Release Date: October 1975. Label: Arista. Producer: John Cale. Running Time: 43 Mins.

If ever a record generated thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, it was Patti Smith’s Horses.

By 1975, the singer was hardly an ingenue, but the force of persona exhibited on her debut album still had enough impact to shatter rockchick stereotypes (despite the best efforts of Aretha, blues/soul belters were still playing the victim; despite those of Joni, hippychicks were wistful, barefoot and pregnant), her lyrics battered down the boundaries between poetry and rock ’n’ roll (previously, only Dylan had taken automatic writing as far) and her voice challenged the very notion of a demarcation between sung and spoken word. Even the cover portrait created a stir, a black-and-white shot by Robert Mapplethorpe which presented Smith as an androgynous cross between a young Sinatra, Keith Richards and Rimbaud, while her take on ‘Gloria’ (transformed from Them’s garage rock grind into a heretical hymn of polysexual emancipation) erased the line between interpretive singing and spontaneous composition.