review of june 2 concert at institute for contemporary arts, london
[from "Keeper of the Phlegm" by Robert Yates, Guardian, June 3, 1996]
You can tell Patti Smith is an outlaw, the way she spits on stage.
"She's not very ladylike, is she," says somebody behind me which, as
insights go, is akin to noting that Vlad the Impaler was not very nice.
Patti Smith may be many thingsequal parts Egyptian goddess, celibate
Shaker and Jerry Lee Lewis is her own preferred analysisbut a lady is
not one of them. At least she did not direct her phlegm at the audience,
punk style, which would have been doubly cruel since the audience had come
in reverence.
The New York singer who made her name in the mid-1970s had not played in
Britain in more than 10 years, and just before she arrived on stage, the
ICA's theatre had the hush of a church about it. You half expected a prefab
altar to be whisked on, and the venerated Patti to arrive with a pile of
hosts and communion wine.
Instead, she appears with a couple of likely-lad musicians. One is
long-term colleague Lenny Kaye, part of Smith's band when she recorded
Horses, her 1975 debut album, a kind of punk rock with A levels, and still
the record most cited by women in pop who never much fancied Doris Day as a
role model. Patti Smith deserves a prize for suggesting that woman
performers did not have to wear paisley leggings and commune with an
acoustic guitar. The second musician is Oliver Ray who, along with Kaye, has
collaborated with Smith on her forthcoming album, Gone Again, her first in
eight years, and whose songs provide the bulk of the set's material.
The songs are largely contemplative, but from the opening beat, Smith is
in exuberant form. Her clothes are, as ever, distressedshe must buy
jackets with the elbows already worn throughthough she is anything but;
and, as the acoustic show progresses, she becomes so animated that Kaye and
Ray have to duck from her swirling arms. Death suffuses the new
materialthe
album was recorded less than a year after the death of her husband,
musician Fred "Sonic" Smith; while one of the show's opening songs, "About A
Boy," is apparently a tribute to the late Kurt Cobain.
It is not Smith's way to play the helpless widow, and it's to her credit
that she resists sentimentality. She has a useful deflationary trickthe
more charged the material, the more aggressive her between-song patter.
Although she has spent the best part of the past 15 years retired in the
Detroit suburbs, taking care of her kids, she retains the manner of a
bar-room fighter, greeting her audience's cries of devotion as if she'd
just been asked to step outside. "You what? You love me? Bah."
In song, however, Patti the Punk turns all purplish. Her material has
always boasted a high level of portent, a record maintained by the new
songs. "Beneath The Southern Cross," we're told, is a meditation on
existence, no less, and she wishes, she sings:
"To be / not here / but here."
Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, Smith has gained a
reputation as a fine wordsmith who happens to work in rock. The truth,
however, is that although a great songwriter and performer, many of her
words, naked on the page, have the gauche insistence of a fourth-former
discovering self-expression. Which is fine, since when her one-off
voicepart Bob Dylan with a decent range, part keening
bansheegets to work on
them, they sound just right. She could sing the telephone directory and
transform it into a grand drama.
At the ICA Smith reads as well as sings. Her performance is the climax
of a conference on Genet and Artaud, and a few of her poems, or
"meditations," punctuate the songs. The one undeniably good thing about
the poems is that you know when one
ends a song is sure to follow and, judged as a pared-down run through of
her upcoming series of concertswhen Smith will be
accompanied by a full bandthe evening is a triumph.
Grown men weep at the concert's close, and so bowled over is Smith by
the acclaim that the trio eventually reappears to try out a "work in
progress." Smith reaches for her notes and for a minute your heart sinks.
Then a guitar rings out, and you know everything is going be all right.
It's not a poem.
Copyright © Robert Yates 1996
back to babelogue