The Fat Angel Sings

Patti Smith is to perform her classic album “Horses” in full on a tour to mark the album’s 50th anniversary Patti Smith band

Born in 1946 in Chicago and raised in Philadelphia and New Jersey, Patti Smith arrived in New York City in 1967 with dreams of becoming a poet and performing artist. Immersing herself in the city’s vibrant countercultural scene, she quickly became a fixture in the world of underground literature, visual art, and music.

Smith headed the Patti Smith Group — featuring guitarist and music archivist Lenny Kaye, as well as MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith — where she released a series of albums that bridged the gap between the art-rock experimentation of the 1960s and the incendiary punk movement that followed.

Her 1975 debut, “Horses“, was a declaration of artistic freedom, mixing Beat-influenced lyricism with snarling delivery. At a time when women in rock were often confined to the roles of glamorous front women or folk singers, Smith carved out space for a new kind of female punk icon: brash, commanding, yet introspective and literary.

Kaye and drummer Daugherty aren’t the only band members backing Smith on the road this November.

Guitarist Jackson Smith as well as keyboardist and bass player Tony Shanahan — who has been performing live with Smith’s band since 1996 — will also join her. In the fall of 1975, Patti Smith gathered her band in Electric Lady Studios in New York City to record her debut album, “Horses”. Released on November 10th by Arista Records, it has come to be regarded as a seminal and landmark recording that continues to have resonance and relevance for succeeding generations of musicians and artists.

“Horses” clarion call was: “three chord rock merged with the power of the word.” A poet and visual artist, Patti had begun improvising her unique blend of song and hallucinatory imagery two years before, appearing on cabaret stages and small clubs with the support of guitarist Kaye and pianist Richard Sohl. She honed her songs in this live setting, allowing them to develop at will, garnering an ever-growing audience within the Manhattan underground. By the time she launched a seven-week residency at the relatively obscure Bowery club, CBGB, in winter of 1975, her band had grown, adding guitarist Ivan Kral and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. It was during this time that she was signed by Arista president Clive Davis. John Cale was chosen by the band to produce the album, and it was released on November 10th, the death date of one of Patti’s most important influences, the poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Opening with an anthemic declaration of personal responsibility – “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” – folded within Van Morrison’s classic “Gloria”, “Horses” was a return to rock’s primal instincts, seeking to awaken the spirit and promise of the music at a time when it seemed as if this sensibility was at risk of being forgotten. The album’s artistic reach took shape in the free-form flights of “Birdland” and “Land,” where the expansive soundscapes of free jazz and propulsive rhythms and incantatory lyrics intermingled to provide an expansive sonic landscape. “Redondo Beach,” “Free Money,” “Kimberly,” and “Break It Up” presented a worldview both idealistic and romantic.

With the album’s final cut, “Elegie,” rock’s past and future were entwined within the “sea of possibilities” that became the present. Infused with poetry, “Horses” is an uncompromising exploration that helped lay the groundwork for what would become known as the upheaval of “punk,” though Smith and her band always attempted to avoid categorization: “beyond race gender baptism mathematics politricks,” as Patti wrote in the liner notes, adding “…as for me I am truly totally ready to go.”

Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic front cover photograph of Patti with her jacket slung over her shoulder perfectly captured this moment of becoming, and indeed, “Horses” was the beginning of a long musical career that resonates even greater today. 

The last time Smith performed “Horses” live in full was at the 2005 Meltdown Festival in London where she celebrated the record’s 30th anniversary.

At all shows, the Punk Poet Laureaute will perform the eight-track “Horses” — which includes “Gloria,” “Redondo Beach,” “Free Money” among other classics — in full for the first time since 2005 along with guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, both of whom played on the now 50-year-old record that she describes as a “three-chord rock merged with the power of the word.”

“Please join us to help celebrate the final ride of our irreverent thoroughbred,” the New Jersey native and ’70s New York icon shared in a press release.

As for whether Smith still has “it,” critics seem to think so.

“She’s still passionate, still fiery, still a dynamite live performer,” Park Life DC wrote about a September 2023 Washington, D.C. concert of Smith’s. “She’s all heart, and sometimes she stumbled with a lyric before catching herself, but it’s all part of being so deeply emotionally engaged with her material. If you haven’t seen Patti do her thing, you should make a point of it, because you’re guaranteed to get a great show.”

Playing gigs across the US, UK and Europe, Smith’s band will feature guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, each of whom played on the original recording. The tour includes two UK dates, at London’s Palladium on 12 and 13 October, with Dublin, Madrid, Bergamo, Brussels, Oslo and Paris also featuring on the European run. The US tour will visit Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia.

“Horses” was Smith’s 1975 debut album, and came to be seen as a foundational text in New York’s punk scene, although Smith rejected the term punk, instead describing “Horses” as “three-chord rock merged with the power of the word”. Featuring a portrait by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover, “Horses” has long been regarded as one of the decade’s great albums, and is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress.

“Horses” will also be commemorated with a tribute concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 26 March, featuring stars such Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, the National’s Matt Berninger, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O and Sharon Van Etten who will perform album tracks backed by a band including the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea.

Smith has weathered bouts of ill health in recent years, including on tour. In January she collapsed while on stage in Brazil after experiencing a migraine over several days. In December 2023, she was hospitalised while in Italy and cancelled tour dates there after being told by doctors to rest.

But her live performances remain as spirited and distinctive as ever, with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis describing a June 2024 concert as “moving, powerful and unexpected, a perfect reminder that, 12 years after her last album, Patti Smith is still in constant motion.”

Horses 50th anniversary tour dates

October

6 Dublin – 3Arena, 8 Madrid – Teatro Real, 10 Bergamo – Chorus Life Arena, 12, 13 London – The Palladium, 15, 16 Brussels – Cirque Royale, 18 Oslo – Sentrum Scene, 20, 21 Paris – L’Olympia

From the album “Animal Style” out May 29 2026 on Fierce Panda Records and Propeller Sound Recordings.

Step inside the extraordinary world of Yes with our NEW Ultimate Music Guide. This deluxe 172‑page edition traces the band’s evolution from their earliest rehearsals through their breakthrough albums and far beyond. 

Featuring a brand‑new foreword by Rick Wakeman, extensive archive interviews, detailed album reviews and rare images, it offers unparalleled insight into the group’s most iconic moments, their shifting line‑ups and the ambitious compositions that reshaped progressive music. 

the latest issue: everything you need to know about Record Store Day, Robert Plant reveals the contents of his record collection, we interview everyone from Celtic Frost to Pink Fairies, Lois Wilson names the 76 best funk, soul and disco albums of 1976, we review great new old music from Beach Boys, Rush and Rainbow, and new new music from Bruce Hornsby, Arlo Parks and Flea, and our Swedish correspondent brings us the 45 best singles ever to come out of Stockholm and environs (or whatever the Swedish is for ‘environs’). The key of life, folks.

I’d never heard of her but someone recommended a listen she was around in the 60s/70s and supported Hendrix and Muddy Waters amongst other notable names.

Ellen McIlwaine, was fiery slide-guitarist and singer who came to prominence in the late 1960s, has died aged 75. She performed with Jimi Hendrix in Greenwich Village and formed what was then a rare thing – a woman-led rock band – only to strike out on her own after she realised her bandmates “expected me to do the laundry after we finished onstage”.

Raised in Japan by American missionaries, McIlwaine grew up listening to Japanese folk and classical music, as well as the New Orleans soul and blues she heard on the radio. “If you know Ray Charles, you can tell where I got everything I know,” she once said. “It’s a little hard to see because I’m a different colour and a different sex.”

McIlwaine played the harmonica, accompanied herself on the piano, and sang her own songs with a voice that was both delicate and booming, echoing through the Gaslight Cafe and Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. But she was perhaps best known as a masterful guitarist who danced between frets and used unconventional tunings, inspired by blues musician Johnny Winter 

‘All To You’ has this stunning wild and free vocal – like a hummingbird darting here and there with pure unpredictability. Her voice and delivery resonate deeply with me, original and unusual melodies that I love.

There’s a joy to the song that’s been giving me a lot lately. She’s also a mean slide guitarist which certainly is something that I love to hear. The album cover for ‘We The People’ is just amazingly powerful too – a picture of her with her auburn hair flowing. It feels iconic and timeless. 

Album: “We The People” (1973)released on Polydor

In partnership with Rhino Records and Grateful Dead Productions, for the First time on vinyl, For the Grateful Dead, the music from the vault never stops.

The Grateful Dead Movie, directed and edited by Jerry Garcia and Leon Gast, is a documentary concert film which captures the band, their associates, and their (extremely) devoted fanbase during a historic 1974 five-night run of concerts at the Winterland Auditorium in San Francisco, CA. Which, at the time, were to be the group’s last shows ever. These recordings capture the Dead at the height of their mid 70’s predominance and effectively marked the end of the first act of the group’s 30 year career, as a yearlong hiatus immediately followed.

The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack now holds legendary status among Dead Heads. Not just for the group’s superb playing, but it also documented the last shows where their infamous “Wall of Sound” sound system was captured to tape, as well as the return of drummer Mickey Hart to the band’s line-up. It is now regarded as a pivotal moment in the Grateful Dead’s long strange trip.
Available for the first time in any format since 2005, and on vinyl for the first time ever, Mondo is proud to offer our first collaboration with the Grateful Dead featuring stunning audio and visual reproduction.

The dates were pivotal in the Dead’s legendary career as it marked the end of its usage of the Wall of Sound, constructed from hundreds of loudspeakers for live performances. The shows came before a planned band hiatus, too, which brought increased focus to the gigs. (The Grateful Dead wouldn’t tour again until June 1976.)

“Widely considered one of the greatest runs of shows in the Grateful Dead’s history, October 1974 at the Winterland featured inspired, exciting and out-of-this-world playing,” said Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux in a news release announcing the box set’s release. “Thankfully filmed for the Grateful Dead Movie, these five shows were the only 1974 performances recorded to 16-track analogue tape. 

This box set features the full 44-song tracklist originally featured on the 2005 CD release, configured for the vinyl format.

The soundtrack contains Dead setlist standards such as “Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones,” “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia” as well as pretty much every major song in the Grateful Dead’s 1974 repertoire, including “Dark Star,” “The Other One,” “Playing In The Band,” “Eyes Of The World,” “Morning Dew,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “I Know You Rider” and “Weather Report Suite.”

Pressed on 10x solid color, audiophile quality discs by Optimal Media, mastered by David Glasser at Airshow Mastering with lacquers cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering, and Plangent Processes tape speed correction by Jamie Howarth. This premium set also includes a 42-page hardcover book featuring an extensive liner note essay by Nicholas G. Meriwether, alongside rare and previously unpublished photos courtesy of Retro Photo Archive.
Original illustration, design and art restoration by Madalyn Stefanak and book design by Justin Goers and Chris Minicucci.

Only 3,000 individually numbered units of the collection will be sold. Each of the 10 audiophile-quality LPs are in a different color vinyl.

The news of this elusive vinyl soundtrack release comes about two months after the death of Dead founding member Bob Weir, who had also been the front man for Dead & Company, which continued to perform until August 2025. His death leaves only drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart as surviving members. Singer Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, died at age 78, in November 2025. Founding member and bassist Phil Lesh died in October 2024.

Described as “one of the sexiest albums in music history,” Marvin Gaye’s number one record “I Want You” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. In celebration, UMe has planned multiple vinyl releases.

“I Want You“, while it a Top Ten smash for Marvin Gaye in 1976, is not as generally as well-known as its predecessors for several reasons. First, it marked a sharp change in direction, leaving his trademark Motown soul for lush, funky, breezy disco. Secondly, its subject matter is as close to explicit as pop records got in 1976. Third, Gaye hadn’t recorded in nearly three years and critics were onto something else — exactly what, in retrospect is anybody’s guess.

From the amazing Ernie Barnes cover painting “Back to Sugar Shack” to the Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson string and horn arrangements to Leon Ware’s exotic production that relied on keyboards as well as drums and basses as rhythm instruments, “I Want You” was a giant leap for Gaye. The feel of the album was one of late-night parties in basements and small clubs, and the intimacy of the music evokes the image of people getting closer as every hour of a steamy night wears on. But the most astonishing things about “I Want You” are its intimacy (it was dedicated to and recorded in front of Gaye’s future second wife, Jan), silky elegance, and seamless textures. Gaye worked with producer Leon Ware, who wrote all of the original songs on the album and worked with Gaye to revise them, thus lending Gaye a co-writing credit.

Gaye had a big task following up 1973’s Grammy Hall of Fame album “Let’s Get It On. He found a collaborator in Leon Ware, known for his work with Michael Jackson, The Miracles, and Minnie Ripperton among others, and the two worked on the record in Marvin’s new custom studio, now known as “Marvin’s Room,” on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The title track is a monster two-step groover with hand percussion playing counterpoint to the strings and horns layered in against a spare electric guitar solo, all before Gaye begins to sing on top of the funky backbeat. It’s a party anthem to be sure, and one that evokes the vulnerability that a man in love displays when the object of his affection is in plain sight. Art Stewart’s engineering rounds off all the edges and makes Gaye’s already sweet crooning instrument into the true grain in the voice of seductive need. “Feel All My Love Inside” and “I Want to Be Where You Are” are anthems to sensuality with strings creeping up under Gaye’s voice as the guitars move through a series of chunky changes and drums punctuate his every syllable.

In all, the original album is a suite to the bedroom, one in which a man tells his woman all of his sexual aspirations because of his love for her. The entire album has been referenced by everyone from Mary J. Blige to D’Angelo to Chico DeBarge and even Todd Rundgren, who performed the title track live regularly. By the time it is over, the listener should be a blissed-out, brimming container for amorous hunger.

“I Want You” and its companion, Ware’s Musical Massage, are the pre-eminent early disco concept albums. They are adult albums about intimacy, sensuality, and commitment, and decades later they still reverberate with class, sincerity, grace, intense focus, and astonishingly good taste. “I Want You” is as necessary as anything Gaye ever recorded.

“I Want You 2″, a special 2LP set featuring bonus tracks, alternate takes, and rarities first issued on CD in 2003. Pressed on 180g vinyl, the packaging houses an exclusive lithograph, and introductory liner notes by R&B artist and songwriter Arin Ray.

Sun Room the Californian band – whose line-up now consists of vocalist Luke Asgian, guitarist Ashton Minnich, and bassist Max Pinamonti – played to a crowd of 500 avid Inhaler fans, offering sun-drenched surf-rock ragers like “Sol Del Sur” and “Something That You’re Missing,” and performing as if the West Hollywood venue was their own backyard.

It was a tour that would see the band open for the Irish rockers around the country and earn the approval of a large portion of their fanbase in the process. Steadily, the band gained traction – having cut their teeth in the Southern California house show circuit, the natural next step was scaling that live energy to match the countrywide phenomenon they’d become. “It felt good to us at that time, but if we watched ourselves playing four years ago, we would be like, ‘Wow, you guys suck,” Pinamonti says . “Four years later, we’re definitely very comfortable with each other. And I feel like as long as you feel comfortable, it’ll just get better and better.”

“Ritual of Chaos“, their brand-new EP, finds Sun Room at an age-old point in their career. Having exhausted their naivety as a new band and entered the ranks as a trusted one, the three-piece turn to a topic they now know like the back of their hand: Change. It’s a title that came naturally: “It was the most representative of what most of the songs are about, which is just being in the stage of life we’re in. Being in your twenties and having chaotic experiences with relationships and whatever it is,” Pinamonti says. “I feel like it presented itself to us, rather than us thinking for weeks about it.”

The music video for standout track “On Fire,” which flaunts the EP’s eponymous line: “Ritual of chaos every single night through the city / Just to see those eyes.” Pinamonti shares that the first thing he heard about the music video was that there would be fire, and I joke that could go quite a few different ways. “Exactly,” he laughs. “I remember we had the initial riff idea for a really long time, and then we made a little demo of it. Maybe six months later, one of us found it on our phone, and then we just worked on it, and it just clicked. It got lost for a while, and then we found it again, gave it new life.”

Despite these changes, one thing remains steadfast: Sun Room will always be a band on the move. They’re preparing for supporting slots with Flipturn and a headlining tour soon thereafter, which will bring them back to old stomping grounds and introduce them to new ones. “We’re playing in Montana for the first time, and playing in Pomona. It’s pretty close to where we are, but we’ve never played there,” Pinamonti says, “and then we’re hitting a lot of similar cities that we have before on our fall headline tour, which is a good thing because hopefully the same people will come back.”

the Californian band’s brand new EP, ‘Ritual of Chaos,’

This the fourth full-length from Manchester trio The Orielles has been self-heralded as a completion of a cycle – a return, of sorts, to the indie, song-led roots of their 2018 debut ‘Silver Dollar Moment’. Tempering the unfettered experimentation of their last outing, 2022’s ‘Tableau’ (where tracks clocked in anywhere between 50 seconds and eight minutes), ‘Only You Left’ does indeed emerge as a more structured project, roughly bound by a central polarity of “wood versus metal” – categories inspired by the band’s dual studio locales of Hydra and Hamburg.

It’s a textural contrast that colours not just their lyricism – ‘The Woodland Has Returned’; ‘All In Metal’ – but their compositions, too, with the former characterised by organic instrumentation and unfurling harmonies, and the latter by harsher lines and atmospheric closeness.

Most interesting, though, are the moments these two material motifs converge: in ‘Shadow Of You Appears’, stabs of increasingly urgent, Psycho-like strings push to the point of elastic limit, before its propulsive, grounding guitar hook pulls us back from the brink; similarly, ‘Tears Are’ pairs the breathy cool of Esmé Hand-Halford’s airy vocals with grungy riffs and, later, an exhale of simple acoustic guitar, imbued with folky, bucolic warmth. Then there’s ‘Ember’ – built on skittish switchboard flashes and a resonant two-note bass refrain, it blossoms into an anxious, knife-edge soundscape of oppositional beauty.

By the record’s final third, however, its already loose ties are slackening, and the closing tracks start stretching to fill space beyond their timestamp, curiously all-consuming but intangible and untethered. A circle completed, then? Not quite – The Orielles have never dealt in such concise shapes.