Credit: Far Out / Richard Thompson

The song Patti Smith never plays the same way: “Blank canvas”

Thu 10 July 2025 0:00, UK

Fittingly for a music genre so esoteric and truculent that it’s evolved far beyond music these days, no one can agree on who invented punk. Some will point to Iggy Pop, some basic-ass dorks will point to Sex Pistols. Then, others will opine that an underground movement will never have a recognised inventor and probably shouldn’t either, as anointing one person as its inventor goes against the spirit of community that actually invented the movement. Patti Smith might just be the candidate that everyone can get behind, though.

Not for nothing is she referred to as the ‘Godmother of Punk’. While this very concept will make a few dyed-in-the-wool punkers nauseous, she was among the first to break out of their scene of origin and make a splash worldwide. Never forget that the likes of The Stooges, Suicide and The New York Dolls were strictly niche concerns, still playing Lower East Side bars while Patti Smith was taking her debut album Horses to Top of the Pops.

While her gender alone made a certain breed of beetroot-coloured berk very cross indeed, this cautious step into the mainstream was viewed with suspicion even at the time. Especially because before punk was “punk”, it was a radical, experimental art movement. Smith was already a published poet, a fairly successful one, too. Her taking to pop music, even a form of pop music as strange and artistic as hers, was viewed as a sell-out move.

However, history has validated her and, to this day, Patti Smith is as legit as they get. A still-radical firebrand whose artistic vision is sacred, wherever it will take her. Whether that means finishing the lyrics to a Bruce Springsteen demo, and making a bona-fide pop hit off the back of it, or opening concerts with uninterrupted readings of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Footnote to Howl’. However, her artistic vision goes beyond grand projects and into her individual songs as well.

Which song does Patti Smith never play the same twice?

Smith and her band may have recorded their back catalogue and put it onto vinyl, but the last thing they regard those songs as is “finished”. Not when, in Smith’s vision, true art and true rock ‘n’ roll are constantly shifting. A living, breathing medium where anything could happen, still thrillingly dangerous and not something anyone, no matter how well they can recite Easter from memory, can truly put their finger on.

The best example of this comes from an interview Smith gave to Elsewhere in 2008, where she talked about the tour she was just about to embark upon. When asked about her tendency to improvise over existing songs, she relayed, “At least two songs a night are entirely blank canvases. We have a song, like ‘About a Boy’, which has a very classic beginning and then opens up into a blank canvas, and that’s both lyrically and musically.”

She went on to note, “There’s a lot of risk in that because when you leap into the blank canvas, you’re not always going to have a good painting or a masterpiece result. Sometimes it even fails, but that one even attempts that process is important.” What’s even more interesting about this is that the inspiration for this lies in one of the least traditional punk artists imaginable.

You see, Smith is about to go on the road with Bob Dylan, who has famously used his live shows to take existing songs and stretch them into new, barely recognisable shapes. Perhaps therein lies the truth of punk’s origin. Neither Smith nor Iggy Pop nor Johnny Rotten sat down and thought of punk where there was no punk before; it was an evolution. One begging to be born and in need of a thrilling artistic voice like Patti Smith to truly come to life.