I was never that crazy about ‘As Tears Go By.’ God knows how Mick and Keith wrote it or where it came from. It’s a great fusion of dissimilar ingredients: ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to the tune of ‘These Foolish Things.’ The image that comes to mind for me is the Lady of Shalott looking into the mirror and watching life go by. It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written. A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song….
‘As Tears Go By’ was a marketable portrait of me and as such is an extremely ingenious creation, a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons. It did such a good job of imprinting that it was to become, alas, an indelible part of my media-conjured self for the next fifteen years.
"Marianne Faithfull (via tylercoates)
i can’t think of “Lady of Shalott” without going to Anne of Green Gables.
