It feels a little strange to hear Patti Smith, poet laureate of punk rock, expounding on her love of the Sunday evening Inspector Morse spinoff Endeavour between songs, but here we are. Confined to her hotel room on Friday night by a heavy Brighton sea mist, she says – “I couldn’t see shit” – her evening was enlivened by watching an episode of the period detective drama on ITV3. Over on her Instagram page, she’s even been ruminating on the philosophical qualities of the show’s dialogue.
This is not necessarily what one might expect from someone regularly held up as the living embodiment of a certain fearsome rock and roll cool – a woman who recovered from slipping over on stage at Glastonbury by snarling “I fell on my fuckin’ ass … because I am a fuckin’ animal” – but tonight at least, Patti Smith cuts an unexpectedly goofy figure onstage.
She fluffs lyrics, stops one song, argues with her backing band about how to end another, chucklingly announces that she’s treating the gig as merely a rehearsal for her appearance at a London festival the following day and demands the house lights be turned up “in case there’s a potential boyfriend” in the audience.
Indeed, Smith is so charismatic and likable that she can pretty much get away with anything, up to and including departing the stage midway through the set “to go to the bathroom”, her backing band busking through a medley of Velvet Underground songs in her absence.
At the conclusion of Ghost Dance, she tells the audience to raise their arms and “shake out the ghosts” and the venue is suddenly filled with hands dutifully flapping above heads. She plays a cover of Midnight Oil’s late-80s stadium rocker Beds Are Burning, which isn’t much improved by Smith appending some ecologically themed incanting – “Man in his infinite lack of wisdom sent his toxins into the sea!” she bellows – and a plodding version of John Lennon’s Mind Games, which features Smith reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper and concludes with the singer’s own appraisal of Lennon’s lasting message: “He wanted you to make love! Not war! Not war!”
Smith has long had a thing for unlikely cover versions – in the mid-90s she was wont to favour audiences with a version of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, while among the selections on her 2012 album Twelve was her interpretation of Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World – but it’s hard not to think she’s got far better songs of her own tucked away in her back catalogue than either of these.
Her own music ranges from chaotic – Because the Night sounds oddly rickety – to transcendent: Dancing Barefoot benefits from having its studio gloss stripped away, a version of Pissing in the River has a glowering power. Listening to her attack Gloria with a ferocity that makes it feel like something she came up with yesterday, rather than 43 years ago, you’re struck by the fact that her voice has proved apparently immune to the ravages of time: she sounds exactly the same at 71 as she did in 1975.
It ends with a ragged attack on People Have the Power, prefaced by a sly apology from Smith herself. “I made a lot of mistakes tonight. I always fuck up in Brighton,” she shrugs. “Everywhere else I’m perfect.” And then she heads off, perhaps to see what’s on ITV3.
