Break it Up: Patti Smith's Horses and the Remaking of Rock N Roll

Before The Sex Pistols, before The Clash, before The Ramones, there was Patti Smith. The poet laureate of punk, she burst onto a vacuous music scene in the mid-1970s with a raw and revolutionary sound - steeped as much in French symbolist poetry as it was in 60s garage rock - and an indelible, gender-bending stage persona. With the release of her debut album, Horses, rock music would simply never be the same. The list of people involved in Smith's debut is impressive - guitarist/rock critic Lenny Kaye, producer John Cale, Arista president Clive Davis and artist Robert Mapplethorpe, among others - but at the centre is Smith herself: brazenly intellectual, uncompromising in her artistry, she quickly redefined the boundaries of what was acceptable in popular music. Using all-new interviews with those close to Smith, Mark Paytress puts the Horses story in its full context: from her early days in New Jersey to her rapid rise on New York's performance art scene and the key role she played in the emerging art-pu...