When a 52-year-old rock chick in battered leathers gets up on stage to belt out an Elton John number, you'd expect there to be a stampede to the bar. But this song, For Wanting You, has been especially written for the singer, and the singer herself is a woman who defined sixties rebellion and remains an icon for every new generation of disaffected youth. True, the bar is likely to remain four deep, but there will be many there who, hearing a voice like rain on gravel, will shed a vodka-scented tear for those swinging days of yore.

Marianne Faithfull has that effect on people. Today she is as vibrant and in-your-face as in those heady yesterdays. In fact, the older she grows, the stronger and more eclectic becomes her music.

''I look forward to getting old,'' she says, ''because it's infinitely preferable to croaking it.''

Twas not always thus. There was a long, long time in Faithfull's life when her existence could have been neatly summed up by her throwaway comment on an early edition of Auntie Beeb's Juke Box Jury: ''I'd like it at a party if I was stoned.''

Liking it came easy, for she was the original wild child, the rocker who lived the life of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll long before the cliche, causing the upper lip of the establishment to quiver in indignation and not a little in excitement.

Born the daughter of a baroness in 1946, she was educated in convent schools. However, the backlash against authority was not slow in coming. Aged 17, she was taken to a London party by her boyfriend, artist John Dunbar, and there a chance meeting with Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager of The Rolling Stones, was to kick-start her dalliance on the dark side of the musical street.

Described by Oldham as ''an angel with big breasts'', she was thrust into the spotlight a year later with the

chart-busting first single As Tears Go By, a ballad written for her by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Another best seller Come And Stay With Me confirmed her status as bona fide star, but it was candid statements on her liking for sex and drugs which really made her the darling of the tabloids and the thorn in the Moral Minority's side.

Although she married Dunbar and bore him a son, Nicholas, it was Jagger who became her constant bedfellow, wooing her with lippy chat-up lines such as Let's Spend The Night Together.

But Jagger wasn't the only rocker to roll. Step aside All Spices, because Miss Marianne Faithfull was striding ahead with her very own firebrand of girl power long before anyone else was even thinking about the possibility of getting what they really really wanted. Brian Jones, Keith Richards, even Gene Pitney . . . many found a little shelter.

Dabbling also led Faithfull into the movies. Her acting career began auspiciously, co-starring alongside Glenda Jackson in Chekhov's Three Sisters at London's Theatre Royal. Her major contribution to celluloid was less than critically acclaimed. However, Girl On A Motorcycle, in which she played a saddle-friendly biker in zippered leather jump suit, has since become cult trash viewing.

If her career was warming up, this embrace of the darker sides of life proved fiery for her personal life. She confesses: ''All the children today think how wonderful it was in the sixties. Well it was for everyone else, except me.''

The first sign of her spiral into hell came in 1967 with that now infamous drugs bust at Keith Richard's House in Sussex. Although tales of Mars confectionery are no more than sweet nothings, the truth is that Faithfull was found wrapped for work, rest, and play in nothing more than a fur rug. Unlike the boys, she was not charged with drugs offences, but she did sink deeper and deeper into heroin addiction. Her singing career waned as her habit waxed and, in 1969, while on the set of Ned Kelly in Australia, she attempted suicide.

It was the beginning of nearly the end. Not only did she lose her relationship with Jagger but custody of her son. Her lowest point came when she was forced on to the streets of Soho, begging for her next fix.

That she survived is amazing. That she fought back over the years and tears and reclaimed her crown is miraculous.

The energy she used to kick against the system was brought to bear on her own addictions, and, in 1979, her album Broken English presented a new voice, now resonant with insight and barely restrained emotion.

Faithfull was born again to the critics and by the late eighties she was clearer, stronger and in control of her demons, making them work in her lyrics rather than in her veins. Finally, she had emerged from the hell of her own making. ''My own reputation,'' she notes, ''is the obstacle I've had to overcome in my life.''

She certainly has come a long way, baby. When she appears on Monday at The Queen's Hall in Edinburgh - her only Scottish appearance to promote her new album, Vagabond Ways - she does so as a fiery meteor that has transformed itself into a guiding star, with her words of enlightenment sought by the new troubled young guns, singers and models such as Courtney Love, Sinead O'Connor, and Kate Moss.

Now settled in Dublin, her adventures are in music, with an indulgent fascination with Kurt Weill and the new album boasting tracks by celebrated authors, but all spoken with an unmistakable autobiographical voice. The girl on the motorcycle may not raise hell for leather any more, but there's plenty of vroom in her throttle.

l Marianne Faithfull plays the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, on Monday at 7.30pm.

Box office: 0131 668 2019

Turbulent history of a wild child who grew up

June 1964: Taken, aged 17, to a London party by artist boyfriend John Dunbar and introduced to The Rolling Stones manager, Andrew Oldham

September 1964: Signed by Oldham to Decca, her debut single charts in UK at No 9

May 1965: Marries Dunbar, splits from Oldham

November 1965: Gives birth to son, Nicholas

February 1966: Separates from Dunbar, hooks up with Mick Jagger

February 1967: That drugs bust, when she is found in a fug in a rug at Keith Richard's house

April 1967: Begins acting career in Chekhov's Three Sisters at London's Royal Court

May 1968: Co-stars with Alain Delon in the wonderfully trashy movie Girl On A Motorcycle

November 1968: Miscarries the baby she is expecting by Mick Jagger

May 1969: Faithfull and Jagger are arrested on charges of marijuana possession

July 1969: Tries to commit suicide, hospitalised

January 1970: Officially divorced from Dunbar

January 1979: Marries bass player Ben Brierly

November 1979: Arrested at Oslo airport on charges of marijuana possession

1988: Marries writer Giorgio Della Terza

1988: Deported by immigration authorities from US, she relocates to Eire, where she finally settles

. . . to this day: Rocks out and lives to tell

the tale