Patti Smith had no idea she was about to have a starring role on a Taylor Swift album until the singer got in touch in the spring of 2024. “I don’t know her, but she recorded a lot of her work at Electric Lady, where I have done so much work, and through the studio she sent me a message and let me know that my name would be on her record – but that it was in a respectful way.”
Swift was reaching out before the release of her album The Tortured Poets Department – laid down at the same New York recording studio where Smith assembled Horses, her punk-poetry masterpiece from 1975. As soon as Smith heard the title track she understood why Swift had tipped her off. “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith,” Swift sings on the chorus. “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.”
The world’s biggest pop star wasn’t throwing their names about at random. Thomas and Smith are two of the great poetic voices of the 20th century. Both were also residents of the Chelsea, a scuzzy dive that served as the spiritual headquarters of the New York avant-garde back when the city was a place where artists could slum it on a shoestring.
As Swift appreciated, Smith is shorthand for the New York of the mid-1970s, when she was an edgy new voice on the downtown scene, an artist who combined poetry and punk and whose music pulsated with both wisdom and danger. But is she a tortured poet? Not on the morning The Irish Times catches up with her over the phone from Paris.
“The thing that made me happy after that [Taylor Swift] song came out was that so many people, young kids, were buying Dylan Thomas. I thought that was a nice thing,” she says. “Any time that younger generations acknowledge our presence – they’ll stop me on the street – I feel happy. It’s a privilege to have young people interested in your work, as it’s such a big field – and because of the internet and everything else, there’s so much that is accessible.”
On a crisp day in France, Smith is relieved to be away from the madness of the United States – the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and fatally wounded the previous night – and looking forward to a productive autumn.
In October she goes on the road for a series of concerts to mark the 50th anniversary of Horses, one of the most essential albums in the history of alternative music, its influence magnified by its cover shot of Smith, as an androgynous-looking 28-year-old, gazing mysteriously at the camera. (The haunting image was taken by her former lover Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer.)
At 78 she is fighting fit and looking forward to the tour, which begins at 3Arena in Dublin. It is followed, a month later, by a new memoir, Bread of Angels. Her publisher set the date of November 4th not knowing that it was both the birthday of Mapplethorpe, who died of Aids-related complications in 1989, and the anniversary of the death of her husband, the MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, who died of heart failure in 1994, aged 46.
The birthday of Horses has crept up on Smith: was it really 50 years ago? She is struck, she says, by how little the US has progressed in the intervening half-century. In 1975 the country was reeling from Watergate and the aftermath of Vietnam. Society was divided and fearful. Fast-forward to 2025 and she wonders if anything has changed. Things certainly haven’t got any better.
“It’s much worse,” she says. “I mean, in 1975 the war in Vietnam had ended, so that was one of the things we were most concerned with. We had lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It was the atmosphere for our culture. It was very bad for our generation trying to rebuild after all of these things.”
Half a century on it’s clear that the US didn’t rebuild. It only went downhill. “As bad as anything might have been, it’s nothing compared to the climate of the world now and what’s happening in my country.”
Smith made Horses when she was still working out what sort of artist she wanted to be. Raised in a lower-middle-class rural town in southern New Jersey, she came to New York seeking to establish herself as a poet. A chance meeting with the guitarist Lenny Kaye was followed by acclaimed shows at the counterculture hotspots CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. The buzz attracted the attention of Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records, who offered her a deal on the spot.
Davis had discovered Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen, and he saw Smith as a similar sort of artist: someone who could move units but was so much more than a mere entertainer. Offered her pick of producers for her first album, she chose John Cale of The Velvet Underground, partly because of his record in avant-garde music and partly because of how impressive his cheekbones had looked on the cover of Fear, his 1974 LP.
They butted heads in the studio, but the sparks threw up one of the great albums of the era. Starting with a tempestuous cover of Van Morrison and Them’s Gloria – Smith introduced a new opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” – Horses is powered by Smith’s incredible voice, an instrument both wise and raw, and balanced between a croon and a screech.
At the project’s heart is the three-part song cycle Land, a nine-minute-plus epic – often referred to as Horses, after its first segment – that builds and builds before exploding into one of the greatest needle drops of the 1970s. To Smith it feels as if it all happened yesterday.
When you’re outspoken, when you speak out against certain government policies or nationalistic politics, you’re going to get punished in certain ways
“It’s strange to listen to this record that for me – you know, it was 50 years, like, half a century. I still have a sense of that. It’s not like I think, well, who was she?” she says.
“Yes, I’ve evolved quite a bit from that. I’ve had a lot of different thoughts – even different thoughts about Jesus’s teachings, all kinds of things. But that stampeding energy that I felt when I was young, I still have it within me. I feel the same rage against injustice. One feels almost like we’re standing in a circle of injustice. It’s all around us. Listening to my younger self reminds me to be very strong and continue on.”
Smith takes inspiration from younger artists determined to make their voices heard. She notes that Irish musicians have been to the fore in speaking out about Gaza, in particular the Derry-Belfast rap trio Kneecap. She sees them as revolutionaries in the tradition of the greats she grew up listening to.
“Even in the time of Elvis Presley, back in the time of Little Richard, rock’n’roll was a revolution. It was not a revolution with guns. It was not a revolution that killed people. It was a revolution of new energy. It was a cultural revolution that, at its height and at its best, no matter how corny people think it is, promoted peace and love. Jimi Hendrix: what did he preach? Peace and love. What did John Lennon preach? Peace and love.”
Rock’n’roll was meant to be revolutionary, Smith says. If some listeners find that offensive or over the top, well, so it goes. That’s part of the musician’s job description.
“It’s nice that it entertains people. That’s great. What Kneecap is doing is what we do, what we’ve always done. If sometimes we step a bit far, sometimes you have to ... be strong to let people know what you’re saying. Whether it’s too strong for you or whatever, the heart of it is social injustice. So the heart of it is humanitarian, a love of the people.”
Smith’s connection to Ireland goes back decades. In 1976, when Horses was becoming a hit, she visited Dublin, reciting poetry in a church where the audience included a young Larry Mullen, of U2. Bono later wrote her a fan letter, describing her music as his “drug of choice”.
She remembers first encountering U2’s music in the mid-1980s, when she had taken time away from the industry to raise her son and daughter. Out shopping one day, she heard Bono singing over the tannoy and was engrossed.
“It’s amazing, because in 1979 I left public life. I was very disconnected with what was happening, musically, living quietly and starting a family. And I remember clearly being in a supermarket by myself, buying food. They had music pumped back then through a radio or something.
“The song came on: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I stopped in the middle of this big grocery store and listened to it. I thought it’s a really good song: whoever that is is going to be big. They were already big, but I didn’t know.”
She was a fan. She soon discovered the feeling was mutual. “U2 has been very good to our band. We opened for them at Madison Square Garden. Bono opened his home to Tony and I,” she says, referring to her long-time bassist, Tony Shanahan. “Tony and I’ve stayed there and met all kinds of poets, and Glen Hansard, and all different musicians.”
Smith was also an admirer of the late Sinéad O’Connor, whom she invited to play when she curated the Meltdown festival in London in 2005. As two outspoken women artists, they had much in common, including unhappy experiences on Saturday Night Live.
The US comedy institution banned O’Connor for life after she ripped a portrait of Pope John Paul II in two during an appearance on the programme in 1992.
Smith had a similar experience a decade and a half earlier: in 1976 Saturday Night Live had booked her to perform her cover of The Who’s My Generation. (The somewhat unlikely guest host was Ron Nessen, the press secretary of Gerald Ford, the US president at the time.)
Before she went on, executives had politely encouraged her to drop the song’s lyric “I don’t need their f**king shit”. She agreed to change the line to “I don’t need no censorship” – but was struck by the intensely hierarchical and corporate nature of a programme that billed itself as anarchic and anti-establishment, and she resolved never to return.
“You’ve never seen me back, have you? I have guidelines. I didn’t say any bad words on Saturday Night Live. But showing any kind of independence on that show ... I mean, yes, the show was so funny. They had the greatest people at the time – John Belushi and Gilda Radner and Bill Murray. But the top, the management, of that show were so uptight.”
Exactly how uptight was made clear to O’Connor in 1992. “No matter what, the mainstream is always going to be censoring anyone with independent ideas,” Smith says. “To me, what she did on Saturday Night Live ... She was [always] so strong, speaking the truth about the famine or the Palestinian people. In the end, she is beloved.”
Speaking truth carries a price, Smith says. “I’m not a mainstream artist in America. I’m more popular in Europe than in America. When you’re outspoken, when you speak out against certain government policies or nationalistic politics, you’re going to get punished in certain ways.”
Horses changed Smith’s life. It also made her an unlikely fashion icon. Mapplethorpe’s instantly recognisable photograph of Smith – a bulletproof punk radiating cosmic quantities of nonchalance, ready to take on the world – made it one of the most recognisable of record covers.
Smith has a different response when she looks at the sleeve: she sees a vulnerable kid from the sticks.
“It was how I dressed. I was always a Peter Pan kid. Never wanted to grow up. That’s all the cover is. People see it as very strong. I look at it and I can still feel my relationship with Robert, my friendship. And my own vulnerabilities.
“To me it’s not just an expression of strength. It’s an expression of all things. We are both strong and vulnerable. I’m very happy and proud of the fact that people still are moved by Robert’s photograph. It was a very honest photograph. We just took it. Robert was not analytic. I wasn’t.
“I wasn’t trying to say anything except to be myself. That’s the one thing I’ve always demanded – I just want to be myself.”
Patti Smith plays 3Arena, Dublin, on Monday, October 6th. The 50th-anniversary edition of Horses is released on Friday, October 10th. Bread of Angels: A Memoir is published by Bloomsbury on November 4th
