PATTI

I first heard Horses blasting through the open french doors of my island home as I approached it up the stone stairs which climbed from the sand to the headland where the house stood. The noise was assaulting , harsh, discordant, crashing into the light sensuality of the tropical afternoon. I recognised it as music of the time, the time being the 70`s and music which spoke to my partner. He had long cultivated a record collection of artists whose music described the underside of life. Disenchanted, disenfranchised, desperate, drug referenced, angry. Punk rock, Tom Waits, The Grateful Dead and Patti Smith.

Patti was the only woman I ever heard singing of the dark time which followed the Summer of love, when the hippy revolution which had held such promise of freedom and equality, crashed and burned in a miasmas of addiction, violence and misogyny. She seemed strong and equal and esteemed by her male musical peers. Which she also seemed to have no care about. I experienced Patti Smith as singular. It didn't make me fonder of her music but she remained on my radar in the intervening years as the aspirations of my middle class life took me a long way from that first jarring exposure that was her music and my life.

An A3 book with a shades of grey dust cover featuring a fierce profile of Patti, and a new record inserted in the harlequin diamond wall paper, reacquainted me with her and her music. Once again the music, this time, Banga , failed to work its magic on me but the style of this offering, part book, part record cover, the photographs and the writing captured me. I sought out her work.

I found M Train which she begins with the line "It is not so easy to write about nothing " My copy of M Train features a book cover which is a sepia photograph of Patti , head resting on her hand at a cafe table on which sits a coffee cup. It is a wonderful image of woman in a beanie and jeans with a strong face and strong hands, such strong hands. And throughout the book she writes of going to a cafe and having coffee. The book dust jacket describes it as meditation on travel, detective shows , literature and coffee. I borrow those words because I don`t know quite how to describe the book . I do know however that through the pages of M Train I fell in love with Patti Smith, her writing, her photography which is elemental to her narrative, and her style.

It is a love affair that has continued through her back catalogue, Woolgathering, Devotion , The coral Sea, Just kids and the Year Of the Monkey. There are more but I am less drawn to her poetry than I am to her memoir and there are some books that I, despite my passion for all things Patti, have found as impenetrable as her music.

What I am loving about having her in my life, 25 years after her music resonated with a generation ( but not me ) , is her fabulous ability to combine the moment with the past and the future. I am entranced by the seeming simplicity of her observations which somehow build to an emotional intensity that at the end of a book, leaves me exhausted and exhilarated. I feel like I do when I finally reach my room in an obscure guest house in a strange foreign city after a long journey. I always lie on the bed, cross my hands on my chest and go "well ".