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Patti Smith Live At QEH, London

By Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times Posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006

The Seventies New York punk survivor Patti Smith reminds us of what we have lost. Smith still believes music and poetry can change the world, and, in a time where Bono Vox poses for photo-op’s with George Bush, asking us to visualise the bigger, if severely blurred picture, her stark, uncompromising sloganeering seems increasingly of another, simpler era. At The Queen Elizabeth Hall to deliver a set of stripped down songs old and new, followed by a reading of an elegy for her friend the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith looks elegantly dishevelled on a set suggesting the corner of a homely recording studio, with sofas, threadbare rugs and a standard lamp. She reamins a strange and eternally beguiling hybrid of stentorian Old Testament prophet, raining down fire and brimstone, and a shy little girl, whose slinky-hipped stage moves and fluttering fingers still bear the stigmata of a teenage Mick Jagger fixation. For most of the first half Smith is backed by her regular bassist Tony Shanahan and the Italian cellist Giovanni Solima, whose thoughtful, sparse accompaniament suggests a musical template over which Smith, should she ever abandon her usual ferocious performance mode, could chose to grow old gracefully. The lament Qana is hot off the press, a passionately declaimed memorial to the thirty-seven children killed in last month’s Israeli shelling of the eponymous village, while the closing number of the first half, a version of Beneath The Southern Cross, from 1996’s Gone Again album, sees Smith’s trio augmented by two influential guitarists of the 1980’s British underground. Jason Pierce of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, who takes up a slumped position on the sofa with admirable nonchalance, were both ideally suited to sustaining a two-chord.

After the interval, Shields is due to accompany Smith reading her Mapplethorpe tribute, The Coral Sea. As the audience re-enter, the number 49 can just be seen blinking red in the liquid crystal display window of his Alesis Midiverb #2 reverb box. This particulr factory pre-set of the now discontinued effects unit was discovered by Shileds in 1988, and is the key to hs former group My Bloody Valentine’s hugely influential smear of liquid noise and subliminal harmonics. Nearly two decades later, one has to admire his single-mindedness, but a more adaptable approach may have suited The Coral Sea better. Given that Smith’s first musical forays,in 1974, were as a performance poet improvising in a little trio, there was little actual interplay between her and Shields in The Coral Sea. Smith is an engaging, unselfconscious and disarmingly open performer, but Shields works, head down, in hermetically sealed, introspective space. It seemed his furry blankets of feedback and fuzz would have unfurled in exactly the same order wether Smith had been present or not. Their collaboration, recorded both nights for subsequent release, was an experiment that didn’t completely succeed, but it felt like a rare priviledge to be allowed to sit in on it.

Written by Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times on 10th September 2006. Filed Under: Written For Money
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