What the hell happened to bohemia? It took a hundred years for poets, painters and talented layabouts to create and just twenty years for slick pseudo-hipsters to fuck it all up. It’s the curse of hollow tinsel bohemia! Everybody’s cool and nobody knows what the hell it means. It’s just pret-a-porter bohemia…consumer cool…I was happier back in the old bohemia. Art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter too – more repressed! And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today. It was much smaller, much more authentic.
I need a time machine to take me back to when Caroline Blackwood was a dear friend – an inspiration, mentor and role model of the oddest sort. She defied reality, housekeeping and common sense with such hilarious results; but what really held her friends and lovers under her spell was her stinging wit and nihilistic take on life. Her novels are dark fables and her life was just as extravagant, magical and filled with black humour… she was clearly an instrument of the sacred god of chaos!
Then there was Henrietta Moraes – the epitome of that bohemian life that’s now gone. Her reckless intensity of spirit magnetically attracted people to her. Henrietta had friends from the gutter to the aristocracy whom she both terrorised and enchanted. I thought she was so beautiful – to the point where the Faerie Gypsy Queen in my song is Henrietta, stomping about with a stick. She was blessed with a thirst for ecstasy and oblivion, a bold eye for a promising sexual encounter and uncanny antennae for alcohol and drugs. She inhabited a sort of enchanted space where the oddest, most unlikely things happened. She was the perfect muse for Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon – who painted her many times. She’d often quote Francis Bacon. He was an incredibly important person in her life. She travelled on her own loopy groove, avoiding the straight world entirely. Henrietta was very kind to me when I needed someone to be kind to me. When I was really in a bad way and in deep shit on heroin, Hen would come over and look after me. She loved me.
Francis Bacon became an important person in my life too. Whenever I bumped into him, he treated me as a long-lost friend. I don’t know why- maybe he saw a kindred spirit? The people who crossed my path when I was a junkie were all gay men. I was really bad at being a junkie – It was a degrading experience – but apparently not degrading enough! The Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher explained to me that the problem with my life story becoming the basis for a feature film was that it wasn’t bad enough. I thought I’d degraded myself plenty, but apparently not. I guess I wasn’t thinking of the movie rights… take me back to the old bohemia!
© Marianne Faithfull 2024
