Patti Smith Quartet

Patti Smith will celebrate a milestone birthday on December 30, 2026: She will turn 80. And she’s doing it the other way around, so to speak: In July 2027, she’ll treat her German fans to another big open-air concert. On July 6, 2027, the “Queen of Cool”—as her close friend Michael Stipe once called her—will come straight from the Roskilde Festival to the Citadel in Berlin for the Citadel Music Festival.

Patti Smith last performed in Germany in July 2025: a spectacular “glorious” (SZ) tour with around 40,000 fans and sold-out concerts (or simply “jobs,” as the working-class daughter likes to call her shows) in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, and Freiburg, among other cities. Hardly any other artist is as perfectly capable of making even the biggest stages shine with her immense presence as Patti Smith.
“If you go on stage, you have to put yourself at risk”, Leonard Cohen once said, and there is probably no other musician who embodies this demand as perfectly as Patti Smith: Her concerts are one-of-a-kind performances, without a safety net or a safety margin, fully in the here and now and at one with her fans. “It is the artist’s unbroken aura that continues to this day to give Patti Smith’s concerts something special.” (FAZ)

The audience can witness another step in the artist’s transformation from a punk icon into a wise, yet still wild, and at times—given the circumstances—explicitly angry, combative shaman. Patti Smith, the “wild poet of rock” (Rolling Stone), is, at 80 years old, one of the greatest icons not only of rock music but also of literature, as her book “Bread of Angels: The Story of My Life”, published in late 2025, impressively demonstrates.

Patti Smith’s electrifying stage shows with her outstanding quartet (Tony Shanahan, Jackson Smith, and Seb Rochford) spark enthusiasm across all generations: “The grandmother you always wished for” (Standard).

“Gentle poetry, poignant lyrics, raging indignation: Anger still burns at the campfire. Smith’s voice navigates expressively through the emotions. (…)
For more than an hour and a half, she fidgeted, hugged, greeted, whispered, reminisced, admonished, and really let off some steam. She couldn’t have evoked the spirit of ‘Horses’ any better.” (Tagesschau, concert review)

“There’s no one like her in our time” (FAZ). A “rock diva” (NZZ) with a “charismatic stage presence” (Rolling Stone), a “master of adoration and transformation” (Tagesspiegel), “the she-wolf—more dangerous than ever” (SZ), or “Dracula’s gentle daughter—the poetess of punk rock” (Der Spiegel).