Patti Smith Quartet und Patti Smith

What else is there that’s left to say about Patti Smith? There’s no question that she’s a bona fide punk icon, having been one of the towering creative forces of the New York movement of the seventies. She’s been inducted - quite rightly - into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, won the National Book Award for her gorgeously poignant memoir Just Kids, and has influenced everybody from Morrissey and Jonny Marr to Courtney Love, and Michael Stipe to Madonna. It probably says a lot about the society that we live in that you never seem to hear the term ‘renaissance woman’ thrown around, but I can’t think of anybody it applies more readily to than Smith. Two years ago, she toured the UK for the first time in more than five years; the sheer variety present in the twenty-song sets that she typically played said everything you needed to know about what a career she’s had. She lent heavily on Banga, her most recent record, and played a handful of tracks from her classic Easter; thereafter, she plucked just one song each from a slew of her best-known albums, including Horses and Radio Ethiopia. A clutch of covers, too, proved that she’s not immune to taking cues from elsewhere herself, but honestly, you have to imagine she could have read the phone book onstage and had the audience enraptured; they turned up to see an artistic legend, and that’s precisely what they got.