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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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Bob Dylan – Blonde On Blonde
I thought I should put one of the great classics of my generation in. It’s very hard because there’s hardly anything new to say about it, but I want to give you an impression of what it was like at the time. It was just revolutionary. It was something I’d never heard before. I already loved [Dylan’s 1965 song] ‘Gates Of Eden’ and all that stuff, which he played with a guitar and a harmonica, but this album was made with a real band, and a really good band too. It was all very ‘this is how it’s all gonna go down’, with a real feeling of apocalypse about it. It was a hard time in some ways, with such a huge social upheaval. Everybody went through it, not just me. Although it was very exciting and wonderful at times, it was still very frightening and strange and disturbing. I never knew what I was afraid of, I was just in dread of something unknown that could happen. All the paranoia that went on, and the nastiness, really. People could be very nasty. Dylan expressed that brilliantly. We grew up with that the bomb. It was awful, and it still might happen, baby.