I've always suspected that there will come a time when I finally understand what Lawrence meant in one of his most famous songs: 'all the people I like are those that are dead'. And while it has not yet come to that, mercifully, it still feels like time is beginning to move a little too fast. This January, it has been cruel and unforgiving. First my favourite filmmaker, and now this.
Marianne Faithfull always had that presence. I guess I could describe it as this effortless charisma that filled every inch of the image or the screen every time that I saw her. She filled the records and the speakers, too, with a voice that had the charm and the sort of playful wisdom that always felt so uniquely hers.
Also, unlike a million other pretty faces from the 60s, the ones that swirled around that glorious decade of madness and beautiful excess, she had substance. And that is not just "Sister Morphine" that she had once co-written with Mick Jagger. Albums like Broken English, Give My Love To London and Negative Capability (her late-period Renaissance was remarkable) are these rough, self-contained jewels that demand your absolute attention.
Presence and substance - when you encounter those two things in one person, hold on to that person until the very end.
And then she always had impeccable taste. The record that gets played in my house most often is a collection of Marianne Faithfull's live performances titled The Montreux Years. It features, among other things, songs from artists such as Van Morrison, Neko Case, Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. Her choice of material was nothing short of perfect, and it always felt as if the likes of Morrison and Cohen wrote those songs specifically for her to sing. She kept that taste until the very end, and that is regardless of where you looked: her Paris apartment or her last spoken-word collaboration with Warren Ellis.
Certainly she was beautiful, one of the most beautiful people you could ever see. A beauty that so effortlessly transcended the physical form as well as that long-gone decade that branded her Jagger's muse and yet another sex symbol.
She had presence, substance, taste, beauty. Very few people in the world can beat that. So few, in fact, that I'm not even too sure that they still exist.
