Marianne Faithfull.

For the past couple of weeks I have finally given in to actually devoting myself to a book, and I've been reading Marianne Faithfull's biography, with David Dalton. It is probably, one of the most enchanting things I have ever read. I think that she is totally misunderstood, everyone sees her as just one of these dolly girls from Swinging London in the sixties, but she explains in the book she hated that scene, she disliked all the Twiggy alikes and the Chrissie Shrimpton alikes. Everything she talks about and everything she says, it makes me feel like I was there with her. She talks about how she used to lounge around Brian Jones & Anita Pallenberg's house in London and do acid, then go on trips to far away lands and statuesqe places. How glamorous and bohemian everything was in those days. What I didn't know, was that she was in love with Keith throughout her whole relationship with Mick, and spent a night with Keith which Mick never found out about... that she really disliked the stereotypical Swinging London scene, that she at first found Mick Jagger to be one of the most annoying people she had ever met, that she slept with MORE people that I imagined (haha), that she REJECTED Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, that she became addicted to all the drugs she took and that she completely and utterly adored and admired Anita Pallenberg and all her ways. She describes Anita as one of the most exhilerating and elegant women she has ever met, and how everyone was really in love with Anita rather than herself. ''...Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones together, they were wondering about the Albert Hall on Acid, in their sashes, silks and feathers... ''. ''Deemed romantics, mad bohemians and opium eaters''. ''Yobbish dandies with guitars''. ''I wanted to smoke Gauloises, drink black coffee and talk about absurdity and maquilage with wicked women and doomed young men''. ''The sixties hadn't happened yet, there were only hazy imitations of what was coming''. ''...He would talk breathtakingly about killing himself, all of which I found incredibly attractive and a little frightening''. ''There were lots of things I could have done at the age of nineteen that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick Jagger's inamorta''. ''The fundamental faith people have in their country no longer exists in England. In the sixties we were rebelling because we thought it was worth changing. I don't think that's true anymore''. Everything written in the book intrigues me, the way she talks about the little group of her, Anita, Brian, Keith & Mick, and how she saw Brian deteriorate before her own eyes, how intense it all was. All the parties she attended, all the people she met, all the people she slept with, all the places she went. There is so much more to her than just being a style icon from the 1960's, she is generally a legend. She doesn't only talk about herself and her life, it gives away so much detail about the Rolling Stones and the feud between Brian and the rest of the group. I cannot put the book down, and I look forward to work every Sunday now so I can sit there for 6 hours on end and read it, imagining I was actually there with her, and I was all part of the little 'Stones cliche.