Patti Smith: Queen of cool's love letter to the people who've shaped her

3 hours ago Share Save Katie Razzall Culture and Media Editor Share Save

Getty Images Patti Smith, who performed in London during the Horses 50th Anniversary Tour last month, told the BBC that it was "humbling to see young people in their 20s know the words"

Dua Lipa admires her writing. Taylor Swift referenced her in her track The Tortured Poets Department, singing: "You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith". Fifty years after Smith released her swaggering, era-defining album Horses, she is back on the road and also publishing a new memoir, titled Bread of Angels. "The idea of the book came to me in a dream," Smith tells me. It's a fantastic read - a portrait of an artist who was at the heart of New York's counter-cultural scene in the 1970s. Smith was rubbing shoulders with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and poet William Burroughs.

Chuck Pulin/Cache Agency Patti and Bob Dylan hanging out at the Bitter End night club in New York in 1975

During that heady period, she was performing at the legendary CBGBs (although the club "wasn't legendary yet… it was completely unknown", she tells me). The singer-songwriter was also refusing to compromise to the whims of male record producers. "I had a lot of armour and it wasn't easily pierced," she says.

1977, Lynn Goldsmith/Arista Records

Her first album Horses was for the disenfranchised and the shunned.