Marianne Faithfull made a comeback, a generation after she came to fame in the Sixties, with the powerful Broken English.

I can’t think of a more appropriate time to post this song than today, at the end of a week with the world once again on the brink of war.

It’s one of a handful of songs that reduces me tears every time I hear it. Whenever I see Derek Jarman’s video I become a blubbering wreck.

The perfect foil for Faithfull’s equallyl powerful lyrics, it uses documentary footage to articulate how easily patriotism and populism can be warped by nationalism and turn into fascism.

Jarman conflates footage of Hitler at Nazi rallies with contemporary film of the hateful far-right National Front, who were all too active at this time, just after I had moved to London in the late Seventies.

When Broken English came out in late 1979, Marianne Faithfull was something of a forgotten figure. A legendary name from the Sixties, she was a famous beauty best known for her love affairs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, a drug habit and a fleeting pop career.

Yet she had amassed a huge body of work since her debut single, a simple folky version of As Tears Go By that was a hit in 1965 – a year before the Stones recorded it themselves. Perhaps her beauty, and her famous friends, blinded audiences to her talent.

Broken English was Marianne’s seventh album, though the first five came in a two-year period after that debut single, and the previous one had been a country-and-western affair that failed to generate any interest.

This one was clearly influenced by the recent advent of punk, embracing the emerging electronic aspects of the New Wave with its hypnotic synthesiser beat and waves of abrasive guitar. It revived her career.

The fact that Faithfull’s once sweet voice had become a croaky rasp, ravaged by cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and severe laryngitis – and hardly helped by years of anorexia, addiction and homelessness on the streets of Soho – only enhanced the emotional power of the songs.

Especially this one.