Search - Marianne Faithfull :: Very Best of

Early Days: Faithfull The Folk Siren

Pieter | Johannesburg | 03/06/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Although I already owned Marianne Faithfull's Greatest Hits album that contains thirteen of these tracks, I had to acquire this one too for her exquisite interpretations of two folk classics: Tom Paxton's The Last Thing On My Mind and Tim Hardin's Reason To Believe with which Rod Stewart later had a huge hit. It was well worth it!



Other sixties classics here include Monday Monday and Yesterday plus the two famous Stones songs As Tears Go By and the lugubrious Sister Morphine. The informative sleeve insert provides an interesting overview of her career, even giving the UK and US chart positions of her singles and ep's. I was surprised to learn, for example, how firmly she stood in the folk tradition in those early years, always having considered her more of a pop singer.



Besides the Paxton and Hardin numbers, my other favorites remain the yearning Come And Stay With Me, a Jackie De Shannon song which reached No. 4 in the UK in 1964, the Goffin/Mann composition Something Better, Spector/Goffin/King's Is This What I Get For Loving You and the sorrowful Go Away From My World. If I had to choose between "Greatest Hits" and this "Very Best Of", I would definitely take this one since Reason To Believe, The Last Thing On My Mind and Scarborough Fair are more beautiful than the tracks Counting, With You In Mind and Some Other Spring found on the Greatest Hits album.



Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology



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Very nice & mellow

Pieter | 08/20/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"For younger listeners this collection of 60-ies recordings by our Heroine of drugs&sex& rock'n'roll would come as surprise.Back then, Marianne was sweet and gentle-voiced, obviously under influence of Joan Baez (she even mentioned this in her autobiography) and although she wasn't really a singer of Baez calibre, she was sweet.I love this album very much and sometimes I think its actually two Marianne Faithfull, one young and innocent and another one older and wiser, I still can't decide which one I love more."

Fine 60's folk/rock, better package than Abkco 'Greatest Hit

randysrodeo.com | Austin, Texas | 02/06/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This 16-track London CD was released, despite what Amazon says, in 1987 - just like the 16-track Greatest Hits CD on Abkco. The selections are comparable (not identical), and the sound quality is very similar.



However, this CD uses mainly stereo mixes, and the annotation - though rather sloppy in the way many early English CD's were - is pretty thorough. The Abkco CD uses a lot of mono, and its annotion is all but non-existent. So, I'd call this the best single CD compilation of Marianne's 60's music - which makes it essential for Anglophiles."