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Customer Reviews
It starts slowly, but gets into it's stride with Guilt, the venom starting to flow in preparation for the main course. Enter Working Class Hero, a track she has almost made her own, shame about the instrumental jazz ramblings in the middle but what do you expect from Greenwich Village session musicians (I havent Googled, I may be doing them a disservice)? Nonetheless she delivers it with true power and anger, spitting bile over the small audience. It was recorded in St. Annes Cathedral, Brooklyn, and the acoustic is utterly superb. The sound manages to be both expansive and intimate, not an easy combination.
This acoustic frames a blinding performance of Sister Morphine beautifully, Marianne projecting the emotion invoked by Jaggers masterpiece as if she was walking you round the inside of her life. Which, of course, she is. It's why we love her. The album is worth getting for this track alone. I cried.
I cried for different reasons at an enormously indifferent performance of Why D'Ya Do It though. Unfortunately this iconic track has become a cliché, and now she sings it with a happy twinkle in her eye; the bite is lost, along with Steve York's original driving bassline. One Fernando Saunders, who also co-produced, was way out of his depth here. Easily the lowest point on the album.
Lucy Jordan soon dispels the gloom (? :-) ) and Times Square is a tour de force. Another, more unexpected, highlight is an eerie lament 'She Moves Through The Fair'. This is performed solo and in total silence from the audience. Sent a shiver down my spine.
The finalé is of course Broken English, performed slightly too fast, and another track that defeats the bassist.
All in all though, as an exibition of that astonishing chainsaw through silk voice this is an umissable album, superbly produced and engineered. There are many Greatest Hits collections out there, but this one has a twist.
A melancholy French ballad with a medieval feel opens the album, representing one of three styles found on Blazing Away: the haunting ballad full of gravitas, like the bluesy Strange Weather from the album of the same name, Sister Morphine, As Tears Go By and the traditional folk song She Moves Through the Fair.
The other styles are up-tempo rock, like Working Class Hero, Why'd Ya Do It with its beautiful accordion keyboards, this hard rocking version of Broken English, and country, represented by the terrific torch and twang of Lucy Jordan and the only studio track Blazing Away that has a thematic connection to Times Square of which this live version is magnificent; devoted fans of Faithfull ought to experience it.
This rendition is much more powerful, unhinged and stirring than the original on A Child's Adventure. That is a definite plus of this live album: the versions are sufficiently different to put the songs, like also Broken English, in a new light. For example, the notorious Why'd Ya Do It is less acerbic, done with a wink and a smile.
Blazing Away is a most atmospheric album showing Marianne at her peak in the early 90s. It includes sleeve notes where the artist explains the meaning of the songs in the context of her life. The best compilation of her later work as a rock/torch singer is Perfect Stranger: The Island Anthology whilst her earlier work as a folk/pop singer is captured on The Very Best Of and Greatest Hits.
It shouldn't work! Marianne Faithfull in a Cathedral! It shouldn't work, but it does...it works like nothing I've ever encountered before! The ireverence is reverential....it shocks, at first, but said shock becomes something quite beautiful....words fail me here....it is so powerful, vibrant...a 'blowsy' prayer of an evening that delighted me beyond any, and all, expectation.
How I would have loved to have been at that performance! In truth, I don't envy much in life, but I've had given (albeit in retrospect)much to have witnessed this almost mystical delight....not an 'airy-fairy' mysticism either...but a full-blooded, 'got you by the throat' and 'no-holds-barred' piece of sheer magic!
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