Re: Patti - Meltdown - Horses - 25 June 2005

[Andrew F Wilson <andrewfwilson>]

Patti brings her Horses thundering back
Andrew Perry reviews Patti Smith the Meltdown, South Bank
Daily Telegraph, 28 June 2005

Patti Smith has embraced the job of being this year's Meltdown curator
with unprecedented relish, creating numerous moments of drama and
inspiration for audiences on the South Bank.

Among the highlights were: her version of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling
Stone during an uplifting co-headline show with Steve Earle; an
unscheduled appearance with her New York punk peers Television; and a
powerful reading of The Coral Sea, her prose lament for the
photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of Aids in 1989, on which
she was accompanied by ex-My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields.

This penultimate concert in the two-week festival was the hottest
ticket, though, because Smith returned, with band, plus guests Tom
Verlaine of Television and Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, to perform
Horses, her debut album from 1975, in its entirety.

That legendary, spellbinding sequence of music has gone down in
history as the first spasm of punk rock, the bridge between the
visionary 1960s rock of Smith's heroes Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix
on the one hand and the manic energy of the Ramones and the Sex
Pistols on the other.

On Horses her reputation rests, and the air of anticipation in the
room was electric.

Smith reaped her first standing ovation by merely walking on stage.
She was dressed in a white shirt, black skinny tie and jacket, just as
she was on the album's sleeve. In the dim lighting, which obscured the
grey in her and guitarist Lenny Kaye's hair, she looked alarmingly
similar to the Patti Smith of 30 years ago.

This, however, was not to be a note-perfect rendering of Horses, ` la
Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds concerts. The opening Gloria was
thunderingly, jubilantly chaotic.

The third track, Birdland, for which a bespectacled Smith read from
her large volume of poetry, deviated wilfully from the recorded
version, while remaining true to its spirit.

This was rock as exploration, adventure, freedom, transcendence.
Hearing it so thrillingly brought to life, one wondered why young rock
bands today refuse to uphold rock's questing ideals, happy merely to
copy old postpunk records.

The show was far from an historical exercise. With the Make Poverty
History campaign making headlines, Free Money sounded urgently
contemporary.

During the song Land, Smith launched an off-the-cuff polemic about
expenditure on "BlackBerrys and business communication systems, when
we can't communicate with our children".

Visibly unscripted, she then segued into a reprise of Gloria, made a
brief excursion into the stalls and, to everyone's bafflement,
scurried off towards the dressing room.

"OK, let me explain," she said, on returning. "I forgot to do the last
song. I got so excited, I left."

The encore included Piss Factory, her first single, recited a
cappella, and a venomous take on the Who's My Generation, complete
with Keith Moon-style drumkit demolition.

"New generations," Smith cried, "the world is yours - change it!"

And, finally, there was Elegie, which mournfully closes Horses. Head
bowed, Smith remembered Hendrix, Morrison, Mapplethorpe, her brother
Todd, her pianist Richard Sohl and her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith - a
moving end to another quite inspirational performance.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk