Review:
'SMITH, PATTI'
'London, Commercial Road, The Troxy, 14 Sept 2012'
- Genre: 'Punk/New Wave'
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Our Rating:
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This was my first visit to the Troxy since its resurrection from the ignominy of the Bingo Hall years and its restoration to its full art deco glory comes courtesy of its new owners who, to their credit,have turned this huge old cinema into an Indian wedding venue that sometimes holds concerts and boxing matches and other events capable of filling its huge space. It must have a 4000 plus capacity because on as weekday afternoons it shows big Bollywood blockbusters apparently.
Well what a great venue. It's fully carpeted and has a very high ceiling and huge stage. I managed to squeeze into the front part that is down a step or two in front of the sound desk and looked and marvelled at the architecture, before gazing up to the very large balcony that appears to have booth seating. It could have come from a speakeasy. I want to go to more concerts here, no matter that it's in the Limehouse end of the Commercial Road. Either way it was good to be somewhere my Grandparents used to take my dad to see films back in the day.
This show sold out ages ago and it was packed solid by the time PATTI SMITH came on and opened up with a great version of Dancing Barefoot. There was only one problem which went unsolved all night: they weren't quite loud enough. Even with a real quiet and attentive audience that only went nuts between songs they needed to turn it up a bit.
Still Redondo Beach had a little false start before being the clarion call it always has been to many of the women in the audience and was played with a gentle reggae lilt that really suited Lenny Kaye's guitar playing and Tony Shanahan really got his bass going nicely on it.
Patti them brought us right up to date with a couple of new songs off of Banga, her latest album out on Columbia. First up was the single April Fool. It was really joyous and up-beat while Fuji-san is a little more ruminative and a good meditation on the feeling of being by a mountain.
Distant Fingers took us back to Horses and had some really nice drum and cymbal work from Jay Dee Daugherty while Patti was doing her shamanistic poetic summoning of the powers to get everyone going as she needed to summon up and shake out the Ghosts on Ghost Dance. This saw her son Jackson trading some nice guitar lines with Lenny Kaye while Tony Shanahan was tinkling away on the piano. Sorry I don't know who the other member of the band was.
Patti slowed things down for Beneath The Southern Cross which is a song that has grown on me considerably since first hearing it and is now like an old favourite. At the end of the song (during which Patti had played acoustic guitar) she went walkabout and Lenny Kaye stepped up front and announced he was going to pay tribute to The Nuggets album that celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.
On cue, the band launched into the old Richard Gottehrer classic, Night Time Is The Right Time. It was an okay version without the crunch that Jayne County brings to the song or the garage fuzz of The Strangeloves version. It also dovetailed into We Ain't Got Nothing Yet. That chugged along nicely before they morphed it into a fairly good version of Born To Lose and then back to the Night Time rhythm only this time it was Pushing Too Hard: the Seeds classic that they closed this section with.
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Then Patti was back up front to sing her tribute to Amy Winehouse, This Is The Girl, a song I think I need to let grow on my a bit as it's pretty good but hasn't wormed its way into my head yet. Unlike Pissing In A River which followed it and sounded as angry and full of bile as ever.
Patti then dedicated Because The Night to her husband and making sure we all knew that his birthday was on the 14th it was a good version of it, getting the crowd going mad before she gave us a speech in favour of Pussy Riot prior to Peaceable Kingdom: a song that really seems to be growing with each tour. She finished it with the first verse of People Have The Power to emphasise our right to pray anyway we want to.
She then closed the main set with a good long version of Gloria that had several breakdowns to build the show to its proper climax as everyone sang along to the chorus over and over as we all knew it was the right way to end the set. They left to thunderous applause that made it certain they would return.
They opened the encore by barking like dogs and Patti got everyone barking for the title track for the new album, Banga, which is apparently about a dog and I have to say seeing how much fun they had with the song and hearing how well Jackson barked really helped to make the song make sense to me much more than it did when I heard it on the album. Perhaps I will have to go back and listen to it a bit more now.
This was followed by a reasonable slow and muted version of People Have the Power featuring plenty more bile thrown at the churches that would clamp down on free speech. Unlike in recent years it wasn't played anywhere near as hard or frenetically unlike Rock & Roll Nigger which followed it and rammed the message firmly home that we all have the right to pray however we wish too. Then Patti managed to bring the song to a close with one more run through of the chorus of Gloria and was gone to another thunderous round of applause.
This was a really good Patti show and a full on band show too. Patti seems happier onstage than she has been for a long while, and as ever she is someone who I always want to see again and again.
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author: simonovitch
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Patti Smith at the Troxy
People Have The Power
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