British singer and 60s icon Marianne Faithfull paid homage to the victims of last year’s Paris attacks in a concert at the Bataclan, singing a song she wrote about the tragedy.
“For me, this is an important concert, there are lots of things which I must mourn… through music and through words,” Faithfull, 69, clad all in black and supporting herself with a cane, told the crowd.
She kicked off the concert — held in the same venue where jihadists massacred 90 people in November 2015 — with “Tower of Song” by Leonard Cohen, who died this month.
The former wild child then launched into “They Come at Night”, which she wrote in her Paris apartment the day after the attacks, the lyrics denouncing those who wish to kill music and partying.
One of the rock’s great survivors, whose voice and body carry the scars of battling through cancer, heroin and alcohol addictions, Faithfull told media last month that she was not afraid to return to the site of the violence.
The singer who was Rolling Stone Mick Jagger’s one-time partner and muse and who lives between Paris and Ireland has said that writing the song for her adopted city was “the only thing I could do”.
Earlier this month rock star Sting reopened the Bataclan in a hugely symbolic show to mark the first anniversary of the series of assaults carried out by jihadists across Paris on November 13, 2015, in which 130 people died.
Scores of survivors attended that concert, with some saying being back in the newly revamped space acted as a form of catharsis.
