Mar 8, 2011 - 12 minDerek Jarman's complete 12min short film for 'Broken English'. Source: www.muzu.tv. Home; Adam smith; capital asset; depreciation; durable; economics; s; non-renewable resource; physical capital; production; service; stock.

Like a lot of stories of scandal, ruin, and the opportunity for redemption, it started with a pretty face. In the spring of 1964, 17-year old walked into a swinging, star-studded London party and landed a record deal without singing a note; Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager and world-class sleazeball, famously summed up the matter with his usual showbiz aplomb: 'I saw an angel with big tits and signed her.'

Within the year, the bookish baroness' daughter was climbing the charts and making the rounds at concert halls and the BBC, thrust into a pop career she didn't much want in the first place. ('For one brief, blissful moment I thought I saw a way out of my pop nightmare,' she wrote three decades later in her autobiography, Faithfull, which is every bit as insightful, vivid, and deliciously bonkers as Keith Richards' Life.) Faithfull was a passable vocalist with a folksy, melancholy, relatively generic lilt, but there was a certain vacancy and listlessness about her that suggested she'd not yet become comfortable in her skin. If you watch some of her on YouTube, she has a way of making Lana Del Rey look present.

Faithfull started dating Mick Jagger in 1966, and her 60s output is generally only discussed in terms of how it relates to that of the Stones: 'As Tears Go By' is more famous for being the first song Mick and Keith wrote together than for being Faithfull's debut single. On the personal front, though, the opposite was true: Notoriety had a way of sliding off the boys and sticking to Faithfull. After the infamous Redlands drug bust, the press dubbed her 'Miss X' and, a bit more personably, 'The Girl in the Fur Rug.' ('SCANTILY CLAD WOMAN AT DRUG PARTY' screamed one representative headline.) To those closer to the Stones' circle, she was The Muse-- though by her account, her relationship with Jagger was a pretty mutual exchange of ideas, old records, and hallucinogens. Draw Bar Settings Handbook To Higher.

Ever the avid reader, a little while prior to the Beggar's Banquet sessions, Faithfull handed him The Master and Margarita and suggested that this Lucifer guy might make for a good character in a song. She wrote the lyrics to 'Sister Morphine', and cut a shudderingly melancholy version that makes the Stones' take almost seem like a romp. This was maybe the first big, public hint that Miss X knew more about pain and suffering than a lot of people wanted to assume.

When she slipped into the coma that almost killed her-- the result of taking 150 Tuinals in a hotel room in Australia-- she had a vision that Brian Jones, just six days in the ground, was beckoning her over a cliff. He leapt; at the last minute she decided to stay. When she opened her eyes in a hospital room six days later, Mick said, 'Marianne, we thought we'd lost you.' In that milky voice that was already starting to curdle, the first thing she said to him was, 'Wild horses couldn't drag me away.' That's the thing about pretty faces.

We'd much prefer to watch them wilt. We don't expect them to belong to the fighters-- the junkies and monks and cockroaches who'll survive every atomic bomb and suicide attempt and outlive us all. And we definitely don't expect them to make songs as gnarled and candid as the ones on Faithfull's finest record, Broken English, but there you go: the best records are all, in some way or another, the ones that blow a mouthful of smoke in the face of expectation. The world that thought it had tsk-tsked Miss X into submission was probably not ready for Broken English in 1979, and even today as it's released in a deluxe edition, it's still raw enough to make you squirm-- the cracked, undead voice of a woman back from exile to make a record about the simple audacity of staying alive. If you know one thing about Broken English, you probably know that Faithfull was living on the streets right before she made it. And unlike the Mars Bar myth (now thoroughly by Faithfull, Keith Richards, and an honest-to-goodness policeman), this checks out.

Broke, heroin-dependent, and (it seemed) professionally washed up, Faithfull spent the better part of two years living in a roofless pile of rubble in Soho, a bombed-out ruin of the Blitz. She was squatting with her then-husband Ben Brierley (of British punks the Vibrators) and riding the unexpected success of her forlorn ballad, 'Dreamin' My Dreams' (a dud at home but a surprise hit in politically tumultuous Ireland, where, in 1976, 'forlorn' was the mood of the hour) when somebody at her label rather improbably gave her the money to cut another record. The resulting album feels so intimate and personal that it's easy to overstate its singularity. But Broken English is more than just a portrait of the addict as a middle-aged woman; it captures an entire generation's disillusioned comedown. 'The days of mind-opening drugs were over,' Faithfull writes in her autobiography, reflecting on the spiritual climate of the mid-70s. 'The world had tilted.