WOEBOT

I was delighted to discover I hadn't sold this in the great Middlebrow purge of 1996. Are there any other sixties icons who ended up making bona-fide Post-Punk records? I suppose McCartney's "Temporary Secretary" and Jagger's "She's The Boss" could plausibly be termed New Wave records, but they're very much of the chipper MTV-friendly variety. "Broken English" taps into precisely the same Cold War alienation and personal-as-political undercurrents that distinguish the tuffest work of This Heat and Gang of Four. Perhaps it was her marriage to Ben Brierly of crap punk group The Vibrators that keyed her into the zeitgeist? Though somehow that seems unlikely. Her cover version of "Working Class Hero" is surely her argument that these same strands were alive in the counter-culture.

Where did that voice emerge from? It wasn't simply procured by dragging herself through the gutters of Soho sleeping rough as a smack-head, it must have been there all along, hidden. I can't think of a better example of Barthes's "grain of voice"; this utterly distinctive heartless, art-less croak evokes a recognition in one that is beyond language. It's the undisguised sound of wantonness and perception in collision with fag damage (note the glowing ember on the sleeve).

They showed a documentary about Marianne on ITV the other night with her being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. There wasn't nearly enough archive footage, some (but not all) of the recent concert film was embarrassing, the pace dragged and poor old Melvyn looked somehow deflated. However Marianne was cool. She said quite a few striking things, notably about drugs and alcohol, and on stage when she got over the discomfort of being an old dame really burned brightly. Aged 19 I used to think the shots of the woman on the sleeve were of someone impossibly ancient, but in 1979 she was only 33. Is that young?