Patti Smith review – freewheeling rampage from the poet laureate of punk

The celebrated rock critic Lester Bangs once declared that Patti Smith’s 1975 debut, Horses, “touches deep wellsprings of emotion that few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching … real rock ’n’ roll again at last”.

Neither critic nor artist could have foreseen that people would remain infatuated with the album 40 years later, that R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe would declare that it “tore my limbs off and put them back on in a whole new order” or that Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr would describe how each listen would “change my demeanour for the day”.

A mixture of freewheeling sound and surrealist poetry, few albums pack such elemental force, yet performing it in full in Manchester on Monday, Smith didn’t just deliver the promised “celebration”, but rechannelled Horses’ almost supernatural powers.

Her famous opening lyric – “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” – rejected cornerstones of religion and sin, before exploding into a radical remodelling of Them’s song Gloria as a lesbian love affair. “And she whispers to me and I take the big plunge,” yelled the New Yorker. “And her name is … G.L.O.R.I.A.” Every letter was accompanied by her punching fist.

This explosive beginning was the first of repeated detonations. She came on to the chimes of Bob Marley’s Punky Reggae Party and the music delivered that, ricocheting between US No Wave, pop-soul and reggae. Guitarist Jack Petruzzelli filled her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith’s enormous shoes admirably. The band – including original guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty – were decked out in black and white, like Smith wore on Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic Horses sleeve, which she once said “captured a generation who sought within a new landscape to excite, to astonish and to resonate with all the possibilities of our youth”.

Now an unfeasibly lithe, bovver-booted 67-year-old, Smith’s masterful singing combined her youthful fury with rich sensuality, authority and wisdom. Some songs sounded just like the album. Others were remodelled, by design or accident. “I’m a person, not a record,” she spat. Lengthy poetic sections incorporated new rails against governments and corruption. Johnny, the desperate character who is attacked in a hallway in Land/Horses, was cheekily relocated to Manchester, but remains “in that same fucking hallway” – a thrilling way of suggesting that, 40 years on, the same issues are more universal.

There was much humour, though. The “poet laureate of punk” is now a grandmother, and revealed that her literary skills now extend to reading Uncle Wiggily stories to her baby grandson. The haunting Elegie – originally a requiem for Jimi Hendrix, which now honours a long line of those departed – felt unbearably sad until someone in the audience yelled the name of Timperley’s deceased finest, Frank Sidebottom.

After a glorious post-Horses romp through the likes of Because the Night, Dancing Barefoot, People Have the Power (“to vote, to strike!”) and even obliging a yelled request for her rarely performed, infamous 1974 first recording, Piss Factory, she exited to an ovation, still mauling sacred cows. A rampage through the Who’s My Generation saw the “hope I die before I get old” line changed to “I don’t need any of that shit. I hope I live because of it.” On this imperial form, few would bet against another 40 years.