Marianne Faithfull

She was the Kate Moss of her day but with the voice of an angel as well as the looks of a nymph goddess Venus to match, the world has lost one of its most elegant, soulful and strongest of larks.

Its incredible isn’t it. The sense and spine, soul touching power of lyrics that you connect with personally. For me, Marianne Faithful who has sadly died today at the age of 78, has been an energising and emotional company for many years, ever since I discovered her singing as God in Absolutely Fabulous - The Last Shout in 1996. Eddie took a wrong turn on the ski slopes and out of the smoke she appeared.

‘It was always Michelangelo’s vision not mine’

Marianne with Jennifer Saunders as God in Absolutely Fabulous.

I’m glad such Ab Fab appearances are noted in most of dear Marianne’s obituaries today.

I did not watch it in 1996 when it first aired as I was 5 then, Ab fab would come years later in 2000 in my early teens, the joy of finding those charity shop videos each with 3 precious episodes on each, I can’t bear to charity shop them.

I was so happy when singing baby blue that my nan Min suddenly joined in too and so Baby Blue - I remember us singing often, one spring day of the covid lock down, under that azure blue, spring sky we had then back when you could hear the blackbirds too with no traffic on the roads… the sky too is folding over you.

Born in 1946 in London, Faithfull was descended from Austrian nobility on her mother’s side – her great-great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch wrote the erotic novel Venus in Furs. Her mother was Baroness Eva Sacher-Masoch, a Hungarian, half-Jewish former ballet dancer who had fled the Nazis in World War II.Her father was Major Glyn Faithfull, an eccentric British MI6 agent turned professor of Italian literature. Very much like perhaps a fictional absolutely fabulous childhood, the convent-educated teenager would abandon school after meeting the Rolling Stones.

Marianne spent her early years at Braziers Park, an upmarket commune founded by her father in an Oxfordshire country house.

In her autobiography, she described it as a "mixture of high utopian thoughts and randy sex". Quite a line of script you can imagine Patsy saying to Eddie or certainly that of Patsy’s older sister Jac’s played by another Ab Fab guest appearance great, the late Kate O’mara.

Her parents divorced when Marianne was 6. Her mother took her to live in a terraced house in Reading where she was raised " Like one of her mother's cats".

She had regular bouts of tuberculosis and was sent to St Joseph's Roman Catholic boarding school, despite her father's complaints that the nuns would "give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life".

Of course the Rolling stones came along and a talent for life was set and spring boarded , the write up of which could fill many books.

She was the first and indeed was, the Kate Moss of her day perhaps less glitzy though but with the voice of an angel as well as the looks of a nymph goddess Venus to match. I wonder if the two woman ever did meet with one another? I’d wrap myself up in a fur rug too after a shower. ‘An innocent gathering of pure domesticity’

Drugs (fortunately for just a period) would prove to be the friend who out competes all others others as they often do. In 1970, Faithfull lost custody of her son, split with Jagger and became homeless, not before a suicide attempt that left her in a coma along with alcoholism and anorexia.

She lived on the streets of Soho in London as she tried to quit heroin, no mean feat of a task. She looked back on these years in a BBC interview in 2002, describing her addiction as a kind of brutal therapy.

"I was in agony and I healed myself as best I could," she said. "One of the ways was with drugs, because they are painkillers.

"It was all too much for me," she explained. "I really didn't like my gilded cage."

“To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.”

“I’d been living in a very fake sort of world in the 60s,” she said in 2016. “Suddenly, when I was living on the streets … I realised that human beings were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me cups of tea.” She slowly turned her life around, ending an almost decade-long spell away from music with the country album Dreamin’ My Dreams in 1976. She managed to quit drugs for good in 1985.

With all this life story in mind, its little wonder that her penultimate album, 2018's Negative Capabilty, was a meditation on ageing, loneliness and grief – inspired partly by the death of her old friend, and fellow Rolling Stones' paramour Anita Pallenberg; and partly by the terror attacks on the Bataclan nightclub in her adopted home of Paris.

She received the World Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Women's World Awards, and was made a commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France.

The singer married and divorced three times - to artist John Dunbar in 1965, Ben Brierly of punk band the Vibrators in 1979, and actor Giorgio Della Terza in 1988.“I’ve had a wonderful life with all my lovers, and husbands,” she said in 2011, excepting Della Terza: “He was American, and he was a nightmare.”

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote her 1964 debut single As Tears Go By that I posted on Instagram today whilst admiring a glade of nodding snowdrops and golden aconites, Marianne singing over such emblems of life and hope in the cold, a sombre but beautiful song, it was a perfect track to accompany them . Like such perennially returning spring flowers, her voice and inspirational spirit will be remembered forever.