Twenty years ago Patti Smith and Kevin Shields appeared at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank in London. Patti had written a poem for her friend and one time lover Robert Mapplethorpe called The Coral Sea, a poem she started when he died of AIDS in 1989. She tried to perform it as a spoken word piece but could never get through it all, the sheer weight of the emotions, his illness related suffering and death too much for her to complete a public reading.
Performing it with Kevin Shields changed the performance for her- Kevin's guitar and FX soundscape altered the performance and provided Patti with a bedrock to explore the words and her feelings. They performed it live twice, once in June 2005 and once in September 2006 and released both as a double CD in 2008, each disc the best part of an hour long. It's not something one pulls out and listens to very often and it was probably best seen live, a book length poem set to improvisational and experimental guitar playing by the My Bloody Valentine man but when it hits its very powerful. This is Part 4 from the 2006 gig, a fifteen minute long section, the climax of the performance, Kevin's glide guitar shimmering, the drones and vibrato ebbing and flowing as Patti reads her tribute to Mapplethorpe with passion. As they egg each other on Shields' playing becomes an MBV style wall of noise, an ecstatic You Made Me Realise freak out section only a flick of the finger and stomp on an FX pedal away.
The Coral Sea 12/ 09/ 2006 Part 4
The section from ten minutes in, where Patti is silent and Kevin drones and glistens, is ripe for sampling- put a drum beat underneath it and add some flute and whispery vocals and you could have a new MBV track out before the band do.
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