The Patti Smith classic that merged punk and poetry

With Horses’ turning 50 this year, Fiona Sturges reflects on how Smith overcame the misogyny of the 1970s rock scene and pays tribute to a masterpiece that nearly didn’t get made

- Fiona Sturges

Patti Smith never planned to front a rock band. In 1971, when the music producer and manager Sandy Pearlman approached her about making music, she laughed and told him she had a perfectly good job in a bookstore. Pearlman had seen her performing her poems at St Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery against a backdrop of feedback courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. (Also in the audience that night: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Todd Rundgren, Sam Shepard and Smith’s exboyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.) In Smith, Pearlman saw a rock star in the making, but it took four more years for Smith to warm to the idea. Finally, in 1975, her first LP, Horses, was born.

This November, Horses will be 50, an anniversary that is being honoured first with a tribute concert this month at New York’s Carnegie Hall featuring Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, Karen O and more, and in the autumn by Smith herself in a string of concerts where she will perform the album in its entirety. Horses which is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress for being a record that’s considered “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” – was not only one of the most explosive debuts of the 1970s: it lit the touchpaper for the New York punk rock scene. It arrived five months before the Ramones’ self-titled debut, and two years ahead of Richard Hell’s Blank Generation, Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and Television’s Marquee Moon.

In her 2019 book Revenge of the She-Punks, the music journalist Vivien Goldman describes Smith as “a new breed of autonomous, self-defined and uninhibited female rock star”. At the time, Smith didn’t give much thought to being a woman in a male-dominated scene – at least, not until men started shouting “Get back to the kitchen” at her during gigs. In the sleeve notes to