break
Click on the song titles above for lyrics and songwriting credits

Released in 1983, A Child’s Adventure, was described by Marianne as “my cry for help”, and it was symptomatic of her profound physical and spiritual malaise at that time. Nevertheless, for many it was deemed a more consistent and fully realised collection than its predecessor Dangerous Acquaintances. A Child’s Adventure contains a number of classic Marianne recordings, it opens with the classic ‘Times Square’ which would remain a staple of Marianne’s live set for the next 20 years. ‘Falling From Grace’ a co-write with Ben Brierley came out of the Redlands drug bust and “everything that had happened to me. It’s a song of shame about it – it was a terrible experience”. The album’s lead single ‘Running For Our Lives’ “was very typical of my state at the time, as if life were some endless escape”. It’s pervading sense of hopelessness is partly masked by the jaunty production, but its message was clear: “I was now running from everything; from success, from myself”.

The album closes with ‘She’s Got A Problem’, “a devastating portrait of my self-destroying, errant self”, featuring lyrics by writer and friend Caroline Blackwood. Written in 1978, it wouldn’t have worked on either of Marianne’s previous two albums, but it was the perfect conclusion to her Island Trilogy, which had begun with the raw opening statement of Broken English, and moved through the thoughtful pop experiment of Dangerous Acquaintances to culminate in the singular, confident sound of A Child’s Adventure. Despite these achievements, the following year Marianne hit rock bottom and in 1985 she entered recovery, where slowly she readied herself for the next quantum leap.