They were relegated without Lawâs goal adding salt to the wound.
To be fair to him he just shrugged his shoulders and trotted to the sideline.
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He will be holding that record for a long time
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I have a memory of seeing it on the telly which must have meant Rte carried MOTD/The Big Match at least on that night.
His last touch of a ball in the football league.
RIP Denis Law.
Sad to lose a City legend. Great he lived to see them top dogs in Manchester again though.
God rest him.
Still joint top scorer for Scotland?
Denis Law was playing golf the day England won the World Cup. Somebody came out to him on the course to tell him England had won.
âAcchhh, they would, wouldnât theyâ, grunted Law.
In fifth year in school there was a discussion on irony and what it meant. Pupils in this English class were asked for a definition of irony.
I immediately responded âWhen Manchester United were relegated, the goal that put them down was a backheel by Denis Law playing for Manchester City against Manchester United at Old Trafford. Thatâs irony. And itâs a better example than anything Alanis Morissette ever came up with.â
It was an ordinary level English class, which I found myself in because when I was 17 I rejected intellectualism.
Nobody laughed.
Denis Law was the pioneer of the non-celebration of a goal against your former team.
Denis Law was ITVâs studio analyst (at the ITV studio in Dallas with presenter Matthew Lorenzo) for Ireland v Italy 1994.
Denis seemed very upbeat about Irelandâs prospects, and emotionally invested on a pan-Celtic level.
Denis was Denis, not Dennis. Others can judge the worth of the other prominent Denis to play for Manchester United.
This Denis was a football legend.
RIP.
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The original king before Cantona
Paddy Cole RIP
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Marianne Faithfull.
To the Faithfull departed.
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Read that as Marouanne Fellaini
Check your retinas
I donât know a lot of Mariannes and Marian Finucane is gone so I panicked for the big guy.
So long
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RIP
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One of the greatest of all songs and performances.
In my top5 most played every year
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How many of the Stones did she sleep with?
An absolute A grade, Platinum celebrity. What a life she led.
Marianne Faithfull, star of the Sixties with big natural talent and a self-destructive streak
âYou wanted to seduce her, to protect her⊠She was everything you could want in a woman that you couldnât possibly haveâ
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30 January 2025 6:53pm GMT
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Marianne Faithfull on the set of The Girl on a Motorcycle Credit: Getty
Marianne Faithfull, the actress and singer who has died aged 78, was one of the most beautiful and resilient guests to have attended the long drugs-and-alcohol party of the 1960s.
A blonde-haired, blue-eyed convent girl with aristocratic forebears and a heart awash with romantic decadence, Marianne Faithfull was just 17 when she went to London and took her place among the ranks of Rolling Stones groupies. Her remarkable looks soon earned her promotion to protégée.
âYou wanted to seduce her, to protect her, and you knew you couldnât do any of these things,â recalled her one-time manager Tony Calder. âShe was everything you could want in a woman that you couldnât possibly have.â
In 1964 Marianne Faithfull became a star overnight with the release of As Tears Go By, a ballad written for her by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. She subsequently had some success as an actress, appearing at the Royal Court, and made a handful of films, including Hamlet, in which she was a diaphanous Ophelia, and The Girl on a Motorcycle, a fetishistic slice of soft porn in which she donned black leather and simulated a high-speed orgasm before catapulting to her death.
She had great natural talent. But Marianne Faithfull seemed as much preoccupied with a personal quest for self-obliteration as professional success. âDeath is the next great adventure,â she announced blithely. Using a series of destructive relationships as greasy poles, she slid down to explore the underbelly of life. There were drugs galore and plenty of sex â straight, lesbian, troilism â but little affection.
âJust to admit I loved anyone was kind of awful,â she said. âI always pretend I have no feelings. I was on a mission.â
She had a four-year relationship with Mick Jagger, but also had affairs with Keith Richards and Brian Jones. She noted that Jagger was tight-fisted and self-obsessed, and, in her opinion, was in thrall to his repressed longing for Richards.
She described a night with Mick in which they made love while Jagger fantasised about Richards, who lay on the other side of a thin partition wall.
Marianne Faithfull, boarding a train for Bangor, North Wales, with Mick Jagger to attend a Love Pilgrimage with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1976 Credit: Bettmann
Eventually, her drug habits would conflict with Jaggerâs infatuation for âany silly thing with a title and a castleâ. The crunch came when the couple were dining with the Earl of Warwick and she passed out in the soup. Though she once described Jagger as âa vampire, a hollow, voracious entity,â she remained fond of him. âPeople have said such awful things about Mick,â she observed.
She also had a close encounter with Bob Dylan â âa really cool guy on lots of methedrineâ â in a suite full of âhipsters, hustlers and pop starsâ at the Savoy Hotel in 1965. Dylan sat in the middle of the carnage, typing songs on lavatory paper. âEvery five minutes someone would go into the bathroom and come out speaking in tongues,â she recalled. When Dylan made a pass, she was so terrified she rejected him and was thrown out.
Another fixation was the homosexual poet-apologist for heroin, William Burroughs. In the 1960s Marianne Faithfull could not get his attention, no matter what she tried. âHe couldnât see the point of me,â she recalled. Only after she had been through the heroin nightmare to which she was partly inspired by reading his works did he tell her that she was, after all, a âgreat artistâ.
In 1967 she endured public humiliation after a police raid on the home of Keith Richards. In rumours leaked to the press, it was alleged that she had been found naked, wrapped in a carpet with a Mars Bar inserted into her person. None of this was true, and she felt that she had been the victim of a fantasist in the ranks of the police.
When in 1969 she recorded a single, Something Better, her record company withdrew it, horrified by its B-side Sister Morphine, a depiction of drug addiction evidently written by someone with experience. When the Rolling Stones recorded it in 1971 they removed her name from the credits, seemingly because any money she earned would be spent on drugs (they eventually reinstated her name in the 1990s).
The Mars Bar story had a dire effect on her self-esteem and hastened her decline. In 1969 Brian Jones drowned in the swimming pool of his Sussex home (the house where AA Milne had written Winnie-the-Pooh). Two weeks later, in Australia, Marianne Faithfull had a breakdown.
Having gone to bed after taking 15 sleeping tablets, she woke up with an âidentity crisisâ and went to the mirror to see who she was. When a vision of Jones appeared in the glass, she reasoned that if she were he, and he was dead, she should be dead also. She took another handful of pills and went into a coma that lasted six days. Her then manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, issued a greatest hits album decorated in funereal black.
Marianne Faithfull in Battersea Park, 1965 Credit: Tony Frank
Years of addiction followed. So slight were considered her chances of survival that The Daily Telegraph first prepared her obituary when she was 26. The publication of an unauthorised biography was, she claimed, held over in anticipation of her impending death.
She made the occasional record. Gradually her voice changed, losing its daffy sweetness and gaining a coating of tarmac. She, also, was growing a thick skin. In 1979 a comeback album, Broken English, was a revelation. Painful, angry and moving, it made her an icon of the punk generation. Marianne Faithfull blew her royalties on cocaine and clothes and was eventually shipped off to a rehabilitation clinic by her record company.
Stripped of the props of alcohol and drugs, she saw herself as she had become: âa ruinâ, albeit a grand one. But she had at last fulfilled her mission, explored the lower depths, and survived. Before she had the looks, but nothing to say for herself. Now she had lost her looks but had a wealth of hard-won knowledge about sexual jealousy and human depredation.
After Marianne Faithfull had dried out, she made Strange Weather, a collection of cover versions of classic songs which showed off her extraordinary sad, gravel rasp. Included on the album was a version of As Tears Go By. Twenty years on, the whimsical hit of her youth had become a song of bitter experience and a tribute to her own remarkable powers of survival.
Marian Evelyn Faithfull was born on December 29 1946. Her father, a British Army officer, was the son of a sexologist and founded a utopian college âfor intensive social researchâ. Her mother was the great-niece of Leopold, Baron von Sacher-Masoch, the author of Venus in Furs, who gave the world the term âmasochismâ.
When Marianne was six her parents separated, and she grew up with her mother in a terraced house in Reading. Though neither parent was a Roman Catholic, she was sent to a Catholic convent, where she read Huysmans, Genet and Baudelaire disguised within a brown wrapping paper on which was written âThe Imitation of Christâ.
She liked talking. She married her first husband, the art dealer John Dunbar, after he lectured her on Huysmanâs Ă Rebours (they divorced after a year), and her first night with Jagger was preceded by a discussion about the Holy Grail.
âThatâs how we were then,â she recalled. âYou would ask your date: âDo you know Genet? Have you read Les Fleurs du Mal?â and if he said âYesâ, youâd screw.â
Alain Delon, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger Credit: Patrice Habans/Paris Match via Getty Images
It was at a party given by the Rolling Stones in 1964 that she was spotted by the Stonesâ manager, Loog Oldham. She was then, as she told Paul McCartney, keen to âexperience anything and everythingâ. âEverythingâ included men. When she told a friend that she was visiting Berlin, he remarked that she should feel at home there, since both she and the city had been occupied by armies. âI thought it was a bit unfair,â she said. âIt ought to have been a platoon in my case.â
High as a kite, Marianne Faithfull wandered through the 1960s. She was denounced by the Vatican as a witch and had prayers said for her by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
She recalled how she packed her bag for a trip to Tangier while under the influence of LSD. At customs, it was found to contain an Indian sari, a picture book and an assortment of sea-shells. âIt seemed logical at the time I packed,â she said.
Less innocent was the human debris the Rolling Stones left in their wake. She recalled a party at which Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg roared with laughter at the sight of Jonesâs abandoned wife and son standing in the street, begging for money. âI was appalled when I saw it happening,â she said. âThey were a tough lot those boys, but I didnât leave.â
When she was not stoned, the round of parties, sex and shopping was stifling and dull. She divorced Dunbar, losing custody of their son, became pregnant by Jagger, but miscarried. Jagger was by that time having an affair with Anita Pallenberg.
One day she walked out of Jaggerâs house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and took to a life of squats, drunkenness and heroin in Soho. For a while, she was anonymous; nobody took any notice of her when they found her in a gutter, and it was widely assumed that she would die sooner rather than later. Her veins were pockmarked from needles; the drugs rotted her teeth. Her looks faded. She was not sorry. âThey attracted the wrong element,â she said.
After her rehabilitation she continued to drink and chain-smoke. She released further albums and a candid autobiography, Faithfull, notably devoid of repentance or self-pity. Her ravaged voice proved particularly effective on Kurt Weill songs, and her cabaret appearances were sell-outs. She also appeared in the film Shopping.
She became, in her own words, âThe Queen of Bohemiaâ. Certainly, she could be regal in her manner, but she had earned the right to be so. Her erratic temper was part natural temperament, part the effect on her blood sugar of years of drug abuse; if she did not eat she became very ratty.
For some years she lived in Ireland, at Shell Cottage on Carton Demesne, an estate outside Dublin owned by the Guinness family. Among her close friends was the playwright Frank McGuinness and her cat McGuinness. She did not drink Guinness, but vodka, and would, given the chance, have lived off caviar and lemon tart. She was dilatory about paying bills and from time to time her telephone was cut off.
Marianne Faithfull said that she liked living alone; that she could have men by the âplaneloadâ if she desired. But she became rather nervous of relationships; it was that âsexual thingâ that was the problem. Shell Cottage finally proved too depressing in the winter and she moved back to Dublin, later living in Paris with her manager, François Ravard.
Marianne Faithfull: enjoyed recording success later in life Credit: Jean Baptiste Mondino
In the new millennium Marianne Faithfull released a number of well-received albums. Vagabond Ways (2000) included collaborations with Emmylou Harris and Roger Waters; Kissinâ Time (2002) had songs written with Jarvis Cocker, Dave Stewart and others; Before the Poison (2005) was largely a collaboration with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, with contributions from Damon Albarn and Jon Brion.
Other albums were Easy Come, Easy Go (2011), Horses and High Heels (2011), Give My Love to London (2014) and Negative Capability (2018), a collaboration with Warren Ellis described by one reviewer as âan extraordinary meditation on ageing, loneliness and lossâ.
She published two more volumes of autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections (2007) and Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record (2014). and appeared in a number of later films, including Sofia Coppolaâs Marie-Antoinette (2006), in which she played the Empress Maria-Theresa. She starred in Irina Palm (2007) as Maggie, a 60-year-old widow who becomes a âsex workerâ to pay for medical treatment for her ill grandson. For this role she was nominated for Best Actress by the European Film Academy, but lost out to Helen Mirren.
In April 2020 while recording She Walks in Beauty, she developed Covid-19 and spent three weeks in hospital. She needed intensive care and it was not expected to recover; when she looked at her medical notes later, she claimed to have read âpalliative care onlyâ. Yet she emerged to finish her album â in which she was heard reading work of the Romantic poets to backings provided by Warren Ellis, with contributions from Brian Eno and Nick Cave â albeit with some memory loss and with the after-effects of Covid on her lungs making it impossible for her to sing.
Marianne Faithfull was married and divorced three times, first to John Dunbar (1965-66), secondly to Ben Brierly, a musician (1979-1986),â and thirdly to Giorgio Della Terza (1988-1991).
She is survived by the son of her first marriage.
Marianne Faithfull, born December 29 1946, death announced January 30 2025â
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Some life