Trailblazer Patti Smith on influencing artists like Taylor Swift

Dua Lipa admires her writing. Taylor Swift referenced him in her song The Tortured Poets Department, singing: “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith”.

Fifty years after releasing his hip, era-defining album Horses, Smith is hitting the road again and also releasing a new memoir called Bread of Angels.

“The idea for the book came to me in a dream,” Patti Smith told me.

A portrait of an artist at the heart of New York’s countercultural scene in the 1970s. Smith rubbed shoulders with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and poet William Burroughs.

During this heady period, he was performing at the legendary CBGB’s (though he told me that the club “wasn’t legendary yet… completely unknown”).

The singer-songwriter also refused to bow to the whims of male record producers. “I had a lot of armor and it wasn’t easily penetrated,” he says.

His first album, Horses, was for the disenfranchised and outcast.

“We were living in a time when, in the Midwest or elsewhere, adoption was rejected if a child told his parents he was gay. New York was full of rejects.”

When we met, Smith had just played the Palladium on the London leg of his European tour.

He says bringing songs that are at least half a century old to audiences of all ages, including young people who know the lyrics, “can make you cry, it’s very humbling.” “It still makes me feel like I’m doing something useful, and that’s a great feeling.”

Being helpful is clearly a driving force for Patti Smith; A poet, author, artist, activist, and groundbreaking rock song, People Have the Power is a call to stand up for what you believe in.

She wrote the track with her husband, musician Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who died more than 30 years ago aged just 44.

The song was “his concept,” he told me, “and it was for the people of the future, it was for the marches, it was for the protest, it was for just feeling some power.”

Since then, he was “going to marches where people didn’t know I was marching, and they were spontaneously singing this song”.

It’s “heartbreaking” that Fred didn’t live to see this. But it also makes him “so proud and happy for her.”

When I asked him if the new book was a love letter to him, he was visibly moved. It seems that even after 30 years, talking about Fred can bring her to tears. “It’s not a sad feeling,” he shares, taking a moment to compose himself.

Probably his best-known hit was also linked to Fred. Bruce Springsteen’s recording engineer had offered him a song the singer had left behind to see if he could come up with an idea for lyrics. He avoided listening until one night when he was waiting for the weekly call from Fred, who lived in Detroit.

He played the tape and said he said to himself: “‘This is one of those damn hits’. I knew it as soon as I listened to it. It was in my key, it was perfect, it had emotion, it was anthemic.”

While waiting for Fred’s call, he wrote the lyrics to Because the Night and wrote “Do I have any doubts when I’m alone?” ‘Love is a ringtone, a telephone’. (He finally called).

At her peak, Smith abandoned her music career, toured Europe and was chased through the streets by fans because she fell in love with Fred. He gave up the band to return to his first love, poetry and marital bliss (the couple had two children together).

The book is “a love letter to my parents, my siblings, my husband, my brother, everyone named and unnamed who helped shape me.”

He certainly lost more than his share of loved ones when he was very young.

Not only Fred, but also his best friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, fell victim to Aids in 1989 at the age of 42. (Smith’s 2010 book Just Kids chronicles their relationship, and was described by Dua Lipa as “an incredible book and a time capsule of where creativity really took off, especially the 1960s and 1970s.”

Patti’s beloved brother Todd also died at the age of 45.

In Bread of Angels, Smith writes about her upbringing with her usual vividness. His family moved 11 times before he was four years old; they were evacuated and forced to live with relatives; They moved into a rat-infested apartment building in Philadelphia.

But what stands out most in the book is how he developed his artistic ambitions from a very young age.

While most of us are still developing our fine motor skills by playing with Lego bricks, young Smith seemed to be asking big philosophical questions about life and being fascinated with words.

He writes that the poem “forms a map to the realm of the infinite imagination.”

He was obsessed with French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and when he was 17 there was a “seamless transition” to Bob Dylan.

“The words of both poets were as if they were written for the black sheep tribe, foreigners trying to exist in the period in which they were addressed,” he says.

As the 1.4 million people who follow him on Instagram know, he’s an artist at heart.

The book delves deeper into what shaped him.

Smith told me that as a child he discovered some Vogue magazines and became fascinated with contemporary photography.

“He was shocked, stunned, deceived. It was a whole new world… I don’t know why a little seven-year-old living in a lower-middle-class area after the Second World War was drawn to it, but it was a real thing.”

At the age of nine, very ill after contracting the virus during the Asian flu epidemic and the doctor saying he probably would not survive, his mother bought him a box set of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and placed it within sight of his bed.

Smith truly believes that her desire to listen to him healed him.

And on the family’s only visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, young Patti escaped alone to a hall of Picassos and “fell in love.” “He had fallen in love with art.”

It was his beloved father who took him to that museum. Smith was a sickly child; He had contracted bronchial pneumonia, tuberculosis, rubella, mumps and chickenpox, which kept him on “long periods of bed rest”.

His mother said his father actually saved his life when he was a baby. “He was born coughing”. She would hold little Patti over a steaming basin to help her breathe.

His love for her is clearly evident. But after her mother died, she and her sister took a DNA test to learn more about their heritage. Smith made the “shocking” discovery that his biological father was a different person. He reveals this for the first time in his memoirs.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little heartbroken.

“It actually kept the book up for a while because I needed to process that. A big part of my book was and still is dedicated to my father.

“He will always be my father, but now I have two fathers.”

He discovered that his blood father was Jewish, “100 percent Ashkenazi,” and that his relatives were deported from Russia to Ukraine, then to Liverpool, England, and Newfoundland, Canada, before setting down roots in Philadelphia, USA.

“I don’t know much about him,” he tells me. “But everything I’ve learned about him, I recognize him. I recognize myself in his face. I’ve only seen a few photos, but his attitude is the same. I can feel it.”

This discovery gave him answers about “things about yourself that the rest of your family doesn’t have.”

Smith praises his mother for keeping the secret from him. “That’s how amazing my mother was. My mother knew that I supported my father all his life, so she never said a word to make me feel like she wasn’t… she did everything she could to protect me.”

Patti Smith has always struck me as uncompromising. Think of those gorgeous, almost gender-defying photos from the 1970s.

It was at the height of the countercultural standoff.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we met. I found him to be a warm and thoughtful person with an intense aesthetic sensitivity and an equally intense love for his family. His losses shaped him.

His poetic art shaped us all.

She is also an ardent supporter of young female artists who follow in her footsteps. Dua Lipa. Taylor Swift. She tells me they’re “doing a good job” because the music industry is “dominated by women.”

He calls them “strong girls… Like in the song The Kids are All Right, the girls are good. They face a lot of things, but they face them well.”

Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels is released November 4