The British singer and actress died at age 78 in January 2025
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NEED TO KNOW
- Courtney Love recalled that she and the late Marianne Faithfull “hated being compared to each other” in a recent interview with The Times
- “Marianne was an intellectual and I am not … She read Dante’s Inferno and I like a cheap thrill and a Beatles hook,” she said
- The former singer and guitarist for the rock band Hole also recalled when she first discovered Faithfull’s music and how it inspired her
Courtney Love and Marianne Faithfull always agreed on one thing.
Over a year after Faithfull, who famously dated Mick Jagger, died at age 78, the former singer and guitarist for the alternative rock band Hole, 61, recalled that the two of them "really hated being compared to each other" in a recent interview with The Times.
"Marianne was an intellectual and I am not," Love, who was famously married to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain until his 1994 death, explained. "She read Dante’s Inferno and I like a cheap thrill and a Beatles hook. But I remember her saying, ‘They wanted me broken!’ I know from experience: she’s not wrong."
Ahead of joining Suki Waterhouse, Tilda Swinton, George MacKay and more in telling Faithfull’s story in the forthcoming documentary, Broken English, Love said that she first discovered the British singer and actress’ music at an "all-ages gay disco" in Portland, Oregon.
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"The two big albums were [David] Bowie’s Scary Monsters and Broken English," she recalled. "There was one song where she said the word ‘c—,’ which I thought was cool as f—."
Love also remembered being blown away by one of Faithfull’s live performances in 1988.
"I saw Marianne Faithfull sing ‘Times Square’ in New York, 1988," she explained of the concert that later became the 1990 live album Blazing Away. "I couldn’t concentrate because Sally Grossman, the woman on the cover of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, was sitting next to me, but anyway here’s this woman who comes back from being ‘ruined’ playing an incredible show with her co-writer Barry Reynolds, who she was clearly having an affair with. And well, it was incredible."
While speaking to the Los Angeles Times in April 2021, Love shared in a joint interview with Faithfull that they had since built a personal connection through their mutual friend and neighbor, Carrie Fisher.
"We did a few things together, you, me and Carrie," she told the outlet alongside the late rock legend. "Marianne and I are weirdly connected. [But] we can’t stand being compared to each other. It’s ridiculous."
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While Faithfull insisted that she didn’t "take any notice" of the comparisons, she did express that comparing two female artists was a "funny way of pushing you down," after which Love deemed the act "flattering, but also cheap."
The pair also went on to discuss Faithfull’s album of poetry with music, She Walks in Beauty, which she recorded during her recovery from a serious case of COVID-19 in 2020.
“When I was listening to your album, I felt like your whole life is embodied in these poems you’ve read,” Love pointed out. “That’s why I can understand [Percy Bysshe] Shelley for the first time. And “The Lady of Shalott” [by Alfred Tennyson]. I know all the tragic woman imagery around it — I’ve even used some of that imagery myself — but you have read it for me for the first time at 56.”
In response, Faithful said that her goal was to give listeners that exact experience “without being pretentious.”
“Warren Ellis told me that until he heard me read them, he didn’t really understand them and I think that might happen,” she added. “It’s a question: What have I got to give now? And at the moment, I have to give this.”
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