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| Tom |
She played last monday at the Hackney Ocean in London the setlist included "The Last Time" with great footage of The Rolling Stones projected behind her. In the last tour she was covering "Paint It Black" |
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| rimbaud |
In the past (as far as memory serves) she's also covered Miss You and a pair of obviously Stones-influenced rave-ups of Time is on my Side (a live b-side)and Not Fade Away, as well as a number of original decation-esque prose pieces. Saw her last summer and she is still great...how was the performance at Hackney Ocean...(and what, exactly is Hackney Ocean...sounds like a very uninspired body of water) |
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| Jaxx |
The Guardian
Reviews
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Patti Smith
Hackney Ocean
London
Rating: ****
Adam Sweeting
Wednesday July 25, 2001
Prophetically, Patti Smith once said that she loved rock'n'roll because, when she played it, she was no longer afraid of dying. In a way, her story is one of the most remarkable in rock history, and has seen Smith rising phoenix-like from a complicated personal life littered with corpses. Acclaimed as the world's artiest rock poet in the 1970s, she spent the 80s and half of the 90s recuperating from celebrity excess. It seems to have been the deaths of her husband, Fred Smith, and her bother, Todd, that galvanised her back to creative life - and the last few years have seen her producing some of her most heartfelt work.
Hackney seemed an improbable venue for the 54-year-old Smith, but she seized the moment by the throat. "I like Hackney," she drawled, in broadest Noo Joisey. "I'm here, ain't I?"
Looking as scrawny as ever, in jeans and an outsized jacket, and surrounded by her trusty band - including original members Lenny Kaye on guitar and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty - Smith ripped brusquely into The Byrds' So You Wanna Be a Rock'n'Roll Star, converting the polite jangle of the original into a thundering garage-band stomp. Later, her version of The Last Time was accompanied by vintage footage of the Rolling Stones. Once, her love of 60s rock and her unswerving faith in rock'n'roll as the ultimate vehicle for demolition or deification seemed corny and old-fashioned. With the passing decades, however, they have begun to assume the heroic proportions of a great crusade.
Smith has never harboured a scintilla of doubt that what she does is Art. This has sometimes made her appear pretentious and po-faced, but it's also what enables her, sometimes, to crash through the barriers that limit less ambitious performers. Here, she mixed poetry readings (both her own and William Blake's) with songs, mantras and some raging agitprop sloganeering.
Gung Ho, complete with vivid newsreel film, was a sprawling saga of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam war. In the midst of a climactic performance of Rock'n'Roll Nigger, in which Smith and band strafed the house like an armoured division on heat, she ripped into George Bush and his refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty. "Didja hear what that motherfucker George Bush said?" Smith screamed. "That's what's wrong with this planet. Business and the economy - that's all they care about." How droll that it should take a middle-aged mother of two to remind everybody that rock stars are supposed to be passionate, provocative and opinionated.
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CHAT ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]