'Richards was intuitively sexy while Jagger had to work at it'

Excerpt from Marianne Faithfull interview: Yours Faithfully by Aidan Smith

None of the tracks on Easy Come Easy Go was written by Faithfull, now 62, but in all of them there are lines which beg questions of her, such is the potency of cheap music, and such has been the colour and chaos of her life. Richards has been her guitar-playing friend for 45 years, and when he accompanied her on this track, the ghosts threatened to crowd the pair out of the studio.

She says: "I don't see him very often because he lives in the Caymans in a place called Pirate – where else? – but when we get together it's just like it was yesterday and singing this song with him was very emotional. I was with him and Gram Parsons the first time I heard it, back in the Sixties."

Faithfull's life has necessitated at least two autobiographies, and both books have been acclaimed for evoking seminal Swinging Sixties moments such as the shooting of the film Performance with its "seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients" including rockers, gangsters, drugs and the threesome-obsessed Scottish director Donald Cammell. She memorably described Richards as "the lute player in the window", penning a love song to his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, the ex of Brian Jones, who had just slept with Mick Jagger, Faithfull's lover, while the latter was expecting the lead Strolling Bone's baby.

Richards, though, was the one Faithfull really lusted after. She's said before that Richards was intuitively sexy while Jagger had to work at it, learning from Keith, and she adds today: "Mick didn't learn enough from him. He wasn't natural like Keith. Keith was so good-looking – they both were – but Keith loved women and didn't have to think about it and he's still like that. We had one night together, that was all. Great sex, fabulous sex." The best? "I can't say, that would be unkind."

Faithfull's life was pretty amazing before any of this. Her mother went from baroness (Austro-Hungarian) to Berlin showgirl to bus conductor, the latter after splitting from Faithfull's father, a wartime spy whose own dad invented a sexual contraption called the Frigidity Machine. Back on her mum's side, a great-uncle wrote the book which minted the term masochism, and Faithfull experienced the extremes of a commune and a convent before this wannabe beatnik caught the bus from sleepy Reading to sleep-around London, capital of the free love universe, where she entranced Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham who famously gasped: "I have seen an angel – an angel with big tits."