‘Hi,’ said Patti Smith, giving us a slightly awkward wave. ‘You know it’s really great here, by the sea. The air is so fresh. You guys are really lucky.’ Well, we felt lucky, sitting inside the iconic De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill of all places, within touching distance of our collective icon.
‘Hi,’ said Patti Smith, giving us a slightly awkward wave. ‘You know it’s really great here, by the sea. The air is so fresh. You guys are really lucky.’ Well, we felt lucky, sitting inside the iconic De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill of all places, within touching distance of our collective icon. Blessed, though, would be nearer to the truth, so close was this to a religious experience. We — 1,000 in all — were there to worship, to pay homage and to revisit a hugely important and emotive part of our younger selves — our veneration of and identification with Patti, punk rock poet extraordinaire.
Patti’s set (‘An Evening of Words and Music’) is wholly acoustic now — guitar, of course, her daughter Jesse on piano, a xylophone, and Patrick Wolf on viola and harp (‘We found him the last time we were over here, in London — that was cool’). By happenstance, the format suits her work more intimately than the heavy rock/punk of the past. Her poetry — the essence of her really — has more power acoustically, the rhythms, the repetition, the cadence of her words soar more freely and hypnotically when not constrained by a heavy rock beat. It hardly seems possible that she is better now, more powerful than ever before, but there it is — the greatest performance poet of all time — amazing.
Smith has just finished a mini world tour. So look out for when she is next in the UK, and kill for a ticket, because — older, wiser (or maybe not), endearing certainly, but above all still a gushing force of creativity — Patti is really very cool.