On 4 October 2021, a sprightly Patti Smith—dressed in her customary attire: a white t-shirt with a black blazer, black trousers, and black boots—ambles onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall as if having stepped out into a Parisian street after having been holed up in a garret for months on end writing. [...] Anyone slightly conversant with Patti Smith knows that she speaks out on environmental and governmental issues and personal strife. This, along with her seer-like qualities, screams a prophetic bard. Oh, and that she can write—well. Thus perhaps Smith was always destined to recite “Piss Factory” at the Royal Albert Hall, complete with the tincture of her blue-collar, South Jersey accent emphasising how far she has come. And, even if not, it still worked and lost none of its vatic meaning. Yet this is in recent history, not half a century ago when a twenty-eight-year-old sinewy Smith entered Electric Lady Studios to record “Hey Joe” and ended up with a take of “Piss Factory.”

There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll see what I mean. For the best part of 50 years she’s been treated as though she’s a mystical object, a human convergence of ley lines, as much as a rock singer. [...] Her status as one of the progenitors of punk – and as a feminist hero – meant the crowd was startlingly varied in age, from teens to people as old as Smith herself (she’s 77), who were rapt and devoted. She remains charismatic – still in black jacket and jeans, as she has been for ever. Her voice was always idiosyncratic so age hasn’t affected it; she sang powerfully throughout. And she has not done the thing some older singers do, of surrounding herself with lots of musicians to bolster the sound.

There was a full moon out there somewhere, watching over us at Somerset House as the Patti Smith Quartet concluded this year’s Summer Series. The moon has been an enduring symbol in Patti’s world, with her career and personal life shifting like its powerful phases, so the July Buck Moon (and all the spiritual symbolism it holds) solidified an idyllic Patti Smith Quartet set. Opening with a rapturous rendition of ‘Summer Cannibals’, Patti’s charisma was immediate and magnetic, raspy drawls flitting in the space. It felt as though little time had passed since she and Fred “Sonic” Smith first conceived the song.

At Brighton Dome, 25st June, four songs into her set, Patti Smith starts to cry: “First tears of the tour!” she sighs, wiping her eyes. [...] At 77, however, Smith remains a genuinely compelling performer. Music seems to have a transformative effect on her. Between songs she’s far goofier than her reputation as the epitome of New York punk cool suggests, but once her band kick into the Velvet Underground-ish chug of Nine or a surging version of Pissing in a River, she appears to be genuinely transported. She dances with an enviable insouciance, and as her eulogy for Kurt Cobain, About a Boy, collapses into abstraction, she appears to be close to speaking in tongues.

Patti Smith headlines the upcoming Higher Ground Festival in London soon – details in ad at top of this page! To celebrate here is her in depth interview with John Robb in 2010 where she details her creative life in New York and with Robert Mapplethorpe in an emotional account that has tears, laughs, poetry.

When Patti Smith described her 1975 debut album "Horses" as “three-chord rock merged with the power of the word,” she was connecting herself to two artistic streams. First, there was the relatively simple “garage” sound of groups like Count Five, ? and the Mysterians, the Seeds, Chocolate Watch Band, etc., which she—and her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye—felt epitomized the primal power of American rock. Second, she was asserting that the poetry of masters such as William Blake, Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud, and their 20th century acolytes Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Olson, could be spiritually integrated into music that would aspire to literary heights. As Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Robert Hunter and other Smith-approved poet-composers had already proven, lyrics could be literature.

Correspondences is an ever-evolving project between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith. Spanning over 10 years, it traverses a wealth of geographies and their natural environments, where the artists have uncovered sonic steps left by poets, filmmakers, revolutionaries, and the impact of climate change. Soundwalk Collective’s founder, Stephan Crasneanscki, has explored, captured, and collected the world’s remotest places in sound to awaken a sonic memory within the landscape, uncovering traces of past and current histories of the world we are living in. The resulting compositions are made of sound that reflects our relation to this world, the environment, the soul of our existence, and the creative process of the artist.

In "Turn in the Wound," long-time filmmaker Abel Ferrara intertwines clips of U.S. singer-poet Patti Smith's performances in Paris with the testimonies of ordinary Ukrainians about Russia's invasion and grainy videos taken mid-battle by unnamed fighters [...] Patti Smith's unmistakable voice reads out work by French avant-garde artist Antonin Artaud as on screen, the viewer follows a Ukrainian soldier through a point-of-view camera, appearing almost video game-like as he moves along a smoky field at dawn.

In 1967, Patti Smith set off to New York with little more than a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her suitcase. “We would escape together,” she wrote in her memoir, Just Kids. Smith’s love affair with Rimbaud, the 19th-century French Symbolist poet, shaped her affection for literature and, subsequently, spurred her on to become a writer. “Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced,” Smith wrote. “It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, […] His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast.”

When Smith first arrived on the scene, though, she was on the precipice of what would become punk rock. Shortly after she unleashed her debut album Horses, bands would be popping up left and right, laying waste to the original scene [...] With artists like John Lennon making songs with profanity, concerned authority figures were under the impression that this new approach to music was a lot more destructive than it was revolutionary, calling for many people to censor what they put into their music. When talking about her role against art being stifled, she thought that rock and roll wasn’t to be trifled with, explaining, “Rock and roll is my art. The government doesn’t know shit, whether it’s art or not. Rock and roll is warfare. All the time…still fighting.”