Marianne Faithfull is no longer the beautiful child with Andrew Loog Oldham’s commercial face and empty eyes.

At 26 she’s beginning to resemble a subtle, more luxurious version of Fenella Fielding. Her voice has dropped a full octave and, judging from the distraught images from old newspaper stories, she’s more composed and settled with herself.

Not settled enough, however, to keep the first appointment we’d made for an interview. She’d responded to a call through her agent and phoned the office to say that, as it was precisely ten years since “As Tears Go By,” she’d be willing to talk. But at the appointed place and time there was no sign of Marianne... not even a last-second arrival garnished with elegant excuses.

This was to come a week later when she confessed over the phone: “I’m sorry. I got the horrors, I’d been reading an interview with Lulu and I thought it was so awful and degrading. I just couldn’t.. .”