Patti Smith says that curating this year’s Meltdown festival has given her “a nice opportunity to pay homage to certain people”. There are two nights named after works by William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The latter night, in fact, pays homage to Jimi Hendrix (and features Jeff Beck); the former, however, is rooted firmly in Blake’s work and ideas.

“I’ve loved Blake so much ever since I was a child,” says Smith. “My mother gave me a wonderful collection of his poems for my sixth birthday, a copy of Songs of Innocence from the 1920s. I read his poems so much as a child that I thought he was a children’s author.” The Songs of Innocence night will feature Sinéad O’Connor, Yoko Ono, Kristin Hersh, Tori Amos and Marianne Faithfull, as well as Smith herself, performing Blake poems, lullabies and songs that speak of children and children’s rights.

“Blake’s work was important to my development as an artist,” says Smith. “He wrote the poems, drew the pictures and coloured them, and that impressed upon me the same kind of work ethic. He has instructed me both aesthetically and politically throughout my life. I would ask my mother, ‘What is a chimney sweep? Why does this poem seem so sad?’ “I really love the poets I read as a child — Blake, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson — and that tone will often permeate my writing. In fact, that’s probably my most personally authentic voice.”

Visitors to Smith’s website (www.pattismith.net) are greeted by a Blake engraving, and her most recent album, Trampin’, includes a song called My Blakean Year. “Many things happen in life, you go through a lot of strife, sometimes you feel beaten down,” she says. “When I wrote that song, I had been reading the Peter Ackroyd biography of Blake. He died dirty, poverty-stricken and obscure, but still creating. He continued to pursue his vision. That was an important lesson for me. You don’t work for the success. You just do the work.”

Songs of Innocence is at the Festival Hall, SE1, on June 18; www.rfh.org.uk/meltdown

Lou Reed
Edgar Allan Poe
Delmore Schwartz

Lou Reed’s admiration for Edgar Allan Poe was made clear on his innovative 2003 album The Raven, which explores Poe’s works through a mixture of songs and spoken-word performances. The links between one of Poe’s central themes — why are we so attracted to things that are bad for us? — and Reed’s own work are clear enough. But it was another poet who had the most profound influence on his work. Delmore Schwartz — once described as “the American TS Eliot” — actually taught at Reed’s university, Syracuse, in the early 1960s. “I took every class I could with him,” he says. “We were all in awe. I ran out and got every book he’d published. Having Yeats read to you by Delmore was an amazing experience. He was very funny. Especially since, as I found out later, he was so depressed — awfully funny for a depressed person.

“At the time,” he continues, “I knew I liked writing. I knew I liked rock’n’roll. I hadn’t quite realised that you could put the two together. I was in bar bands all through high school and college. I was playing other people’s music. I was the guitarist in the back.

I wasn’t even the lead guitarist: I was the second guitarist. Delmore opened everything up for me.

“When I read Delmore’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and saw what you could do with the simplest of language in such a short space, that was the tipping point. I couldn’t believe it. It doesn’t require a special vocabulary. If you could do that, then, ipso facto, you ought to be able to do the same thing in rock’n’roll — without missing a beat.”

This was the light-bulb moment that led Reed to revolutionise the scope of rock lyrics with his band, the Velvet Underground. “That’s when I wrote Heroin and other songs that ended up on the first Velvet Underground album. A lot of those things were written at college, under the influence of that idea from Delmore.

“I’ve got some signed books he gave me,” Reed adds. “I don’t have the original Velvet Underground albums. Over the years, everything’s got lost. But not the Delmore books. They’re in a safe.”

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