Patti Smith picks her favourite movie soundtracks
Patti Smith’s artistry knows no bounds. Across her decade-spanning career, she’s traversed various forms, too. Not only is she the godmother of punk, but she’s also a writer, artist, poet, and film appreciator, having contributed to several soundtracks. The art of a good soundtrack seems to be something she’s really interested in, as she once shared her favourite cinematic musical efforts.
From her roaring and raging punk to her more thought-provoking poetic delivery, all corners of Smith’s music lend themselves to cinema. Her songs are sometimes whole films in themselves, fitting full narrative tales into her lyricism. So it’s no wonder that she’s regularly called upon to contribute to soundtracks.
For Peaky Blinders, she recorded a cover of Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’. The horror film Mother! ends with an acapella rendition of ‘The End Of The World’, sung by Smith. Her own tracks have been featured in Natural Born Killers, Sixteen Candles and the recent Wim Wenders movie Perfect Days.
But beyond her own work, Smith celebrates the work of others as an avid film watcher who is clearly impacted deeply by the soundtrack or score. In a list of her favourite soundtracks, she first picked out Naked Lunch, the 1991 film adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel. As a fan and then friend of Burroughs, it makes sense that Smith would love a film celebrating a writer she deeply respects. The score was written by Howard Shore and Ornette Colman, combining classic cinematic orchestral sounds with more left-field beatnik flare to create Burroughs’ manic, drug-fuelled world.
She also picks out the soundtrack for Lars Von Trier’s 2011 end of the world flick, Melancholia, where the soundtrack is a crucial part of the film’s gripping and unrelenting gloom. The music for the film borrows from another art form Smith appreciates as she explained that the score is “a lot of music from Tristan and Isolde,” a 19th-century opera.
“I quite like instrumental tracks,” she said, which is a very different type of music from her typically word-heavy, poetry-led music. However, her work with Soundwalk Collective as an experimental art piece has seen her delving into the world of instrumentals or soundscapes, where her voice is only one of the many textures going on.
Overwhelmingly, though, she offers her top spot as her favourite film soundtrack to a 1985 biopic. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is about the life of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and it features music by Philip Glass.
The soundtrack from the film is so powerful that segments of the music have actually been repurposed and used in other films, such as the piece ‘Mishima / Opening’, which was used to score the end credits of The Truman Show.
For Smith, it’s a stand-out favourite. “The Mishima soundtrack is, I think, one of his great pieces,” Smith said. “I’m friends with Philip and I often perform with him,” she added, but assured her love for the soundtrack isn’t a biased choice as she added, “but the Mishima, just as a fan, is the one that I’d listen to the most.”
