‘We’re catalysts of the new plague’ – from the archive, Patti Smith interviewed in 1976

15 May 1976: Robin Denselow meets New York’s latest sensation as she prepares for her first British concert

She was sitting in a hotel in Notting Hill Gate, talking about her favourite subject. She was wearing a white shirt, a black tie and black trousers, and if it wasn’t for those piercing blue eyes she’d have looked like a rag doll in drag. Considering she had just got off a plane from New York, and had only been asked a simple question, the words were pouring from her in an excited and unexpected torrent. “Being into rock is like being into the most important, newest art form. I feel like an early prospector in California before the gold rush. I feel rock is going to explode and encompass everything. It’s like this fantastic plague over the universe and we’re in on it. We’re like catalysts of the new plague …”

Patti Smith is New York’s latest sensation. She’s been an artist, a playwright, a poet, and a rock critic, and now – at 29 – she’s a rock’n’roller (“though we want to obliterate definitions”). The press there have called her “the wild mustang” and “the rock queen of the seventies,” and right across the country she’s beginning to win a varied and fanatical following.