Patti Smith Vicar Street, Dublin ★★★★☆ “I am happy to say I am Patti Smith,” Patti Smith wryly states, as she greets the audience on the first night of her two sold out shows. Joined by her band of Seb Rochford, son Jackson Smith, and long-time collaborator Tony Shanahan, she rampages through a set that is as sweet as it is snarling. Early on the concert resembles a love-letter, with its desperate yet unhurried joy, but eventually morphs into a poem, a form Smith holds so dear.
In fact, when she misses a few lines from Boy Cried Wolf, she revisits it unaccompanied, delivering, “torn reborn the cries of our dismay, are nothing to the wind but whose to mind, kings are lifted up and kings are thrown”, making it sound like a poem or perhaps a Shakespeare play, recently uncovered. And uncovering is something Smith does so well, testifying as she does on Summer Cannibals and Peaceable Kingdom, or transforming on Dancing Barefoot and Ghost Dance – she is clearly in thrall to something Hilma af Klint once called “mystery service”. That mystery service is poetry, family (all kinds), and ideas and themes of unity and freedom, but there is duality also, observed in the Velvet Underground-infused, swaggering Nine, which coexists with the pared back rendering of Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat.
She incorporates affecting stories, telling us about a man she once knew who loved his mother so much that he would always return to her “sad, beautiful face”. Smal.