Marianne Faithfull: "Late Victorian Holocaust"

This isn’t a single. It’s a séance. Singing lyrics penned by Nick Cave, Marianne Faithfull sounds like a ghost recalling her life on “Late Victorian Holocaust”, drawing out her words slowly and carefully as though they’re all she has in this afterlife. She is resigned to an eternity ruminating on happier times, when she had blood and bone, and even the music sounds spectral and disorienting: those careful chords are the fading memory of a piano, the violin solo played through a medium. The centerpiece of her upcoming album Give My Love to London, “Late Victorian Holocaust” is haunting in a nearly literal sense.

This is not the first song Cave has written for or with Faithfull, who included three of his tunes on her 2005 album Before the Poison. But it is the best he has given her and the first she has owned so thoroughly, nearly erasing his imprint on the words and melody. The downside is that it becomes tempting to read it as a commentary on Faithfull’s own notorious past—perhaps as a prologue to her upcoming memoir, Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record. “We were starbabies in the dark, throwing up in Meanwhile Park,” she sings, savoring those unlikely syllables. “Sleeping in each others’ arms, beyond happy we were, beyond harm.”

That could be Swinging London in the 1960s, the same scene that nearly made—and nearly killed—Faithfull. Fortunately, “Late Victorian Holocaust” never settles for any one particular set of references. It’s more about memory in general, sung by a woman whose own experiences have given her the musical and interpretive authority to invest the chorus—”Sweet little sleep, my dreams are yours to keep”—with so many chilling implications.

Marianne Faithfull: "Late Victorian Holocaust" on SoundCloud.

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