London Music Tours

Marianne Faithfull‘s musical journey has ranged far-and-wide through the genres… here’s how it all began on the Decca label back in the 60s…

Come My Way (the sleeve pictured at the top of this post) was released in 1965. A great folk-flavoured record (originally on the Decca label) it contains many of the seeds of Marianne Faithfull’s later career as a respected chanteuse.

We discuss her version on House of the Rising Sun on the Bob Dylan In London tour (when we visit the Savoy, as Marianne did back in ’65 to hang with Dylan) and her career features in the Women In Music tour.

The sleeve was shot on St Martin’s Lane, WC2, right in the heart of the West End in The Salisbury Pub. The photographer was the famed Gered Mankowitz.

This ornate gin palace dates back to 1892 and is one of the West End’s best-preserved old boozers. The great Marianne herself is a terrifically well-preserved old boozer, and that’s just one of the reasons why we love her.

Back in ’65, the Salisbury was known to the cognoscenti as a gay bar. In 1965, however, it wasn’t as simple as that, what with homosexuality being a crime in the eyes of the law. Before decriminalisation in England (1967) there was no question of openly gay places in London (or anywhere). Bars such as the Salisbury were frequented by a gay clientele at certain times of day and one had to be in-the-know as to where the scene was going to pop up at any given time.

The (back then) scandalous location is greatly at odds with the virginal image carefully created for  Marianne by her manager Andrew Loog-Oldham (also the svengali behind the young Stones). The image in turn was, we now know, greatly at odds with Marianne’s wild life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Find The Salisbury here…