Patti Smith trespasses sacred garden, again

A few days before this show by Patti Smith, the copy of her new album, ‘trampin’’, is within my voracious curiosity. Thus, the ears are enriched with an excellent disc of ten originals and a cover - the title track is a standard popularised by American contralto Marian Anderson - but two songs tower above everything, straddling the rest like legs of the Colossus of Rhodes.

And tonight‘s set-list features just one of them, ‘Ghandi‘, a tone-poem taking one in on a total journey to the limits of lyrical and sonic extremes. Patti Smith has never been a woman who skirted - well, she’s always preferred Katherine Hepburn’s trousered chic - issues and this time is not different. Missing tonight is ‘Radio Baghdad’, a damning condemnation of Iraqi debacle.

Other ‘trampin’’ songs previewed tonight are the title track, ‘Stride Of The Mind’ and ‘Peaceable Kingdom; the latter gets dedicated to all war-mongers, families who were robbed of their loved ones and have had their lives screwed up by big boys pretending to be doing everything else but being - new kind of capitalist expansionists knows as neo- colonialists.

Ms Smith remains outspoken, finger-pointing, accusing, questioning, as a true artist should be - an alerted observer. During her career - a poetess who’s became the ‘Godmother of Punk’ - she’s explored many a musical genre and tonight she appears to showcase them all, from a poem-reading to gospelly tune, from minimal to fully-blown track that would silence Nickelback.

When she revisits her rebellious roots - man, it is punk without the vogue-junk! New material - ‘trampin’’ is not released until the end of April - is listened with respect, appreciation and enthusiastically applauded but it is the old favourites - including her biggest hit, ‘Because The Night’ - that really get this crowd of students and more mature fans singing along.

All performed in front of a screen full of Americana visages, deserts, docu-footage of world’s suffering, TV news [mis]informations, some psyche-imagery and live feed, her four piece backing musicians - together for the past 8 years - simply work like the WMB were supposed to, if ever existed. The first encore, this being St Paddy Day’s eve, she announces as “something for all to enjoy”, is a cover of The Rolling Stones’ vintage tune.

In the world that is happily diving into further dumbing-down, Patti remains the most intelligent and informed writer/performer: it is enough to listen to the lyrics of ‘Radio Baghdad’ and get a history lesson!

Patti, the undisputed Queen for rock-literati. To paraphrase a line from ‘Gandhi’, it was like - trespassing in a sacred garden.