Marianne FaithFull releases new album Negative Capability

'Negative Capability' is Marianne Faithfull’s 21st album and the most emotionally powerful of her 54-year recording career. Facing down arthritis and bolstered by collaborators including Warren Ellis, Nick Cave, Rob Ellis, Ed Harcourt and Mark Lanegan, Negative Capability is charged with brutal honesty and autobiographical reflection as she addresses losing old friends, her loneliness living in her adopted city of Paris yet still hopes love can come around.

Driven by her supernatural reinterpretative skills, florid lyricism, battle against the pain she live with and realised with her stellar group of musicians, 'Negative Capability' is Marianne’s unflinchingly honest and relentlessly beautiful late-life masterpiece, emphasising her unique place as a force of nature in the beating heart of modern music that started opening up after ‘Sister Morphine’ ignited her muse and it was recorded by the Rolling Stones nearly fifty years ago. At that time she had enjoyed her pop career with hits such as ‘Come And Stay With Me’ and ‘This Little Bird’ then became the crown princess of the UK counterculture before grasping her artistic reins with the landmark Broken English.

Recorded at La Brette studio near her adopted home city of Paris when she’s not in her beloved Ireland, the album is inexorably overshadowed by grief at losing close friends from the ‘60s such as Anita Pallenberg, Martin Stone and Cream album designer Martin Sharp. It’s produced by both Rob Ellis – the PJ Harvey producer who’s been Marianne’s collaborator for five years and Warren Ellis from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, whose violin blesses songs such as ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘Born To Live’ – her intensely moving eulogy to departed friend lifelong Anita Pallenberg - with the stark but lustrous autumnal beauty that makes the album. Cave co-wrote ‘The Gypsy Fairie Queen’ – inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – and supplies backing chorale and keyboards throughout.