or Stanley and Dora, an anti-monarchist version of Frankie and Johnny that she had apparently learned from her father.

And, of course, there was competition to see who would be invited to her house to take her mum’s dalmatians for a walk. She was the most beautiful girl any of us had met and had the charisma of a superstar.

It was 17 years before I met her again, in 1979, after the release of her classic album Broken English. She suggested meeting at the Ritz hotel, from which we were expelled because neither I nor her press officer was wearing a tie. Sitting in a nearby bar, she talked about her early career, saying: “I felt terribly manufactured, and I was. There was probably something real they could have done, instead of the most obvious, with As Tears Go By. But I was only 17.”

She talked about her drug days, saying: “I must have given up then, or I wouldn’t have got into heroin.” And when congratulated on Broken English, with its sense of danger and powerful storytelling, she said: “It’s the first angry statement I’ve made. In the past I did what people told me.”

“To be frank,” she said, “I always knew I was something extraordinary.” She wanted to be “something real, not too arty or serious, but real, like BB King, Ma Rainey or Billie Holiday – except they are great. I may become a great star, which will be great. It’s what I want to be and what I think I am.”

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