Patti Smith at Vicar Street review: Set is as sweet as it is snarling, with desperate yet unhurried joy

Patti Smith

Vicar Street, Dublin

★★★★☆

“I am happy to say I am Patti Smith,” Patti Smith wryly states, as she greets the audience on the first night of her two sold out shows. Joined by her band of Seb Rochford, son Jackson Smith, and long-time collaborator Tony Shanahan, she rampages through a set that is as sweet as it is snarling.

Early on the concert resembles a love-letter, with its desperate yet unhurried joy, but eventually morphs into a poem, a form Smith holds so dear. In fact, when she misses a few lines from Boy Cried Wolf, she revisits it unaccompanied, delivering, “torn reborn the cries of our dismay, are nothing to the wind but whose to mind, kings are lifted up and kings are thrown”, making it sound like a poem or perhaps a Shakespeare play, recently uncovered.

And uncovering is something Smith does so well, testifying as she does on Summer Cannibals and Peaceable Kingdom, or transforming on Dancing Barefoot and Ghost Dance – she is clearly in thrall to something Hilma af Klint once called “mystery service”. That mystery service is poetry, family (all kinds), and ideas and themes of unity and freedom, but there is duality also, observed in the Velvet Underground-infused, swaggering Nine, which coexists with the pared back rendering of Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat. She incorporates affecting stories, telling us about a man she once knew who loved his mother so much that he would always return to her “sad, beautiful face”. Small stories are writ large within her, and she manages to convey the beauty of the everyday without artifice.

Patti Smith performing at Vicar Street. Photograph: Fran Veale

Her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith is never far from her mind, as she tells us how some memories “never really diminish”, before a deeply wistful cover of Lana Del Rey’s Summertime Sadness. Loss is another theme in the show, but more a celebration of those that have gone. She talks of being with her husband on the day Kurt Cobain died, and their mutual shock, relating as they did, to his feelings of isolation. This frames the beautiful About a Boy and its “dream that dreams itself about a boy beyond it all” with its heavy guitars that take us into a searing cover of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.

In Just Kids, Smith wrote that “books and rock ‘n’ roll” were the “adolescent salvation”, and at least two of her covers harness a sense of youth and disenchantment. In ways they are both anthems of doomed youth, to borrow from Wilfred Owen, but Smith leavens this with her own romantic offering in Because the Night, which lights something special from within the crowd. Perhaps its magic is in its endlessly hopeful nature, something that encore People Have the Power leans into, and as she sings of the perpetual task that is redeeming “the work of fools” she reminds us that such work is not a burden but a gift. It reminds us about that “mystery service” again, and Smith’s unwavering sense of benevolence.