My partner, knowing that I’m a huge Patti Smith fan, bought me her latest memoir for my birthday a few months ago. The autumn had been pretty hectic and so it wasn’t until the Christmas break that I found time to settle down and delve into this latest tome.

It’s funny how the art and influences that we discover in our formative years stick with us and help mould whatever comes after (and reinterpret all the stuff that came before). They also colour our thoughts of the new, as we have a richer tapestry of references with which to compare. 

Knowing the influence that Horses (Patti’s seminal debut album) had on REM, my favourite band, meant I delved into her back catalogue through my mid-teens, picking up her early works in various 2for1 sales in OurPrice and even finding a slightly scuffed copy of her often overlooked and unloved 80s album Dream of Life in a secondhand electronics store in my hometown.

At uni, in the mid-nineties, word got out that she was coming out of retirement and had recorded a new album. I remember discussing this with one of the blokes in halls and declaring “It’s going to be great, or maybe it’ll be horrible?”. My friend, showing more sagacity than I possessed at the time, asked “Or, it could be okay?”. It was okay.

In the following years she released a stream of nifty albums (I have a particular fondness for Peace and Noise, the quick followup to the comeback album). In Cardiff, mid nineties, I was chatting with a colleague at work about how the venues here were rubbish at advertising the gigs they had on. I made the point that there were even occasional gigs on at the famous Coal Exchange (the place where the first million pound cheque was signed, back in Cardiff’s industrial heyday). We flicked through page after page of empty calendar on its website until one popped up in July (the 26th, thank you setlist.fm ) with the words “Patti Smith” on it. Illustrating my point perfectly, as I’d not been aware. Seeing her in that  half empty venue (and again in London years later, and then to a sold out coal exchange gig again in the early teenies) have been some of the highlights of my musicgeeking life. Such a powerful, pure, artist. 

At the end of last year there was a 50th anniversary of the release of Horses listening event at Cultvr Lab ( https://www.cultvr.cymru/ ), in which fans could come together and listen to the album in full on high quality surround sound speakers underneath a dome, in the dark, with eyemasks on, to fully appreciate the music. It was fascinating to experience the music in that context, stripped of any other distractions. It was really reminiscent of the Cardiff Musicgeek listening events at Chapter Arts Centre (https://www.chapter.org/ ) a decade ago. An island of calm in a busy world. Listening again I was struck by the snippets of backing vocals, the nuance of the music, which somehow I’d never picked up on over the years (and over hundreds of listens, in the car, on headphones, on bluetooth speakers on phone speakers). I know that my hearing has taken a battering over the years of gig going, but the hearing with new ears was really as much to do with the focus that that experience allowed you to bring.

So onto the latest book. It’s a more straightforward memoir than some of her more recent efforts, which have been more scattergun, after the critical and commercial triumph of her debut book “Just Kids” which recalled her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Bread of Angels outlines Smith’s poverty stricken childhood and recurrent illnesses, how she led a motley band of urchins among the suburban and urban housing projects. It’s told with a Dickensian eye for colourful characters (and also something of Dickens’ penchant for taking the scenic route when describing things, though I didn’t find it especially jarring in this context).

It’s a faceted telling, in which really critical moments are skimmed over and other, seemingly incongruous passages, are explored in forensic detail. If you’re looking for a tell-all expose, you’re not going to find it here. But in many ways it is a more truthful reflection on a life lived. I recognise how the mind does skim over things that seemed gargantuan at the time, with the passing of the decades, and often the images and anecdotes that are left are of the odd things, the quirk and the comedy and the tragedy seen through general impressions and what else was going on. So much of the pivotal stuff of my life is remembered through a lens of how I coped at the time, rather than the indescribable nature of what happened. 

And it was the accumulated tragedies in the book, followed by an awkward but sweet gesture from another artist that has meant a lot to me, that brought me to tears. The succession of friends and family that Patti Smith lost in the late eighties through to the early nineties was absolutely tragic. Hearing her write about that grief so plaintively and also having been introduced to those people in the earlier part of the book was almost too much to bear. But it was the minor act of kindness that broke my heart.

You can’t live too long and avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and being let in to how someone else suffered, and then navigated and eventually emerged from similar times is a gift.

It’s a lesson that I’ve learned from the best artists that I’ve encountered in my life.

Sticking with Patti, I’m also reminded of when she represented her friend and mentor Bob Dylan when she collected his Nobel peace prize.

In front of an unusual audience she stumbled, stopped, apologised, gathered herself up and showed the precariousness and bravery of the performer. The emphatic applause that met her at the end of the performance highlights that it can often be the points at which we’re most vulnerable that we’re most human, most relatable and most effective.

In a world where we often strive for perfection, and flawlessness, a reminder that doing our best is often all that’s required, and that there’s a crack in everything. Nothing is flawless. That’s how the light gets in*.

*With thanks to cheery Len.