New York punk pioneer Patti Smith is to curate this year’s
Meltdown Festival, which takes place in the UK between 11 and
26 Jun. Smith will be selecting fifteen days worth of acts to appear at the Royal Festival Hall, on London’s South Bank.
Last year’s Festival was curated by ex-Smiths singer Morrissey, who programmed appearances by Jane Birkin, Nancy Sinatra and playwright Alan Bennett. Smith has yet to decide on the line-up but has said that she would like to touch on all aspects of culture and that the festival would be her response to these
‘material, greedy and exploitative times’.
“I never think in terms of labels,” she told The Observer newspaper. “I just see rock as a raw art form that belongs to the people, but has the possibility of merging with poetry, politics, the spiritual and the revolutionary.” So there you go.