If you spent the morning with the Stones at the Circus, watching Marianne Faithfull stand in a tent in 1968 wearing a nun’s habit and sing “Something Better,” you already know what she was capable of. What you might not know is what it cost her to get from there to here.
Broken English is what a decade of wreckage sounds like when it finally finds its shape.
The Voice That Came Back Different
By 1979 Faithfull’s voice had dropped an octave from the silvery ingénue soprano she’d carried through the sixties. Heroin, a collapsed marriage, years homeless in Soho — all of it is audible. The instrument that emerges on this record is a low, abraded contralto, something closer to smoke and gravel than to the girl Decca had packaged for radio. Producer Mark Miller Mundy and arranger/co-writer Barry Reynolds had the good sense not to sand it down.
Reynolds had been her guitarist and confidant through the worst of it. He co-wrote the title track and “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” and he understood that the voice was the story now.
The sessions happened at Startling Studios in Ascot — the same Tittenhurst Park estate John Lennon had once owned — and at Island’s Basing Street studio in London. Engineer Wally Bairsted captured a lean, metallic production that sits in its period without apology, all synth pulses and tight, almost brittle drums. Session drummer Terry Stannard laid down patterns that feel clipped and deliberate, a world away from Charlie Watts’ loose swing but carrying a similar fatalism in the pocket.
What Connects It to the Circus
Here is the thread: at the Rock and Roll Circus, the Dirty Mac played with the chaos barely contained — Lennon’s guitar grinding against Clapton’s, Richards barely holding the thing together, and underneath it all that sense of people performing at each other out of some unresolved need. It was not polished. It was not meant to be.
Broken English occupies the same emotional frequency. This is not a careful album. The title track is built around a Langer-produced synth riff that sounds almost confrontational, and Faithfull delivers Heathcote Williams’ lyric about Ulrike Meinhof — yes, the Baader-Meinhof member — with a fury that has no precedent in her catalog. She is not singing about politics exactly. She is singing about women who push so far past acceptable that the world has no language left for them.
“Why’d Ya Do It,” a Toni Stern poem set to music, is still one of the most genuinely obscene tracks ever made by a major label artist. It is also funny, and wounded, and completely alive.
The Torch Song at Midnight
If the Circus’s great buried moment is Faithfull’s own “Something Better” — which Mick and Keith had written for her, which she delivered with a stillness that embarrassed the noise around it — then “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is its dark completion. Guy Clark’s original was already devastating. Faithfull turns it into a séance.
She was thirty-two years old when she recorded this. She sounds older than the century.
Steve York on bass gives everything a low, unhurried gravity. Joe Mavety’s guitar parts are placed with restraint, appearing only where they’re needed. The whole record breathes like someone who has learned, the hard way, not to waste air.
There is nothing soft about Broken English. But there is nothing false about it either. Put it on after midnight when the house is quiet, after a morning spent with the Circus, and you will hear the same unruly voltage — just translated into a different kind of survival.