“Broken English” by Marianne Faithful

"Broken English" is the title track of Marianne Faithfull's seventh studio album, from 1979, and Island put it out as the record's second single in January 1980. Faithfull wrote it with Barry Reynolds, Joe Mavety, Steve York and Terry Stannard, and it's about terrorism, of all things for a pop single: she took her cue from Ulrike Meinhof, a co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, reportedly after a documentary on the group whose subtitle handed her the title.

Critics loved the new direction and the nerve of the subject. The charts in Britain and America wouldn't touch it, but Germany, New Zealand and Sweden let it into their top forty, and a reinvented Faithfull had arrived.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.