Wild horses couldn’t drag me away” is a lyric that has survived 40 years and will doubtless survive many more. There can scarcely be a music lover anywhere who is unfamiliar with the Rolling Stones’ chorus. But most of those who sing along will be oblivious to the phrase’s origin.

It came courtesy of a drugs binge/suicide attempt, during which Marianne Faithfull is said to have swallowed 150 barbiturates before slipping into a six-day coma. On waking in a Sydney hospital, she uttered the timeless phrase about wild horses not being able to drag her away.

Of such stuff rock’n’roll legends are born. In Faithfull’s case the story is true, unlike the scurrilously apocryphal tale of her sexual abuse of a Mars bar at a drugs party in Keith Richards’s country house in the 1960s. Faithfull, according to one police officer, let her fur coat slip off to reveal she was naked. The allegation that she was performing an intimate act with a Mars bar was put about by a vindictive colleague, she says.

Whether the wild horses were a metaphor for her drug addiction or her love for Mick Jagger is unclear, but in any assessment of Faithfull’s life and career, drugs and Jagger remain the defining motifs.

She once gave him a book — The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — which inspired the classic Sympathy for the Devil. In many ways that song title is a neat synopsis of the public’s fascination with Faithfull. Beautiful and talented, it was her devilish flaws, the bacchanalian love of drugs and sex, that endeared us to her.

On Thursday her agent revealed she has breast cancer. She turns 60 in December, but is determined to carry on touring next year. In the myriad news stories reporting the diagnosis, the fact that she still makes a living as a singer shocks more than the tales of her past excess.

Many people can remember her first big hit in 1964 — As Tears Go By penned by Jagger and Richards — but who can remember her last?

She will never be as famous for her strengths as for her weaknesses. She has lived in Ireland since 1990, where she enjoys tax-free earnings on her 20 mostly forgettable albums while escaping the attention of the British paparazzi. But she will spend most of her recuperation in Paris, where she has a home in the upmarket 1st arrondissement.

Her links to Ireland go back to the 1960s, when she spent time with Jagger in his country home. It was there, in 1968, that she miscarried their daughter almost eight months into the pregnancy.

The child was to be called Corrina and the loss left Faithfull permanently scarred. She slumped into depression and her drug use spiralled so far out of control that Jagger threatened to leave her unless she got help.

Faithfull can have few complaints that drugs and sex define her. This, after all, is a woman who publicly regrets not having slept with Bob Dylan when she was heavily pregnant with her first husband’s child. She was 18 at the time and already embarked on the shortest of her three marriages.

The first marriage fell at the first hurdle — Jagger — though in truth it could have been any of the Stones. She bedded three of them and admits to sleeping her way through the 1960s. Afterwards, Faithfull said she’d actually preferred Richards and regretted that her relationship with the guitarist was restricted to a one-night stand. She only started dating Jagger, she said, because Richards told her to.

“It was Keith’s idea that I go with Mick,” she said. “He thought it would be good for the band. And instead of saying, ‘But I love you’, I said, ‘Okay’. I didn’t really love Mick when I was first with him, I was just obeying Keith.”

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