108. Patti Smith

Roundhouse

30 October 2015

In 1976, Patti Smith stormed the roundhouse and detonated Horses in front of a crowd that had scarcely imagined a woman snarling poetry over feedback. That show sits in rock’s pantheon of zeitgeist gigs; the night punk’s godmother baptised an era. Four decades later she’s back, older, greyer, but still radiating that strange cocktail of tenderness and threat.

She strolls onstage clutching a copy of Horses, reads the back-jacket poem in a conspiratorial murmur, then detonates “Gloria.” “Jesus died for somebody’s sins…but not mine!” she spits, and the room, an eclectic stew of hemp-clad fifty-somethings, horn-rimmed beat scholars, Doc-Martened media students and casual pilgrims like us, erupts.

Horses was lightning in a very particular bottle: New York City post-Vietnam, CBGB’s gutters, amphetamines, Rimbaud, and a healthy contempt for everything. Like The Velvet Underground & Nico (John Cale haunts both records), it captured a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when high art, street trash and political disillusion fused into something combustible. Time has turned it into a T-shirt and a syllabus entry, but tonight you remember why it mattered.

Smith herself toggles between village-elder warmth and flashes of the old street-corner menace. Mostly she feels like the coolest independent-bookshop owner you’ve ever met, until she hits the chorus of “Horses” and roars, “Come on, you motherfuckers!” or kicks into a barefoot, amp-shredding “My Generation.” Then you glimpse the firebrand still smouldering under the silver hair.

Is Horses still revolutionary? Maybe not. The world has moved on, punk was absorbed, commodified, made into dorm-room décor. But for the faithful gathered in this Victorian echo chamber, it remains sacred text. They mouth every word, sway during “Because the Night,” punch the air for “People Have the Power,” and leave glittering-eyed, convinced history just repeated itself.

And perhaps it did. Smith’s brand of anti-establishment fervour hasn’t died; it has simply atomised, dispersed into countless smaller voices rather than one cavernous howl. The spirit lives on in basement gigs, bedroom laptops, online zines and blogs nobody’s heard of yet. Tonight, though, we witnessed its original vessel, still upright and howling. That alone feels like enough salvation for one evening.