Garbage’s Shirley Manson describes Patti Smith as “one of the touchstones in my life”

nme.com:

Garbage’s Shirley Manson has said that Patti Smith is “one of the touchstones in my life”, who has inspired her “as a human being and as an artist”.As part of The Line of Best Fit’s Nine Songs series, the singer selected Smith’s ‘Revenge’, from her 1979 album ‘Wave’ as one of her favourite songs.She explained that Martin Metcalfe, the frontman of Manson’s earlier band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, turned her onto Smith’s work by introducing her to the seminal 1975 song ‘Gloria’, which caused Manson to fall “into a tunnel of love” that remains to this day.“We’ve shared stages with her,” she continued. “And I’ve met her several times, our history is long at this point.

But she is extraordinary. And what really strikes me every time I see her play, is unlike every other artist I think I’ve ever seen in my life, she is augmented by her age, she’s not diminished by it.“Every time she appears, she appears even more powerful, even more potent, even more challenging, and arresting.

She’s taking us to task, but it also feels to me like it comes from a place of real generous love, I find that really beguiling in her.

And I think this is, again, why she has managed to straddle all these decades in an industry that eats women.”Manson is not the only one to have namechecked the punk icon recently – Taylor Swift also gave her a shout out on the title track of her runaway new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’.“I laughed in your face and said, ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots.’,” Swift sings on the song.Smith herself responded to the namedrop: “This is saying I was moved to be mentioned in the company of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.