Patti Smith & Kevin Shields
The Coral Sea
Pask/ Inertia


Two giants of their respective eras come together here in an unusual creative union: Smith a legend of NY art punk, Shields part of the Nineties ear-splittingly fine miasmic pop quartet My Bloody Valentine, in live recordings of Smith's poem 'The Coral Sea'. Cut from performances on London's South Bank Queen Elizabeth Hall in June 2005 and September 2006, the time frame is really just a footnote as the mode of delivery is timeless. Smith's vocal is familiar, her spoken word style not a million miles away from her song style. She breaks into song at certain moments and when it comes it is wrenching release. Urgent, deliberate, at times lilting, at others times spitting the words, Smith wrote 'The Coral Sea' after living through the death of her great friend and iconic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe from AIDS.

Shield's shimmering guitar layers are not the crystal waters of the Mediterranean, but a churning vast grey sea. It does feel as though Smith casts the listener adrift, a paddle to chart the course of an ocean liner, as she orates the stories of 'M'. It is difficult listening. The words are heavy, but her phrasing cleaves beautifully as it unfolds; other words knock elbows, intentionally perhaps. She has always been able to beautifully valorise art, and acknowledges it in her friend: "art not nature moved him. Nature, he had boasted, was meant to be redesigned, opened and folded like the fan". Beyond vanity, his life force was still palpable "He drew his nourishment from a banquet of eyes" and "he belonged to nothing, no one, save his dream, his destiny, and to this he was a slave."

Her verse would never be easy listening - spoken word itself, unless comic, does not lend itself to a leavened atmosphere. Nor does Patti Smith, and we thank her for it.

Narelle Walker