Marianne Faithfull”Broken English” (1979) Island* Times Line(tm):...

Marianne Faithfull

“Broken English” (1979)

Island

* Times Line(tm): 808-8463. To hear an excerpt from “Broken English,” call TimesLine and press * 5541

Back in the late 1960s, heroin hooked Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend of the swinging London era, taking her down hard.

It wasn’t until the late ‘70s that she re-emerged, and this album is both her own soaring punk anthem and her musical Phoenix. (This past year she again rose from the ashes, with a film, “Moondance,” and an autobiography, “Faithfull.” Her new album, “A Secret Life,” is due out in March.)

All the punk-rock priestesses since then, from Liz Phair to Courtney Love, owe something to this woman’s tough swagger.

The record is a strange showcase: a sophisticated, gorgeous but ultra-harsh mix of what women might say if they had a microphone at their unedited mouths and what men could learn about what women think and feel, particularly when they’re not smiling. Definitely not for the squeamish.

The record opens with Faithfull’s witch-wasp voice gasping “Broken English”--a paean to emotional breakdown--and ends with a voracious, difficult but beautiful song of strident sexual jealousy, “Why D’Ya Do It?” A wide emotional meter is spanned in between, with songs such as “Brain Drain,” “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” and an implacable cover of John Lennon’s barking testimony, “Working Class Hero.”

Having been hit hard through every cut, listeners might be left gasping for breath at the end, were it not for the irrefutable sincerity of it all. Faithfull conveys the disillusionments that reverberate so poignantly through a woman’s life, but without any victim reminiscing. And that’s no easy task.