This is…. Patti Smith, under a full moon, in Oxford. A review.
The full moon cast her warm mesmeric light on Oxford, gilding the fringes of the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge, along to the narrow lanes of Jericho. In the New Theatre, Patti Smith was performing. It was Oxford’s night of illuminating presence.
I’d had battered vinyl copies of ‘Radio Ethiopia’ and ‘Horses’ as a teenager that I’d picked up from boxes in the second-hand record stores that are few and far between now. ‘Ask the Angels’ had a continual click sound thanks to a scratch running through the vinyl. I still hear the click in my head even during a clean digital version of the song. A lingering ghost. It wasn’t until the end of my teenage years when Patti Smith released ‘Gone Again’ that she transcended my general musical landscape into something more personal. It is an album I’d save from a house fire, alongside the likes of Vespertine, Hounds of Love, and Hejira. Made after the loss of both her beloved husband Fred Sonic Smith, and her brother Todd, it is filled with despatches from the underworld, of grief, loss, humanness, and spirit. Like Kahlo, or Blake, she returns from the dark with hard won images. I’ve lived inside ‘Beneath the Southern Cross’ so long it feels more like a terrain than a song. The ghostly background echo of Jeff Buckley was his last studio recording before we lost him to the Mississippi. I have always been moved by the ‘cross-over boy, cross-over’ line at the end, as Patti watches the soul of her beloved cross the sky, her tone has the awe of watching a shooting star. There are many songs long worn and loved on Gone Again; ‘Fireflies,’ ‘About a Boy,’ ‘Ravens’; 'Common fortune seeks us all and slips our binding rings, We’ll turn our heads and make us reel, we’ll bear our arms as wings, Before our feet, a feather drifts, beyond us, it will fall, ‘Cause time will bid and make us rise, make ravens of us all’.
I didn’t get the chance to see Patti live in those years. She appears for me now serendipitously in a year I have held her as a creative talisman, during my book project. I inadvertently retrieved M Train (my favourite of her books) from my shelf a year ago to accompany a trip to Lisbon and found her my companion once again. Her generous curiosity signposts the way of the creative, in service to my fumbling soul, she encourages me to stare deep and commit. In some abstract way she is present in my exploration of William Morris’s gardens. And so, at the end of a year of writing, she arrived in Oxford with impeccable timing.
Pic: M Train accompanying my pilgrimage to Fernando Pessoa’s cafe haunt in Lisbon.
Despite the five-decade career, Patti is no ‘legacy’ act, plumping her retirement fund. She remains a creative entity, living every note, meaning every word. She is present in the world, singing the pain of tribes displaced by deforestation (ghost dance) and the lost lives of Palestinian defenders (Peaceable Kingdom) as a concerned mother of the earth. Her band too, featuring her son, Jackson, are tight, dynamic, and having fun.
Patti has a great armoury of songs to choose from in performance, particularly from her later career, where the free wild energy is replaced with a richer, deeper song craft. Songs that become treasured companions the more water that passes under the bridge. So much gold to mine that I did not mind the absence of loved songs like ‘Don’t say nothing’, ‘Paths that Cross,’ or ‘Fuji-San.’ Her song choice was impeccably curated to honour the full moon night in Oxford. ‘Cash,’ the song written after the passing of Johnny Cash, was deeply rendered and given even more depth by the band, following naturally from a rendering of Dylan’s ‘Man in a long black coat’. Later came ‘Nine,’ the filmic vagabond’s song sounding as rich as a landscape. The Lana del Ray cover ‘Summertime Sadness’ has become a live staple this summer, a song she says makes her think of her husband, on the 30th anniversary of his passing. Sung through Patti’s lived experience it is a vulnerable and moving moment. The Kiss me hard before you go line carries a longing that only the full moon could negotiate. I imagine Lana must be moved by what Patti has found in her song.
The gig ended with a series of songs powered by an energy that defies 77 years of living. ‘Because the Night,’ then ‘Pissing in a River’ where she bent double to release the rich vocal energy in her, followed by a ten minute ‘Gloria’ that surged the crowd towards her. In the middle of the raucous energy she pauses, leaning over the mic, ‘I’m getting old’ she sighs and laughs before another wave of energy takes her over. Afterwards she lovingly held the hands and privately spoke to the swarmed security at the front of the stage; no one has a bad night on Patti’s watch.
Patti Smith stands for many things, for me she stands for engagement with life and creativity, for negotiating with the shadow as well as the light. Hers is a generous curiosity and humanness, a force for good. I left and wandered the late-night streets of Oxford for a while, under the full moon’s golden gaze. The moon’s silent presence a perfect counterpoint to the music. Merci Patti