Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis review, She Walks in Beauty: Faithfull breathes fierce, sharp magic into these old words

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. She brought her teenage passion for Romantic poetry into their rock’n’roll camp, writing the lyrics to “Sister Morphine”, and waking from a drug overdose, told Mick Jagger that “wild horses” couldn’t drag her away. She might have snapped “I’m not a f***ing wise woman!” at me when I met her that year, but she sure sounded like one, with a voice both scarred and gilded by her extraordinary life. She spits the anger of her punk days into the 12th verse: “The bleak wind of March/ Made her tremble and shiver;/ But not the dark arch,/ Or the black flowing river:/ Mad from life’s history,/ Glad to death’s mystery/ Swift to be hurl’d – Anywhere, Anywhere/ Out of the world!” Ellis gives a creepy, horror movie backing to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. The tale of a wild-eyed fairy who seduces a knight to strange slumber with “roots of relish sweet, and honey wild and manna dew” is the predecessor of Faithfull’s “Sister Morphine”.