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Euronews
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Patti Smith announces a new memoir 'Bread of Angels'
ADVERTISEMENT The legendary Patti Smith has shared details of her new memoir, 'Bread of Angels', which will be published on 4 November. Smith, 78, made the announcement on Instagram alongside an image of the poet-writer-musician with her parents as a young adult, writing: 'This is with my mother and father who inspired much of my next book Bread of Angels. The memoir, a bright and dark dance of life, will be published on November 4th, by Random House.' 'Bread of Angels' is Smith's third memoir after the wonderful 'Just Kids' in 2010 and the mesmerizing 'M Train' in 2015. In 'Just Kids,' winner of the 2010 National Book Award, Smith looked back on her early years in New York City and her romance and friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Meanwhile, 'M Train' was a chronicle of Smith's later years following the huge success of her album 'Horses' in 1975 and the 40 years that came after which were tragically punctuated by the losses of her husband Fred 'Sonic' Smith, her brother Todd Smith, and Mapplethorpe - who all died within the space of a few weeks in 1994. Voir cette publication sur Instagram Une publication partagée par This is Patti Smith (@thisispattismith) The synopsis for 'Bread of Angels' reads: 'The most intimate of Smith's memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, 'Dancing Barefoot' and 'Because the Night'.' It continues: 'As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again - the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.' The book's release date is deeply personal, coinciding with Mapplethorpe's birthday and the anniversary of Fred Smith's death. Later this year, Smith will spend time on the road celebrating the 50th anniversary of her seminal debut album, 'Horses' - which features hits like 'Gloria' and 'Redondo Beach'. 'Horses' has appeared in numerous lists of the greatest albums of all time and was selected by the US Library of Congress for preservation into the National Recording Registry in 2009. Smith collapsed on stage in Brazil in January and later wrote on Instagram that she suffered 'some post migraine dizziness.' The incident has not stopped her from planning her upcoming tour in Europe, which starts on 1 July in Germany and will take her to Italy, Ireland, UK, Belgium, Norway and France, where she'll round off the EU leg of her tour on 21 October at L'Olympia in Paris.
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Patti Smith to publish ‘intimate' new memoir, Bread of Angels
Patti Smith has written a memoir that her publishers are describing as her 'most intimate and visionary work' yet, which is due out this autumn. Bread of Angels will cover everything from Smith's childhood in working-class Philadelphia and South Jersey to her rise as a punk rock star and her subsequent retreat from public life. 'It took a decade to write this book, grappling with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime,' Smith said. 'I'm hoping that people will find something they need.' The singer won the 2010 National Book award for nonfiction, a prestigious US literary prize, for her previous memoir, Just Kids, which she had promised the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her longtime partner and friend, that she would write. Bread of Angels will be published on 4 November, in the gap between the Europe and US dates of Smith's 50th anniversary tour of her first album, Horses. The date is 'especially meaningful' to the artist, as it is both Mapplethorpe's birthday and the anniversary of her late husband Fred 'Sonic' Smith's death. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion As well as Just Kids, which documented her relationship with Mapplethorpe, Smith has written four other books including memoirs M Train, about her relationship with Smith, and Year of the Monkey. The latter focuses on 2016, when Smith's friend, the producer, manager and rock critic Sandy Pearlman, died, and the musician was confronted with grief for him alongside fears about the rise of populism, the climate crisis, and her impending 70th birthday. 'Patti Smith is a living legend,' said Alexis Kirschbaum, head of Bloomsbury Trade, which will be publishing the book in the UK. 'While her lyrics and music have inspired generations of listeners, her books have made her one of the most cherished and influential writers of the last 50 years. Bread of Angels confirms her position as a writer.' As well as music and literature, Smith has also created visual art and photography, which has been exhibited globally. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the ASCAP Founders award, Sweden's Polar Music prize, the PEN/Audible Literary Service award, and France's Légion d'honneur.
Associated Press
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Patti Smith will take another look back in a new memoir, ‘Bread of Angels'
NEW YORK (AP) — Even after publishing a handful of memoirs, including the classic 'Just Kids,' Patti Smith has a lot more to say about her life. The poet-writer-musician's 'Bread of Angels' will be published Nov. 4, Random House announced Wednesday. In 'Just Kids,' winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Smith looked back on her early years in New York City and her romance and friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In her new book, according to Random House, she reflects on her childhood 'in working class Philadelphia and South Jersey,' her marriage to guitarist Fred 'Sonic' Smith, her move to a home in Michigan by Lake Saint Clair, to raise a family and her grief over the death of her husband, in 1994. Even the book's release date is deeply personal, coinciding with Mapplethorpe's birthday and the anniversary of Smith's death. 'It took a decade to write this book, grappling with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime. I'm hoping that people will find something they need,' Smith said in a statement issued through Random House. Smith's other books include 'M Train,' 'Year of the Monkey,' 'Woolgathering' and 'Devotion (Why I Write).'
Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Patti Smith: ‘I'm not a musician, people's concept of me is so off the mark'
This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by Jessamy Calkin. It appears as it was originally published. It will surprise many people to know that the legendary Patti Smith – whose debut album, Horses, revolutionised rock in 1975 – thinks of herself as a writer and not a musician, though she will allow the term 'performer' a little airplay. Gaby Wood caught up with her at a music festival in Hamburg in 2015, on the eve of the publication of her second book, M Train, which she describes as being about everything and nothing. They talk about her work, her children and the influence of her late husband, Fred Sonic Smith, and Wood finds her to be a poet, a loner, a philosopher – with the same style she made famous in her late 70s heyday and the same volcanic spirit. – Jessamy Calkin At a former racetrack an hour outside Hamburg, a weekend-long music festival is in its tentative first year. It is a hot day in August, and a couple of hundred people are milling about between the circus workshop, the tie-dyeing tent and the outdoor yoga classes, while a roster of all-male guitar bands sings in German. In the car park, the 68-year-old rock star and performance poet Patti Smith has just spilt out of a van with her bass player and drummer, the whole group looking as if time travel has brought them to the wrong place. Luhmühlen hardly seems an auspicious setting for a proto-punk revival. But a few hours later, with the sun low in the sky and the ragged afternoon crowd gathered in front of the stage, the band appears, dressed all in black. They barrel straight into Gloria, the fiery first song on their 40-year-old album Horses. 'Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine,' Smith sings, unleashing a tempest that will last for well over an hour. 'Right out the gate I have to start with Gloria,' she had told me earlier that day, when we met in Hamburg, suggesting such an enterprise was not for the faint of heart. 'Had I known that I would be doing this 40 years later…' She trailed off ruefully. 'It's like a baby stampede – that's how it feels to me.' Sure enough, the force of the opening is incredible: the low, round sound of Smith's voice and the precision of her punctuation are almost prehistoric, as if a buried giant has risen, growling and spitting, in the German countryside. Our meeting in Hamburg takes place in a labyrinthine hotel with old Hanseatic fittings: plush velvet seating, dark wood-panelled walls, polished gold buttons to ring for service. Smith enters the surreal scene with no fanfare or false niceties. She sits and scribbles with a pencil as she speaks – scratchy, spiky doodles. Now and then the thick grey curtains of her hair part to reveal tortoiseshell glasses and a slightly erring eye. Over the course of an hour or so she moves gradually from thoughtful reticence to outright maternal warmth, as if a fog of preoccupation has burnt off. She is here for the 40th anniversary tour of Horses, but we are meeting to talk about her new book, M Train, a real-time meditation on her life as it is now. Five years ago, Smith published Just Kids, an award-winning commemoration of her relationship in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which took her more than a decade to write. M Train, though, is far from being a sequel. It is an experiment inspired by a dream she had, in which a cowboy appeared to her and said, 'It's not so easy writing about nothing.' 'I wasn't brought up in a disposable society. I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important' So she began. In the book, she lives alone, drinks coffee and eats little, dragging an unnamed malaise everywhere she goes. She writes from bed, like a convalescent; she writes on napkins, without realising she is doing it. But sometimes her existence appears to have been torn wholesale from a Wes Anderson film: she travels to Berlin for a convention of the Continental Drift Club, pausing in London to watch mystery dramas on ITV3; she has conversations in her head with the 19th-century electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, and writes an essay about William Blake. She buys a bungalow on the grimy seashore in Rockaway, New York, and thinks of it as 'the most beautiful boardwalk in America'. Three weeks later, Hurricane Sandy destroys it almost entirely. 'M Train is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything,' she tells me. 'I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.' The thing Smith discovered about writing in real time is that real time has many tenses. In order to write faithfully about the present, she had to record all the thoughts that sprang to mind about the past. And so, without ever having had a plan in mind, she found she had threaded reminiscences of her late husband, Fred 'Sonic' Smith, throughout. How much has Smith changed? She would say not a great deal, citing her ongoing fondness for the same T-shirts and the same lisle socks. Not long ago, Smith was sitting with her daughter, Jesse, 28, when a stranger came up and asked her to sign a single sleeve from 1974. Jesse looked at the clothes on the cover, then looked back at the same clothes on her mother's body. 'Look, Mommy, you're the same person,' she said. To the untrained eye, though, the transformation from the bony, androgynous raven photographed by her lover Robert Mapplethorpe into something like a storybook sorcerer seems considerable. But then, Smith always had a quality of necromancy about her. Having been close to death throughout her childhood (she had TB and scarlet fever, among other potentially fatal illnesses), as an adult she photographs gravestones, speaks to inanimate objects and likes to take a tarot reading before leaving the house. Now that she is practically a prophet in her own right – for both her place in the pantheon of American punk and her other-worldly wisdom – this is probably the least you would expect. But Smith explains that her reverence for material things, and the fact that her home contains corners that are like reliquaries, has nothing to do with superstition. It is choice. 'I wasn't brought up in a disposable society,' she says. 'I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener.' Smith was brought up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey by a mother who was a waitress (and a Jehovah's Witness) and a father who worked night shifts in a factory. When she moved to New York in the late 1960s, she had escaped from low-paid piecework herself – as described in Piss Factory, the B-side to her first single. 'I am a performer, but in my life, when I'm not performing, I'm a mother, I have a cat, I'm sort of a loner' 'I remember when the Bic pen was controversial,' she recalls. 'They came from France. They were cheap, and when one was out of ink, you threw it away, you didn't dip it into more ink. I remember my father saying, 'I don't understand: you have a pen, then you just throw it away? What if a million people had them? That's a million unusable pens.' ' She pauses while I take in the incontrovertible, but now entirely alien, logic of this. 'I mean, I know I talk to my channel-changer,' she goes on, 'but I would rather talk to my channel-changer and respect it than have 14 of 'em. I'm not making some judgmental statement, I'm just saying: we are living in disposable times.' One thing there is not much of in M Train is music. I remark on this, and Smith nods. 'Well, I mean, I'm not a musician. People's concept of me is often so off the mark. In '78, '79, right before I walked away from public life, I experienced, in Europe, two years of what I would call being a rock-and-roll star. My last job, my band played to 80,000 people in Florence. I know what that tastes like, to be a rock-and-roll star – to have a limousine, to have girls screaming when they see you, girls trying to cut my hair, get a piece of me. But I don't walk around with a concept of myself as a rock-and-roll star, and certainly not as a musician, because I really can't play anything, except primitively. I sing, but almost everybody sings. I am a performer, but in my life, when I'm not performing, you know, I'm a mother, I have a cat, I'm sort of a loner, I write every day. My view of myself is more as a writer.' She 'walked away from public life' when she married Fred Smith, the influential guitarist of the countercultural band MC5, in 1980. She was at the height of her fame, having released her bestselling album Easter, but moved to be with him in Detroit and started a family. Passport photos from those days reveal the pair to be both strangely suburban and strangely like runaways, and I suppose that sums up the way of life Smith says they shared: domestic, ingenious, full of curious shared passions. 'I was so happy,' she says. 'Time seemed like it would go on for ever. I didn't have the concept that all this would be gone. Just like with Robert,' she adds, thinking of Mapplethorpe. 'I lived with Robert all those years and used to take pictures of his hands, and never took a picture of his face.' Fred Smith died of heart failure in 1994, at the age of 45. A thunderstorm was brewing, and his wife, who has always been sensitive to meteorological shifts, felt it keenly. 'Fred, fighting for his life, could be felt in the howling wind,' she writes in M Train. She rushed him to hospital on Hallowe'en, and their daughter went to bed in her costume, expecting her father to see it when he came home. He never did. 'The world,' Smith writes, 'seemed drained of wonder.' In the book, Fred Smith comes across as having an almost mystical appeal. Was there something in particular that drew people to him? His widow nods, then struggles to define it. 'He had some kind of quiet, special power, but not something I could easily describe,' she replies. 'I would see how men – my own brother, my father – how much they admired him, and my father wasn't easily beguiled. He would have been a great king. I mean, in the best of ways – a benevolent king. He was just that kind of guy.' Smith and Jesse, and her son Jackson (now 33), speak to each other about him every day. 'And also my son and daughter are both musicians,' she says, 'so they magnify him. My son is really a virtuoso guitar player.' (Jackson was married to Meg White, of the White Stripes.) 'Sometimes he'll be improvising a solo, and his tone… My husband had beautiful guitar tones – he wasn't called Fred 'Sonic' Smith for nothing. And Jackson, without knowing it, resonates that. My daughter, she plays piano, and she has his composing sense. Sometimes the three of us play together, and it's beautiful. So we have various ways to keep him as part of our conversation.' All of this, combined with the anniversary tour of Horses, seems like a lot of retrospection. But Smith says they are unrelated. The tour is a celebration of the fact that they are still alive. 'I don't do it with nostalgia,' she says. 'When we're performing Horses, my concern is the people who are right there: some maybe loved Horses and listened to it 1,000 times, some have never heard of it, some who saw the album cover but don't know any of the songs, some who don't even like it but their girlfriend dragged them, some really young people whose parents brought them.' I ask her what she will do to prepare for tonight's concert, and she shrugs. 'We just do it,' she says. Smith suggests that she will never give a perfect performance anyway. 'I'm a flawed performer – energetic and emotional and flawed. So my goal is that, if not in the beginning then somewhere through the night, we have an authentic connection. That the people and the band become one organism, going through rough moments, ludicrous moments, embarrassing moments and magical moments. That, to me, is what a concert is all about – and coming out of it feeling alive.' In Luhmühlen, Smith moves up several gears per minute. The sweet, spoken subversion on the original recording of Horses, which lurched between a wail and a whisper, has become a howl of experience torn from the gut. A couple of songs into the set, I move from the audience to the side of the stage and feel the floor reverberate as she improvises scorching vocals on Birdland, punches her fists into the crowd, spits on the ground. She is not on her knees screaming, as she once was, or falling off the stage, as she once did, but there is a fierceness to her that is more like voltage than anger. She sings the last song on the album, an elegy for the dead, then introduces her most famous one. 'I wrote this for my boyfriend, Fred 'Sonic' Smith,' she says of Because the Night. 'And he's still my boyfriend.' Finally, the band covers My Generation, and as it swerves into a long improvised riff, Smith picks up an electric guitar. 'We want to be free!' she shouts. 'Are you ready?' A roar rises to meet her. She bends down, hair swaying over her face as she smears the guitar's sound into the floor. Then she straightens, and prises the strings off her instrument, twisting each one with an electric undulation of noise until it is dangling, unshackled. Before her, an infinity of pink arms waves like a bed of living coral. Moments later, back in the artists' building, Smith has returned to her calm self. She is pleased with the way it went, she tells me when I go to say goodbye; she declares the audience to be 'pure'. Even then, immediately after she has come off stage, it seems impossible that such an elemental force should have originated in the person standing opposite me. I feel slightly high, slightly stunned. I think, and I may even have said it out loud: Hurricane Sandy's got nothing on Patti Smith. In an extract from M Train, Patti Smith discusses her love of holing up in a hotel room with only British detective inspectors for company Though reluctant to [leave Berlin to] go home I packed my things and flew to London to make my connection. My flight back to New York was delayed, which I took as a sign. I stood before the departure board and a further delay was posted. Impulsively I rebooked my ticket, took the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station, and from there I took a cab to Covent Garden and checked into a small favored hotel to watch detective shows. My room was bright and cozy with a small terrace overlooking the London rooftops. I ordered tea and opened my journal, then immediately closed it. I am not here to work, I told myself, but to watch ITV3 mystery dramas, one after another late into the night. I had done this a few years before in the same hotel while ill; delirious nights dominated by a procession of clinically depressed, bad-tempered, heavy-drinking, opera-loving detective inspectors. I settled in, giving myself over to the likes of Morse, Lewis, Frost, Wycliffe, and Whitechapel – detective inspectors whose moodiness and obsessive natures mirrored my own. When they had a chop, I ordered same from room service. If they had a drink, I consulted the minibar. I adopted their manner whether entirely engrossed or dispassionately disconnected. In between shows were upcoming scenes from the highly anticipated Cracker marathon, to be aired on ITV3 the following Tuesday. Though Cracker wasn't the standard detective show it stands among my favorites. Robbie Coltrane portrays Fitz, the foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, and brilliantly erratic, overweight criminal psychologist. The show was discontinued some time ago, akin to the character's hard luck, and as it's rarely aired, the opportunity of 24 hours of Cracker was pretty tempting. I deliberated on staying a few more days, but how crazy would that be? No crazier than coming here in the first place, my conscience pipes. During a break between Detective Frost and Whitechapel, I decided to have a farewell glass of port in the honesty bar adjacent to the library. Standing by the elevator I suddenly felt a presence beside me. We turned at the same moment and stared at one another. I was stunned to find Robbie Coltrane, as if I'd willed him, some days ahead of the Cracker marathon. I've been waiting for you all week, I said impetuously. Here I am, he laughed. I was so taken aback that I failed to join him in the elevator and promptly returned to my room, which seemed subtly yet utterly transformed, as if I had been drawn into the parallel quarters of a proper tea-drinking genie. Can you imagine the odds of such an encounter? I say to my floral bedspread.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Patti Smith collapses on stage in Brazil after suffering days-long migraine
Patti Smith collapsed during a performance in Brazil after experiencing a severe migraine for several days. Smith, 78, was performing with the Berlin group Soundwalk Collective, in which she recites her writing to a musical backing. Associated Press reported that the newspaper Folha de S Paulo said that Smith passed out about 30 minutes into the event while reading a piece about the climate crisis. After falling, she was taken backstage in a wheelchair. Smith returned to the stage to apologise for having to cut the performance short. 'Unfortunately, I got sick, and the doctor said I can't finish,' she told the crowd from the wheelchair. 'So we will have to figure something out. And I feel very badly.' The crowd responded: 'Don't be, we love you.' Posting on Instagram, the collective said that despite her migraine, Smith 'still wanted to be there for all of us and you and perform today' – Wednesday, the final date of a run of South American tour dates. 'She is now being cared for by the best doctors in the most loving way and will be back on stage tomorrow night [Thursday],' the collective said. Smith also signed the statement, which continued: 'Patti says that she is tremendously grateful for your patience and forgiveness and she sends her love to all who attended.' In March, artists including Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chrissie Hynde and Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles will perform at a tribute concert marking 50 years of Smith's canonical punk album Horses. They asked fans to 'refrain from posing [footage] at this sensitive moment'. Nevertheless, videos posted online showed Smith lying on the ground at the Cultura Artística theatre. Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective have collaborated on several albums since 2016, the most recent of which, The Perfect Vision: Reworkings, was released in 2022. Smith's last solo album was Banga, released in 2012. In the meantime, she has written several acclaimed books, including M Train and Year of the Monkey. In December 2023, she was briefly hospitalised in Italy for a 'sudden illness'. In 2020, she told the Guardian that she had struggled during the pandemic owing to a lifelong bronchial condition that kept her indoors. 'To be in limbo almost 10 months, for a person like me who doesn't like sitting in the same place, it's been very challenging,' she said. 'I feel like I'm part-wolf, roaming from room to room.'
