Patti Smith

Patti Smith walks on, dons her spectacles and immediately starts reading ‘Piss Factory’ and we’re transported, transformed and transfigured, a lucky few hundred of us in this sweaty hall not even the size of Whelan’s, brought almost 40 years back and thousands of miles away to a Michigan production line, a 16-year-old girl inspecting pipe (the way she says that, punishing the consonants: “inspectin’ pipe’), sweating in the summer stifle of her first shit-job, getting hassled by hardcore Catholic bitches who call her a commie for packing Rimbaud in her back pocket, but she won’t faint, she won’t give them the pleasure, she’s luminous with dreams of moving to New York City, never to return to the Piss Factory.

And now she’s here in Belfast in 2003, come back to her grandfather Walter Smith’s place of birth, still dressed in the dandy waif rags of black jeans, buckle boots, white granddad shirt and oversized men’s jacket, the rats’ nest of hair long gone grey, the fire still in her skinny belly. Of late I thought she’d lost her sense of humour, thought her arcane turn of phrase more Donovan than Dylan, wondered where the sexy, raunchy, funny comedienne of the Bottom Line bootlegs had gone.

The short answer is she never went anywhere, she’s still here, up for any heckle or jibe, by turns coquettish, harpy-esque, eager to please and brim full of fuck-you. I’ve never seen man, woman or ladyboy spit like she does, like a snake, taking aim and shooting out phlegmatic jets that go splat on the black surface of the stage.

And when her partner in crime Oliver Ray starts chopping out ‘Hey Joe’, she owns it – even without the Patty Hearst rap. Smith is still bold to the point of foolhardy; the act of dedicating ‘Wing’ to Bobby Sands shone a UV light on the crowd exposing their denominations like dandruff on a black shirt. But on the other hand, ‘Dead City’ is equal opportunities urban waste.

So, it’s the all-singing all-dancing Patti on duty tonight. She reads ‘Dylan’s Dog’ for Bob and ‘Land’ (version of) and ‘Babelfield’ for her late brother Todd: “I’m at the finish/I’m finishing/I step up to microphone/I have no fear.” She levitates through ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Ghost Dance’ hissing, “C’mon, gimme sumpen!” whenever in need of a shot in the arm. She tells jokes (“What do you call an Irish man sitting out in the sun? Paddy O’ Furniture.”). She does Robert Burns for the Bush mob. She delivers full-throated renderings of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Because The Night’ and ‘People Have The Power’ and ‘Pissing In The River’ and brings ‘Gloria’ back home to Van. Then, after almost two hours, she says her voice is shot but doesn’t want to go yet so she pulls up a chair and takes questions from the floor. Then she does a beautiful, innocent, aged ‘Be My Baby’.

And that’s all she wrote.