Patti Smith - Horses (1975)

 I must confess a slight preference for Radio Ethiopia, the rougher-edged follow-up from 1976, but there were too many good reasons to go for Horses.

First of all, there's the Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of Patti on the front, all moody, androgynous charisma.

Like most album art, it's far more arresting at 12 inches across, rather than the measly 12 cms of a CD - you see the faint triangle of light to her left, the fraying cotton of her sleeves, the hint of moustache. No concessions here, her stare tells you - not hostile but simply strong.

Smith had to battle hard with Arista to ensure the photo was left unchanged and this refusal to prettify anything runs through the album.

Constantly pushing and stretching her voice, she chews through the songs while experimenting with tone and melody, dropping into whispered poetry, double-tracking over herself.

When she simply sings the final song Elegie in a gentle voice over Richard Sohl's piano in a style that would fit on any of Kate Bush's first three albums, it comes as a shock.

All of Smith's fascinating contradictions are present in the first song. Opening with the immortal couplet 'Jesus died for somebody sins/ But not mine', the former schoolgirl Jehovah's Witness sounds utterly iconoclastic before breaking into a rampaging version of Them's Gloria, a three-chord paean to teenage lust from 1964.

Snearing one moment, pleading and whining the next, delirious a second after, she's totally in the moment, living it all.

Dressing in braces on the cover, singing about girls (side two also starts with Kimberly), she obviously playing with the public's perceptions here.

Perhaps this was Mapplethorpe's influence - perhaps she just wanted to be one of the boys and sidestep how women were supposed to behave in rock'n'roll in 1975.

It's ironic that she later gave up music for most of the 1980s to play the dutiful wife and mother while married to Fred 'Sonic' Smith (of MC5 fame), who proved a woefully unsuccessful provider as they lived in suitably bohemian penury with their two kids in Michigan.

But then Patti never shied away from paying respect to her male heroes. Rimbaud gets a nod in Land, the sprawling epic that dominates side two and manages to bring to mind Camus's L'Estranger and The Doors' The End while taking a bizarre swerve into Land Of A Thousand Dances.

Jim Morrison and Van Morrison are also clear influences in Smith's shamanistic incantations on Break It Up and the glorious nine jazz-influenced minutes of Birdland, building from slow spoken-word passages to heights of delirium where the words spew out in an exhilirating babble.

Smith was 28 when Horses came out but the teenage spirit seems to still burn within her - on the punky cover of My Generation that was released on the B-side of the Gloria single, she finishes by shouting: 'I feel so goddamned young'.

You can't listen to Horses without feeling invigorated yourself.