Marianne Faithful, 74, reveals she STILL suffers from long-covid after cutting podcast short

Marianne Faithful has admitted she is still suffering from long-covid, 15 months after first falling victim to coronavirus.

The music icon, 74, was forced to cut short a recent podcast interview, complaining of fatigue and memory loss, after just a 23-minute chat.

She was speaking to Pink Floyd session bassist Guy Pratt for the Rockonteurs podcast, when she found herself struggling to remember someone’s name.

Still suffering: Marianne Faithful has admitted she still has long-covid, 15 months after first falling victim to coronavirus

Marianne invited Guy – a long-term pal – into her home to record the session. He had taken a lateral flow test and Marianne has received both her vaccine jabs.

She began to get tired 20 minutes into the chat, however, when trying to recall the name of someone who helped raised her in the 1940s, when she was brought up in a commune.

‘I can’t do much more – I can’t go on!’ she is reported to have said.

‘It’s my throat, my lungs – since covid. One of the bad things that happened after covid is my lungs, my memory, my tiredness,’ she explained. ‘These are the three things that really affect me and it’s an awful drag.’ 

She was so ill with Covid-19 last April that her ex-husband said she was ‘barely able to speak’ and her doctors even recommended ‘palliative care only.’

But Marianne is trying to power on regardless, releasing a new solo album – her 21st – in April, one year after being sick.

In a recent interview with The Guardian in support of the new record, the As Tears Go By rocker reflected on her health journey and the lasting affects the coronavirus has had on her.

‘I may not be able to sing ever again,’ Faithfull told the publication. ‘Maybe that’s over. I would be incredibly upset if that was the case, but, on the other hand, I am 74.

‘I don’t feel cursed and I don’t feel invincible,’ she continued. ‘I just feel f**king human. But what I do believe in, which gives me hope, I do believe in miracles.’  

Marianne went on to say that one of her primary doctors during her Covid battle last spring said that ‘she didn’t think my lungs would ever recover.

‘And where I finally ended up is: OK, maybe they won’t, but maybe, by a miracle, they will. I don’t know why I believe in miracles. I just do. Maybe I have to, the journey I’ve been on, the things that I’ve put myself through, that I’ve got through so far and I’m OK.’ 

Recently Marianne reflected on her health journey and the lasting affects the coronavirus has had on her: ‘I may not be able to sing ever again’; seen here onstage in 2011

And Faithfull has indeed been through a lot in her nearly 60-year career, which has led to romantic tanglings with the likes of Mick Jagger, as well as bouts of drug addiction, bulimia, suicide attempts, homelessness, breast cancer, hepatitis C, emphysema and most recently, a broken hip that became infected after surgery in 2014.

This, plus the fact that Marianne was a longtime smoker before contracting the novel coronavirus. 

‘I wish I’d never picked up a cigarette in my life,’ she reflected.