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Baker's Dozen

The Golden Past: Marianne Faithfull's Favourite Albums
Joel McIver , February 4th, 2013 06:42

Following the recent reissue of her landmark album Broken English, and in advance of her 50th anniversary as a performer next year, Marianne Faithfull tells Joel McIver about her 13 favourite LPs

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Serge Gainsbourg – Melody Nelson
I listened to this a lot when it came out, because I was a friend of Serge and I loved his work. I miss him terribly. He was brilliant, and very strange in some ways, and I had a feeling that he really knew what he was doing. He knew he was laying down a new thing and a whole new register of music. I just wish he hadn’t died so young: I would love to have seen what he was doing as he got older. Was I a bit like Melody Nelson myself? Yes, I do relate to her a lot. I was a teenager, a little girl, and I did a lot of what I did on intuition. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Theatre was where I learned my craft, I suppose, while not really conscious yet, and I needed that to learn how to make records, of course.