9. Patti SmithEaster
I feel about Patti Smith the way I feel about Kate Bush. What a completely compelling, uncompromising artist. At university, I had a girlfriend called Carol, and Patti Smith was her world. We’d listen every day, and for girls like Carol, as well as all kinds of men, Patti was a very new kind of role model. Even before you listened to her music, you looked at her photographs and album cover art, and she had her own definition of glamour: her hair was unkempt, she looked at the camera in a new way, and what she wore felt very direct at the time. Those pictures still look amazing. I could pick any of her albums from that time, but Easter is the one that I really, really love. ‘Because The Night’, ‘Ghost Dance’, the title track – it’s her strongest collection of actual songs.
