Patti Smith

Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1946 and grew up in New Jersey, where she worked in a factory after high school. In 1969 she went to Paris with her sister and busked. Back in New York she lived at the Hotel Chelsea with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and read her poems on stage before she ever sang.

Her first album, Horses, came out in 1975. It opens with a cover of Gloria, prefaced by a line from one of her early poems: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Mapplethorpe took the black-and-white cover photo. The record placed her at the centre of the New York punk scene. In 1978 Because the Night, co-written with Bruce Springsteen, became her biggest hit.

French visitors may like this part. She has long admired Arthur Rimbaud, first visited his grave in Charleville-Mézières in 1973, and in 2017 bought the house in Roche that stands where his mother’s house was, the place he wrote A Season in Hell. In 2010 her memoir Just Kids, about her years with Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award. In 2016 she sang A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm on behalf of Bob Dylan, who did not attend.

Play Horses straight through and listen for the point where speech turns into singing. Then Because the Night, and People Have the Power from 1988.