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“I keep in contact with a lot of old friends but I have a lot of new friends too. “We went through an extraordinary experience together, and because of that we have a bond,” she says. They did destroy Brian [Jones, the Stones' drummer who drowned in his swimming pool], though, which was dreadful.”These days she doesn’t see Jagger and Richards much but she still regards them as close friends. They didn’t manage to destroy Mick and Keith and, though I f was the most vulnerable, they didn’t manage to get me. Although Jagger chivalrously took the rap for Faithfull’s stash, the fact that she was found covered in nothing but a fur rug was leaked to the papers, along with a bogus story about a certain bar of chocolate.The memory still stings: “Well, it was just too ridiculous,” she hisses. Did I really do that? Did I think that? Did I actually say that?” So why put yourself through it, I ask? “The money, mostly,” she sighs. “But I also wrote it to put it all from my point of view, to show what I remember and how I saw it and to draw a line under it all.

Finish! Fini! I think I was very angry, just because of all the misconceptions and all the bullshit In the end it was rather positive It gave me a sense of perspective. It was like I’d been carrying around these heavy cases for a long, long way and I put them down at the station and I walked off.”A large chunk of the book is inevitably taken up with Jagger, whom she describes upon first meeting him as “a cheeky little yob”, and the establishment’s distrust of the Rolling Stones which culminated in the notorious Redlands drugs bust. When, a few weeks later, Faithfull announced that their romance had no future, he threw himself out of a 36th-floor window. The shock of his death finally persuaded her to get clean for good.That 1994 autobiography, an exhaustive trawl through her darkest decades which both dispelled the myths and reinforced the legend, broke a long silence Writing it, she says, was “awful, a nightmare Going over the things one did again and again. There she passed out at the table, falling face-down into a bowl of soup A few months later they went their separate ways. By 1971 Jagger had married the Nicaraguan model Bianca Perez Moreno de Macias and Faithfull had lost custody of Nicholas and was living as a homeless addict on the streets of Soho.Throughout the latter half of the 1970s and 1980s, Faithull made the occasional album – among them the querulous 1979 classic Broken English – and took small roles in a series of unexceptional films. By the mid-1980s, she’d failed to kick her habit and was sent to a clinic in Minneapolis where she started an affair with a fellow junkie named Howard.

For years they were pop’s golden couple, though by the end of the decade their relationship had turned irretrievably sour.In 1969, Faithfull lost the baby they had conceived together, seven months into the pregnancy; not long after, she took an overdose and spent six days in a coma. Within a few weeks Faithfull was in the studio recording her first hit, “As Tears Go By”, written for her, at Oldham’s behest, by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. More hits followed, including “Come and Stay with Me” and “This Little Bird”, along with a series of tours with the Kinks, Gene Pitney and Gerry and the Pacemakers. Although she married the artist John Dunbar and had a son with him, named Nicholas, she soon started a passionate but ultimately destructive affair with Mick Jagger. On one occasion Jagger, who had by this time developed an unhealthy fascination with the aristocracy, took her to a dinner party given by the Earl of Warwick at his castle. Their relationship limped on for another year, during which time she got deeper into heroin. The fact that I might have a personality of my own seems to be neither here nor there.”The myth began in March 1964 when, aged 17, Marianne went to a party given by the singer Adrienne Posta.

There the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham famously looked across the room and saw “an angel with big tits”. Where once upon a time Faithfull was touchy about being quizzed about her past, now she is remarkably candid, and clearly revels in her status as rock’s primary horizontale (along with bedding three-fifths of the Stones, she also seduced Gene Pitney, Jimi Hendrix, Chris Blackwell and David and Angie Bowie She did, however, turn down Bob Dylan). Her anecdotes – of which there are so many – are punctuated by loud guffaws that are so rasping you don’t know whether to laugh along or call an ambulance. Yet there is a certain detachment in the way that she looks back at her life. One gets a sense of a woman removed from herself, as if looking at her life through a pane of glass.Her hot-head reputation is, she tells me, something that she’s stuck with. One of the reasons she agreed to the press conference was to convince the San Francisco literati that “she’s not bloody Hydra”. After getting a particularly vicious pasting in a Sunday newspaper a few years ago, she put herself through her own media-training course which involved repeated screenings of Fellini’s film about the paparazzi, La Dolce Vita The problem seems to be about expectations.