Teenage-boy thin, ash-pale, she grins widely at us from beneath her greying, famously conditioner-avoiding shag. Her moustache (that’s right), only faintly visible but undeniably there, makes you think simultaneously of Frida Kahlo’s thundery brow and a lanky Rembrandt hero in a fray-wristed secondhand suitjacket. You watch the 50-something Patti Smith sashay with mock girlie-show suggestiveness one minute, and manhandle the mic stand like a confident lover the next, and even though she’s inarguably the most female thing you’ve clapped eyes on since seeing her musical godchild PJ Harvey a few weeks ago, you’ll look at her too-baggy jeans and it will take you a quarter of a second to remember that there isn’t, as it were, anything in there.
So, yes, she still inspires amazement and admiration, not to say countless post-doc theses on socio-sexual iconography, just by swaggering onstage. And yes, incredibly, her voice hasn’t lost an ounce of strength in 25 years: it still possesses its beautiful stray-cat scratchiness (when she chats and murmurs) on the one hand, as well as the sobbing, wild vibrato of a girl-group heroine in full heartbreaky flow (as in ‘Because The Night’) on the other.
Her songwriting, however, ain’t what it used to be. Tonight’s set is drawn mostly from this year’s Trampin’ LP, as well as various Democratic- convention-manque moments from elsewhere in her career (‘People Have The Power’, with a guesting Steve Wickham on fiddle); and all the anti-war, pro-democracy sentiments you’d expect are present and correct. But some seriously old reference points (an invocation of MLK; a new song called ‘Gandhi’) and the use of utterly clichéd language (“Up the revolution!” etc) are just a few of many things tonight that provide an unsettling sensation of like-the-Nineties-never-happened. As well, musically, in place of her incantatory poetics of old, it’s all late-Springsteen workshirt-rock and muddy, imagination-free barroom-blues, delivered by Patti’s band via all kinds of creaky fretboard noodling and leather-vested, too-old shapethrowing. Of the new music, only ‘Radio Baghdad’, its documentary-quality impassiveness suddenly bursting into flame at its screamed apex, reaches escape velocity.
Mind you, for me she’s always been about that dreamlike, quasi-sexual song shape of hers. You know the one: it simmers up, from calm and motionlessness, over time you won’t be able to measure afterward, into a shouting gallop – as in a thundering, explosive ‘Gloria’, which, as tonight’s set closer, makes anything lumpen or too-mannered that may have preceded it okay. She mightn’t be leading from the front anymore, but she does wear her own legend, like everything else she’s sporting tonight, with authority.