Rock icon Patti Smith to play Prague’s Forum Karlín this summer

Smith was last in Prague in 2015 to play the entire Horses album on the 40th anniversary of its original release. That show and the two previous ones were at Divadlo Archa and sold out quickly, as it is a small space when compared to Forum Karlín. She also played twice at Palác kultury, now known as the Congress Center.

Patti Smith Group released four classic albums in the 1970s — Horses (1975), Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978), and Wave (1979).

Former Velvet Underground member John Cale produced Horses, capturing the band’s raw energetic sound and helping to push her to the forefront of punk rock in the US.

Her most successful album from this era was Easter, which contained the hit single “Because the Night,” co-written by Bruce Springsteen. This album and the follow-up Wave were a bit more mainstream than her first two efforts, and helped to expand her audience.

In 1988 she released the album Dream of Life, containing the hit “People Have the Power.” The album was her only new musical work until 1996’s comeback album Gone Again.

Her output since 1996 has been sporadic, with five albums to date. The most recent is Banga, which was released in 2012 to widespread critical acclaim. She referred to album as “a reflection of our complex world – a world that is rife with chaos and beauty.”

She has also been releasing books of poetry and memoirs. Just Kids, a reflection on her life in New York in the 1970s with photographer Richard Mapplethorpe, was published in 2010 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She published another memoir, M Train, in 2015. The audiobook of that earned a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.

Her recent Year of the Monkey, released in 2019, is a reflection on a year in her life after the end of a successful series of concerts. It is illustrated with her own instant photographs.