To quote herself below, this is… Patti Smith performing in Vicar Street last weekend.

This was… truly something else altogether.

It was the wildness.

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I've seen her before, but there was a jolt and an energy and a spirit and a momentum to how that woman and her band played which marked it out from the back pages.

It just felt like the room - the best room for live music in Dublin city - was moving to a whole different rhythm. That the air was charged and no one was holding back as a result.

She’s the true cultural throughline now, the one who forges more and more dots together, the one who brings the whole crazy carnival back home, the one still standing and shaking and smiling and rocking the white Pro-Keds and drinking the hot honey and looking like she’s still kicking out the motherf**king jams.

There’s much poetry in all of the emotion which cloaks this rectangle of the Liberties tonight. Pay attention to the songs, the anthems, the lines of pure juju which she spins and you’ll find ways into puzzles and riddles.

We all are paying attention. The wide-eyed kids in the audience who are soaking it all in for the first time and could well head off to produce their own prose. Us olders and elders who’ve experienced this before and are remembering now the days when all of this hit hard for the first time. Recalling with fondness the people and places who turned us onto this seam of wonder in the first place.

On a weekend when the capital city is giddy as a goat about events and gigs and outdoor jamborees, this was the one which really mattered. A room of crackling electricity powered by Patricia Lee Smith.