Marianne Faithfull releases new album but was sure she'd have 'croaked it' before now
By Nina Nannar: ITV News correspondent
The woman who for many embodied the 60s is now in her 60s and no one is more amazed than her that she has emerged from that decade of excess to still be making music today.
"I thought I I'd have croaked it before now," she says.
Marianne Faithfull is walking with a stick when we meet - she fell down on holiday and broke her hip.
The woman whose well-documented drug addictions would see her living as a junkie on the streets is avoiding painkillers - they don't agree with her, she says.
It is 50 years since Faithfull, then a 17-year-old hanging out in London, went to a party and was spotted by The Rolling Stone's Manager Andrew Loog Oldham who promised to make her a star.
Her first single "As Tears Go By", co-written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, came out shortly afterwards and her journey began.
What would she have done at that party I wondered, if she had known everything that was going to follow. "I'd have run!" she said.
Faithfull's new album is called Give My Love to London, but it is a long time since she has lived there.
She gained notoriety as Mick Jagger's girlfriend, as the mystery woman wrapped in a fur rug who was present when the police raided Richards' home and arrested him and Jagger for drug offences.
She and Jagger, the 60s "It" couple, were together for four years.
After they split, her descent into drug addiction took her to life on the streets.
She was, she tells me, "a broken doll...thrown in the gutter".
She has no regrets but says trying to break into the pop industry now would be impossible for her.
The industry is youth and sex obsessed she says, bemoaning the likes of Miley Cyrus and Rihanna, who regularly strip down for pop videos.
She doesn't understand, she says, why they would be "so desperate to make it that they make fools of themselves like that".
But misogyny like in the 60s, she feels, is still prevalent in the music industry, inequality still rife.
And then, as now, she muses, men always come out of it much better than women.
Marianne Faithfull does not hold back on her opinions. We do not respect old people in this country, not like in France she says; the French love older women, she adds.
Faithfull now lives in Paris and Dublin.
She will be back on stage in the coming weeks - the one-time 60s wildchild no longer drinks or smokes.
After decades of two packets of cigarettes a day, her doctor warned her to give up.
She's on the e-cigarettes now - so that smoky picture of her new album cover is of her face obscured by vapour.
Still on her new album, out next week, you can hear it in her voice - a growly, deep world away from the sweet voice of a teenage singing "As Tears Go By" 50 years ago and unaware of the dramatic, exciting, and at times desperate path she was embarking on.