Patti Smith: Horses.

I saw Patti Smith in concerts about 4, 5 times before, but last Friday at The Roundhouse was an unique, special experience. Perhaps it is because she replayed the whole Horses album and that this album means so much to me? Horses, along with Ziggy Stardust and Lou Reed's Berlin, was the very music of my teenage years. Symbol of my despair, rage and powerlessness. Before Horses, I was a child. After, I became a teenager. It broke the safe bubble of my childhood. I awoke to the real world, funny enough, through the torn and ethereal rifts of Horses. So, this is a music I can never listen to objectively. It is loaded with emotions, from despair to exhilaration. It is the very music of my deep past and eternal youth.
So it was quite something seeing Patti Smith singing again as she sang in Paris, in 76 or 79?  I don't remember, I was just about 15 and in awe of her. What I mostly remember from that long past concert is how chaotic it all was. Utter chaos in the audience, we were standing close to the stage but in a perpetual motion from the sheer pressure of the crowd and on stage, it seems it was just as shambolic. The music was screechy and inaudible really, from the sheer loudness. I only remember chaos all over. After, I waited a very long time hoping to see her at the exit door but the wait was too long and I gave-up after about 45 mn. Would my life have been any different if I'd met her then in person? At the time, we were only 2, 3 people waiting outside, it would have been possible to make a connection. But, as most things in my life, because of my idiocy or lack of perseverance, it didn't happen.
But we met again, perhaps 15 years ago, before a concert at Sheperd's Bush. It was a friendly, brief encounter, with a few other fangirls around and she was happy to sign her book 'Early Works' with a large 'Power to the people', and chat. Though, by then, life had dulled me and I had nothing special anymore to share with her.
At the Roundhouse, again, I bumped into her alone in her lodge, before the concert, by chance. She was on the phone and hastily agreed to sign my copy of her last book the MTrain, but waved me off after to carry on her phone call. I heard saying 'sorry, there was 'someone' ..' So someone disappeared and greatly enjoyed her amazing performance on stage. She has something of the shaman and can raise an audience to a near-sacred level when everyone feels something 'is happening' She has this powerful, wonderful, amazingly positive energy that can send everyone spiralling into happiness. She must have such deep wonder and respect for Life that she is able to pass on a similar near-sacred emotion to people in the audience. Someone said the concert was 'biblical' Yes there is, (bizarrely because it is all far away from 'religion!) but there is a sense of a biblical, sacred moment going on. She has that force, that aura, that voice.
It was odd to make the link with my old self of 15 yrs old, to know I still was that very person today and for ever. It was a deep and moving experience as if Time, roughless Time, for once had been conquered and the dots joined, no more distance nor separation, it was all there, in a nugget, in fabulous Horses galoping wild for Eternity.

Thank You, Patti Smith, for that.