Patti Smith waited a while before releasing her debut album, nearly reaching the age of twenty-nine.

Perhaps because of that, she did not want to wait to make a profound mark on rock history.

In the very first line of "Gloria," the opening track of 'Horses,' she declares a phrase fit to print on a T-shirt, tattoo on one’s back, or carve into a gravestone: "Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine".

As she delivers the words — not quite singing and not quite speaking — only a piano is heard in the background.

It’s only when Smith asserts that "my sins, my own, they belong to me" that an angry electric guitar riff kicks in, leaving no doubt about who the savior really is.

Fifty years after 'Horses' shook New York’s art-punk scene in the mid-1970s — and then the entire world of rock — Patti Smith’s sins remain as mesmerizing as ever.

On a crisp October evening, she stepped onto the stage of London’s Palladium with the classic look of one of the coolest people on the planet, opening with "Jesus Died" in the same defiant tone that announces she doesn’t care about anyone or anything.

She carried the song’s spoken-word section to a peak before exploding into the frenzied, shouted climax of "G-L-O-R-I-A".

That transition — from subtle spoken poetry to wild rhythmic assault and communal chanting — is the symbol of 'Horses’' innovation and one of the main reasons it’s worth celebrating in full on this stage.

Like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed a decade earlier, Smith was both a bookshelf and a record shelf — a poet who delighted in being inscrutable at times, yet always accessible to the liberation and discovery that simple, powerful music can deliver.

It’s no coincidence she found — if only roughly — a common language with John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed’s partner in shaping the vision of one of history’s most influential bands, and certainly the one that built a bridge between high literature and the gritty underworld of distortion.

Smith created 'Horses' in the same rat-infested New York scene (both the literal and human kind), but she was groundbreaking in many ways.

She was a woman in an environment so masculine that calling it merely "male-dominated" would be like describing Manhattan as "a big city".

And she was not a "singer" or even a "singer-songwriter" — she was a creative force of nature who saw herself as a successor not only to Dylan and Reed but also to the French Decadent poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

In that sense, the long, deep, and passionate gestation period that preceded 'Horses' was distinctly Francophile — thorough and deliberate, yet still bursting with life and intensity.

That energy bursts forth in one of the album’s and the concert’s defining moments: Smith’s performance of "Free Money," an anthem for dreamers with holes in their socks.

"My mother always dreamed of winning the lottery," Smith once recalled in an interview, "and she never bought a ticket!" Now her daughter sings about a fantasy in which "we’ll redeem the pearls from the sea, redeem them and buy everything you need".

And then, in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the world — where real estate is worth as much as oil — the cry erupts: "Free money!

Free money!

Free money!" Even though, for over fifty years, it’s been clear that there’s no such thing.

True to its status as a masterpiece and a bold opening statement, 'Horses' set the tone for Smith’s career without ever constraining it.

In the second half of the show, which began with a charming but unnecessary tribute by her band to Television — the group that shared the golden (and grimy) days of the CBGB club with Smith — she performed several standout tracks from later years.

One of them, unsurprisingly, was "Peaceable Kingdom," written in 2003 following the death of peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip.

"As a mother, I found myself mourning for her parents," Smith wrote in her newsletter over two years ago.

This time, she dedicated the song to the Palestinian people.

She then recounted the story behind one of the few tracks in her repertoire considered a hit: "Because the Night".

The song began in the mind of Bruce Springsteen, who had been stuck with it for months until legendary producer Jimmy Iovine asked Smith to work her magic.

She had little enthusiasm for working with other people’s material but, upon hearing the expansive, libido-charged melody of Springsteen and the E Street Band, muttered to herself: "Those damn hits".

One night, while waiting for a phone call from her legendary partner, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, she decided to pass the time by working on the song.

The line "When I’m alone, I doubt / Love is a ring, the telephone" was written, appropriately enough, while Smith sat by the phone in the late 1970s waiting for it to ring.

"He did call in the end," she reassured.

The evening ended, as it always does, with "People Have the Power" — a kind of 'Imagine' for punks: a burst of naïveté without which it’s hard to exist, a moral call in a world that tries every possible path before choosing morality.

Yet for a few in the audience, this call came the day before the return of twenty hostages — some of whom had simply gone out to dance at a festival.

Since their return, many have emphasized the strength and encouragement they drew from the demonstrations held for them everywhere.

For fifty years, Patti Smith has been right — and on this night, more than ever.