by Some gigs are dreams, like Patti Smith playing Horses in its entirety with her old band at the stunning London Palladium to celebrate the album’s 50th anniversary. But some dreams can also break your heart.
I was gifted a CD of Horses when I was 17. I’d recently finished re-reading Just Kids for the however-manyth time after buying it by chance as a teenager with no prior knowledge of who Smith was. Instantly, though, she was an idol. I pored over her writing and her story, and then I pored over the music and the lyric book, including her introductory poem where she writes about “the feel of horses long before horses enter the scene”.
This was music like nothing I’d ever heard before. ‘Gloria’ was electrifying, ‘Break It Up’ was dramatic, ‘Birdland’ was utterly astonishing, bridging the worlds of literature and poetry and punk as I learnt that Smith improvised the track, spiralling that story out of nowhere but her mind and the world of references that lived up there. She implored me to get smarter, read more, and live more.
Really, she implored me to live the life I do now in this job and in my other writing, even in my choice of holidays, as I pilgrimaged to New York just to go to the Chelsea Hotel.
All of this is to say that I love Patti Smith. Her influence on my life, and the lives of so many others, all dancing in their seats at the Palladium, and at all the other venues she’s entered for decades now, is insurmountable. For so many, she is a beacon of good things, so how do you reconcile it when she does something bad?
I really did want to keep focus on the gig here. It was incredible. Smith played with more energy than I’ve ever seen her embody, as those 1970s songs clearly still evoke her 1970s self. Seeing many of the tracks live for the first time also felt revelatory. Suddenly, I could see right there in front of me how insane Lenny Kaye is going on the guitar throughout almost the entirety of ‘Birdland’.
I could see the way a song like ‘Horses’ seems to almost possess the band. As Smith also scattered reflections and memories from the record throughout the set, the whole experience simply felt deeply special. I was sat there listening to her talk about her early shyness with my eyes wide and teary in awe as Smith feels like a vital figure as someone who built all of this through bravery and artistry alone.
By the interval, I declared it the best gig I’ve ever been to and excitedly shuffled back to my seat for the second set. Opened by her band playing tracks from Television as a nod to the CBGB era, the energy stayed high and special as Smith returned to the stage and dove into a ‘greatest hits’ type of set with a beautiful nod to the Palestinian people during ‘Peaceable Kingdom’.
And then it happened. It happened the night before, but I simply thought it wouldn’t happen again. But it did. As Smith was announcing the band, honouring both her children and collaborators she’s worked with for decades, she brought out Johnny Depp onto the stage.
Smith and Depp are friends, fine. If she wants to personally align herself with the actor, despite it being proven that she knew about the allegations brought against Depp during texts shown in court, fine. But given the controversy of the figure, I fail to understand why she would spoil the end of a celebratory and magical night by being so needlessly divisive.
The toxic impact of Johnny Depp is something the world has yet to fully unpack. In 2020, a UK judge ruled that Depp’s assaults on Amber Heard were proven to the civil standard, concluding that The Sun’s reporting on his abusive behaviour was “substantially true”.
That finding has never been overturned, even if the 2022 defamation trial in the US – with its televised circus and social media frenzy – convinced much of the public otherwise.
Now, Depp is back on stage at the Palladium while Heard remains largely out of sight and in hiding. It sends a chilling, sickening and disgusting message: spin can overpower substance, and charm can erase violence. That the entertainment industry continues to embrace abusive men is depressingly familiar, but watching one of your own heroes hold hands and cheer them on is its own kind of heartbreak.
I walked out of the concert last night, and so did many others, all gathering in the hallway outside and sharing upset and anger. The crowd split in an awkward two with half of the choir screaming out “what the fuck” or booing Depp. It was a sour and strange end that is hard to rectify. Can I still call that the best gig of my life when I walked out devastated? That’s something to unpack.
