Rock Chicks

by Alison Stieven-Taylor

  The lacklustre Dangerous Acquaintances followed eighteen months later. Marianne had procrastinated over it and it received a lukewarm response. Whatever magic she had conjured for Broken English seemed to have been lost.

  Broken English was confronting on all levels—a fabulous, punk-oriented effort that saved her life. It was brilliant

  Arriving in New York to promote the new album, Brierly and Marianne indulged in all the goodies of the Big Apple. It was like two kids being let loose in a candy store, but in this case it might as well have been a shooting gallery. As his wife’s notoriety escalated, Brierly’s drug-fuelled paranoia resulted in ugly scenes and venomous exchanges. Marianne grew bored. He had become dead baggage. Finding Brierly in bed with another woman, she showed him the door.

  A Child’s Adventure was released in 1983. Marianne co-wrote a number of tracks on the album with producer Wally Badarou, who had worked with M on the hit ‘Pop Music’ and Joe Cocker, and musician Barry Reynolds who played on Broken English. The album made its way into the Billboard top 200, peaking at 107.

  It wasn’t until she fell, stoned to the eyeballs, and broke her jaw that she decided to seek help for her addictions again. This time she checked into Hazelden in Minnesota, a no-nonsense rehab centre where many celebrities have gone to get their act together. There Marianne was subjected to a rigourous detox program that shook her to the marrow.

  for a woman who traded on her beauty, growing old can be difficult to swallow. ‘It’s very hard having been so beautiful when young,’ she lamented

  During the sober years that followed, Marianne released Strange Weather, her 1987 Dietrich-esque album that featured a selection of songs sung with a haunting blues ambience, including ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, ‘I Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well No More’ and ‘Penthouse Serenade’. It also featured a re-worked version of her first hit ‘As Tears Go By’, which benefitted from the maturity of the delivery and the world-weariness of her voice.

  In the late 1980s she took off to Ireland where she holed up in a beautiful, somewhat decrepit cottage on a country estate in County Wicklow and had problems with the landlord and rats. In 1988 she had married Giorgio della Terza, a writer she’d met at Narcotics Anonymous, but Marianne reportedly spent much of the marriage away on tour. By 1991 it was over and she was back to living alone. She stayed sober for five years before she dipped into the drug pool again. This time she stayed clear of heroin, but thought it her duty to try ecstasy.

  The quiet of the Irish countryside was obviously conducive to creativity. Marianne had sung Kurt Weill on the Hal Wilner 1985 tribute album Lost in the Stars, recording ‘The Ballad of The Soldier’s Wife’ accompanied by Chris Spedding on guitar. In 1989 she performed two concerts of the sung ballet, Seven Deadly Sins, composed by Weill with Bertolt Brecht’s lyrics. The performances, at the Church of St Ann and the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn Heights, New York, were acclaimed as masterful interpretations of Weill’s work, planting the seed for a Weill album of her own.

  she holed up in a beautiful, decrepit cottage on a country estate in County Wicklow and had problems with the landlord and rats

  The 1990 live album Blazing Away, recorded at St Ann’s, included songs that spanned her career, from ‘As Tears Go By’ to ‘Broken English’, ‘Guilt’ and ‘Sister Morphine’. Hal Wilner was producer along with Barry Reynolds.

  For her next album Marianne chose to work with composer Angelo Badalamenti on 1995’s A Secret Life. Badalamenti, best known for his work on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks soundtrack, co-wrote most of the tracks with Marianne. Some reviewers felt the orchestral arrangements swamped the work. But there was no question about Marianne’s voice and its ability to handle the material.

  In 1992 she had played Pirate Jenny in the Gate Theatre production of the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera in Dublin. Now, three years later, with pianist Paul Trueblood she performed An Evening in the Weimar Republic, her Kurt Weill tribute concert, at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. The resoundingly positive reception prompted Marianne and Trueblood to tour the show down the American West Coast and to Europe, where she performed at the Berliner Ensemble Theatre in what had been East Berlin. Recordings from the performance feature on 1997’s 20th Century Blues.

  A recording of Seven Deadly Sins, released in 1998 featured the Vienna Radio Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Marianne’s cigarette-ravaged voice was an ideal vehicle to convey the intellectual and emotional depths and intimacy of the work. Many reviewers compared her with Kurt Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya.

  Marianne’s cigarette-ravaged voice conveyed the intellectual and emotional depths and intimacy of the work—reviewers compared her with Kurt Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya

  In 1999 Marianne returned to a more contemporary sound. Vagabond Ways may not have been a chart success but it was a critical triumph. Barry Reynolds was in the studio again with Emmylou Harris on backup vocals and Roger Waters playing synthesiser. The album contained mostly original material co-written by Marianne with a number of her close associates.

  Marianne was back in front of the camera in Patrice Chereau’s Intimacy, voted best film at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001, followed the next year by an independent cinematic release Far From China. Marianne hooked up with French filmmaker Francois Ravard, who became her manager and lover, and moved to Paris where the pair currently reside.

  When she came to record her 2002 album Kissin’ Time, Ravard suggested she make up a wish list of those she’d like to work with. This album, she has said, was the first in which she committed to being an active participant in the creation of her work. She was ‘beginning’ to take it into her own hands, she said. Kissin’ Time again proved that Marianne was the mother of reinvention. She collaborated with a younger group of artists to give the record a pop music feel that hadn’t been present in her work in the 1990s.

  In 2003 she was back in the studio to record Before the Poison, which featured another who’s who of contemporary artists, including PJ Harvey who wrote five songs for the record (two with Marianne) and Damon Albarn. Nick Cave was also on board, writing three songs with Marianne, and his Bad Seeds played on these collaborations, which were tailor-made for her rasping vocals. One reviewer described Before the Poison as ‘poetic and unnerving’.

  Marianne appeared in the 2004 production of The Black Rider, the William Burroughs’ play with songs by Tom Waits, in London and San Francisco. The following year she toured through Britain, Europe and the United States. However, then fifty-seven, she had to pull out of her final European dates, and also a planned performance of The Black Rider at the Sydney Festival in Australia early the next year, due to exhaustion.

  For a woman who has traded on her beauty, growing old can be difficult to swallow. The creeping decrepitude drove her into therapy in 2005. ‘It’s very hard having been so beautiful when young,’ she lamented to the Sunday Times.

  Kissin’ Time again proved that Marianne was the mother of reinvention

  Marianne took the role of the young queen’s mother, Marie Theresa of Austria, in Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, released in 2006. Her next cinematic outing was in Irina Palm, in which she played a grandmother who resorted to working as a prostitute in order to save her ill grandson.

  In stoic French style, Ravard has stood by his grand dame through her recent health scares: a minor heart attack in 2005, which finally prompted her to give up her sixty-a-day cigarette habit, and diagnosis of breast cancer in 2006 (from which she has made a rapid recovery).

  The Marianne Faithfull story is an extraordinary one—one that isn’t over yet. We can anticipate more work from one of the most enduring female performers in rock ’n’ roll. As Hal Wilner said, ‘she’s among the royalty now’—where she has always wanted to be.

  TINA TURNER

  Shake that Thang


  Ann took the microphone and sang for Ike Turner. In that instant, her life changed forever

  Of course the reality was quite different. Tina on the tight leash of Ike Turner, who she met when she was sixteen, was anything but free. Ike was a dominating bully and kept Tina wrapped in a cocoon of subservience, violence and fear.

  It took Tina sixteen years to break free. When she finally did it was the act of a desperate woman, fleeing for her life, her sanity, her self-respect.

  Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939. She grew up in the cotton country of the American South in and around the township of Brownsville, Tennessee. By the time Ann, as she was called, was born her parents’ relationship was on the rocks. Zelma Bullock always resented Ann, whose birth had not revived the marriage as hoped, and she showed her daughter no affection even as an infant. Ann’s memories of early childhood include wandering in the fields, sitting under the trees on hot summer days and the warming smells of cornbread and beans in winter. Her father was caretaker of a cotton plantation and the family lived comfortably. She and her elder sister Alline had their own rooms, a luxury in many African-American families.

  Her parents split up when she was around ten years of age, her father moving to Chicago and her mother to St Louis. The sisters were separated. Ann was shunted off to live with her father’s folk, who were unemotional and disciplinarian. Forced to go to church every Sunday, Ann soon joined the choir. She was a natural performer and would often break into song, singing tunes she heard on the radio. In the 1940s the radio waves were humming with the sounds of the big bands of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey, and the likes of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie. By the time she was in high school, she was holding down a job as a live-in house maid for a middle-class white family. The Hendersons were generous and Ann was made to feel one of the family.

  it appeared to be one big, happy family. In reality it was a cauldron of clashing egos, adultery, domineering men and conniving women

  When she was around sixteen, she sought out the big city lights of St Louis, moving in with her mother and Alline. It wasn’t long before Ann, who looked older than her years, got into the club scene, tagging along with her sister. One of East St Louis’s jumping night spots was Club Manhattan, where the Kings of Rhythm played. Alline was dating the drummer and the girls spent every weekend at the club. One night Ann took the microphone and sang for Ike Turner. In that instant, her life changed forever.

  A singer by night and schoolgirl by day, Ann began living a dream. But once her mother got wind of what was going on reality came crashing down. Zelma put a stop to the singing.

  Ike had been in the music game for years. Hailing from Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was an accomplished pianist and guitarist who had played on records for Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush and Elmore James. He’d been with the Kings of Rhythm, an R&B ensemble, since 1951. But his real talent lay in being a bandleader and he had a firm grip on the Kings’ musical and business direction. Convinced that Ann’s powerful vocals were the key to his band’s future success, Ike wasn’t going to let anyone stand in his way. He sweet-talked Mother Bullock and within days Ann was back on stage.

  To Ann, the Kings of Rhythm seemed more like a family than a band. All the members and their partners and kids used to congregate in a house in St Louis. There was always music in the air, food on the stove and people everywhere. It appeared to be one big, happy family. In reality it was a cauldron of clashing egos, adultery, domineering men and conniving women.

  Ann fell for saxophone player Raymond Hill. Still in her last year of high school, she discovered she was pregnant. For a time Ann lived with Hill in the band’s house, but it wasn’t long before he shot through and she moved back in with her mother. In 1958, at the age of eighteen, she gave birth to a son, Raymond Craig. No longer welcome in her mother’s house, Ann found herself living on her own, looking after her newborn baby, working as a nurse’s aide in the local maternity hospital and singing at night in order to pay the rent. It was a hard slog.

  cocaine fuelled Ike’s already skewed perspective on reality. He didn’t just slap Tina or punch her, he used twisted wire coat hangers for maximum impact

  Ike could see the pace was wearing her out. He gave her a pay rise and Ann ditched the nursing job. She was now a full-time singer. For a time she was swept away with the glamour of the life Ike promised. Initially they were like brother and sister, but one thing led to another and Ike, nine years her senior and a chronic womaniser, seduced the young singer. Ann didn’t want a sexual relationship but, thinking that without Ike she had nothing, she acquiesced.

  It wasn’t long before she was pregnant again. Ike’s response was to go back to his common-law wife Lorraine. For a time the three of them lived in the same house along with the other band members, Ann sleeping in a room down the hall from Ike and Lorraine. Ann became one of his other women, a silent player in Ike’s world of deception and violence.

  she moved and sang in a way no other woman dared. She was uninhibited and intoxicating

  She may have been compliant in her private life, but on stage Ann was a different person. Her powerful voice was as arresting as her wild antics. She gave the Kings of Rhythm the edge on other bands playing the club scene. She moved and sang in a way no other woman dared. She was uninhibited and intoxicating. When she was on stage all eyes were glued on her.

  Ann sang backing vocals on the 1958 single ‘Box Top’. On the strength of her performance on the record, which was released by an independent St Louis label, industry insiders recommended that Ike put Ann up front of the band.

  ‘A Fool in Love’, released in 1960, was her first single as lead singer and her first as Tina Turner, another Ike masterstroke. There had been no consultation about changing her name. ‘A Fool in Love’ got to number three on the Billboard R&B charts and, more significantly, made it on to the pop charts, reaching the top thirty.

  Ike had an extraordinary grip on Tina. She was pregnant, in hospital with hepatitis, a young son to care for and Ike’s wife back on the scene, and he still convinced her to defy doctor’s orders and leave the hospital so he could promote ‘A Fool in Love’. They hit the road. At their first gig as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, in Cincinnati, Tina concealed her pregnancy in a flowing, micro-short dress. Soon the duo, now complete with three backing singers known as the Ikettes, were performing on the smash-hit TV show American Bandstand. This was a level of success Ike had never experienced before—and it was clearly due to Tina. Then in October Tina gave birth to a second son, Ronald. Five days later she was on stage again. Ike had allowed her two weeks off from touring.

  it took Tina sixteen years to break free. When she finally did it was the act of a desperate woman, fleeing for her life, her sanity, her self-respect

  The following year another single, ‘It’s Gonna Work Out Fine’, made it into the top thirty pop charts. It was quickly followed by two more singles, ‘Poor Fool’ and ‘Tra La La La La’, which both made it into the charts but not with quite the same success.

  In 1962 Tina sealed her fate, marrying Ike in Mexico. Another top twenty hit was released that year, ‘I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)’. Professionally the Turners were on fire, but their personal life left a lot to be desired.

  The pair moved to LA and set up house in the up-market, predominantly white suburb of View Park. Now Tina was the wife expected to put up with Ike’s other women. He didn’t bother to conceal his philandering and even bedded other women in their marital home. His control over Tina reached into every corner of her life. The only thing she did without him was to go shopping. It became her escape. As the money rolled in, Tina took the allowance Ike gave her and bought expensive clothes and accessories, filling her wardrobes with designer labels and developing a habit that would last a lifetime. She was the original shop-till-you-drop girl.<
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  Paralleling their success was the escalating abuse that Tina suffered at the hands of her husband. At any moment Ike would fly into a rage. Make-up covered the bruises and Tina learned to perform with cracked ribs and bloodied mouth. Everyone around them knew what was going on. Ike didn’t save his fists for his wife alone. His other women also knew the sting of his temper. Band line-ups changed frequently as did the members of the Ikettes. No one wanted to be around Ike for too long once they’d seen his true colours.

  The Ike and Tina Turner Revue performed fifty-one weeks a year, usually multiple shows each night. They played the LA club circuit for half the year and hit the road for the rest of the time. Tina’s children spent weeks away from their mother in the care of nannies. Despite the constant touring, the chart successes began to dry up and in 1964 the Revue had only one hit, ‘I Can’t Believe What You Say’.

  Phil Spector was eager to work with Tina. In 1965 the boy-wonder producer—of the Ronettes, Connie Francis, the Righteous Brothers, Darlene Love and Bobby Sheen—negotiated a deal with Ike, who was less than thrilled that the producer only wanted Tina. Still, Ike was a shrewd businessman and he could see the sense in hooking up with the quirky little producer who had orchestrated a string of hits.

  Spector wanted Tina to record ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, a song he’d written with husband-and-wife team Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, one of the most successful songwriting duos of the time. Spector produced the song in his wall-of-sound style using multiples of the same instruments—guitars, keyboards, horns, percussion, strings—to create a musical storm that engulfed the listener with its orchestral majesty. It was a masterpiece. Some of the hottest musicians of the day—Glenn Campbell, Leon Russell, Hal Blaine and Jim Horn—worked on the record. But it bombed in the States, sending the eccentric producer into semi-retirement. In Britain it was a different story and it became a top ten hit. Years later Rolling Stone magazine would list ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ at number thirty-three in the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.