The Coral Sea

On two separate nights – June 22, 2005, September 12, 2006 – poet-rocker Patti Smith and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields performed together at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on a collaboration based on Smith’s 1997 book The Coral Sea, her requiem to her dear friend and iconic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (who took the cover photo of Smith’s debut album, Horses, among his many other accomplishments). Both hour-long performances are offered here. Both performers play to their strengths. Smith has always been a riveting public poet. Her words are meant to be heard and there is no one better at unraveling their rhythms and nuance than Smith in her often shaky, intimate delivery. Shields is a master of cryptic, distorted, ambient sound. Here, he masters the electronics to create sometimes static, sometimes thrusting waves of eerie, metaphoric sound. Smith turns Mapplethorpe’s terminal illness from AIDS into a moving elegy where Mapplethorpe makes one final journey to view the stars of the Southern Cross as a way of affirming life’s beauty in the face of tragedy.