"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," sings Patti Smith to the packed Roundhouse, hurtling straight into the wilful, freeform mugging of Van Morrison's Gloria that opened her 1975 debut album, Horses. It's a typically audacious opening from an artist who, well into the fourth decade of her career, looks leaner, moodier and hungrier than anybody could reasonably expect.
Smith turned 60 last year, but age has withered neither her spirit nor her wardrobe. Pacing twitchily around stage in her perennial East-Side beatnik uniform of skinny jeans, T-shirt and black jacket, this wired figure still looks like the honorary female member of the Ramones.
Smith is touring Twelve, a patchy album of cover versions of rock classics, but tonight this stunning performer lifts even the ropier contributions. Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? is slowed down to a dark, subterranean grind, the lascivious celebration of the original transformed into something as bleak as a rape survivor's testimonial.
She has famously described her art as "three chords and the power of the word", and her sidekick Lenny Kaye, even after all these years, remains a relatively rudimentary guitarist. The pair gel superbly on the magnificently propulsive Privilege (Set Me Free) from 1978's Easter album, Smith dancing as if trying to punch her way out of her skin.
Her voice is in fine fettle on Frederick, her 1979 love song for her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, and on the neo-psychedelic wig-out of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. The Doors' Soul Kitchen and her own Because the Night, co-written with Springsteen, are blanched of any blues content and reduced to a hard throb of carnal need.
Smith adds little to Neil Young's Helpless, but her transformation of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit from diseased blues to melancholy bluegrass is ferocious. At the heart of the song, she spirals off into an inspired improvised paean to Cobain, rock's "golden-haired boy, walking into the sun": far from mawkish, her tribute is staggering.
She inexplicably encores with Tears for Fears' Everybody Wants to Rule the World, a platitudinous dirge that even she cannot render profound, but then closes with the no-taboos outsider anthem Rock'n'Roll Nigger, thrashing at her guitar as if not happy until her fingers bleed. She may be 60, but art rock's great provocateur is not going to retire quietly.
· At All Tomorrow's Parties, Minehead (0115-912 9000), tonight. Then touring.
