"It's been a hard year for us Capricorns," says Marianne Faithfull, introducing a cover of Harry Nilsson's Don't Forget Me. "But we'll be back, stronger than ever." She's weathered worse, though recent months have not been kind. Ill health forced her to postpone a European tour last December. Then film-maker Duncan Roy announced that Faithfull had stepped down from his screen version of The Picture of Dorian Gray because she had suffered a heart attack. Faithfull rushed a denial into print: "These horrible rumours are completely untrue - I haven't had a heart attack, not even a slight one." All of this is presumably a cakewalk compared to living on a wall in Soho as a state-registered heroin addict or having the world believe, erroneously, that you got up to some nefarious business with Mick Jagger and a Mars bar.
Signs of infirmity are thin on the ground tonight, unless you count a box of tissues on a table next to Faithfull's microphone. Rumours that she has given up smoking are clearly false: a combination of burning fag and actressy gesticulation during the closing Broken English means she nearly vanishes in a cloud of smoke and ash.
Her voice sounds like a chilling death rattle - bleakly husky, somewhere in the general area of the tune - but it sounded that way long before her recent travails. It is not the most versatile instrument, which may account for the variable quality of her output in the 25 years since her bruised and bruising masterpiece Broken English. Faithfull is constantly in search of a suitable setting. In recent years, she has been assisted by a variety of younger musicians, lured, as she freely admits, by the mythology that surrounds her. Beck got her to rap - not one of his brighter ideas - while Blur constructed the serpentine, African-influenced rumble of 2002's Kissin' Time. On record it sounded insouciant and darkly sexy, but tonight it takes on a different power: enunciating every syllable, Faithfull sounds positively fearsome.
She works better on stage than in the studio. Cherry-picking the highlights from Broken English onwards - As Tears Go By and Sister Morphine are the only concessions to her 1960s oeuvre - her material seems more unified. Her take on John Lennon's Working Class Hero, an odd song for someone of aristocratic stock to interpret, is weirdly stirring; the songs Nick Cave and PJ Harvey wrote for latest album Before the Poison bleakly potent. Best of all is Roger Waters' remarkably bitter Incarceration of a Flower Child.
Like the younger artists, some of the audience are surely here for the myth rather than the music, as Faithfull seems abundantly aware. She is fantastically good at the grande dame stuff: she imperiously tosses her hair, schoolmarmishly berates the pronunciation of a lone heckler and, during instrumental passages, retreats to the rear of the stage and sits, wearing an inscrutable expression. "I know it's a long show," she says, towards the end of her two hours on stage, "but it's been a long life."
· At Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on October 21. Box office: 028-9033 4455.
