Well, the music was ragged: guitars thrust out at peculiar angles, the piano sounded like it was actually prowling around the studio. And Patti's voice, my God, and the things she said. "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine..." no-one has opened their debut album with such a radical (and true) statement of intent, before or since. It was quite a shock to the system. It completely shattered whatever preconceptions I might have had about what rock music could do, what it could contain, what it could promise and more to the point, what it could deliver: passion, poetry and intelligence all at the same time - and once the strangeness had subsided, it became perfectly clear that you could, after all, dance to it.

Patti Smith turned out to be the flip-side (good grief, I'm regressing into vinyl-speak!) of glam: literate, allusive, predatory and strident, in a good way. She was utterly unlike any woman I'd ever seen in rock music before. Even if I'd known of Janis Joplin at the time (I probably didn't), any comparison would have been fatuous: Patti was totally in charge of herself, she projected a vision of deliverance and redemption through rock'n'roll, and unlike Bowie, there was no trace of ironic distance - bear in mind that at this point in Bowie's career, Young Americans was the latest release, and while it was all fine and interesting, he seemed to be receding into thinness (and whiteness, and erm, dukishness) it looked like ironic distance was all we had left of him.

Horses provided a set of clues that continued to unravel and offer leads into unknown territory for years afterwards. (Oh and the second album, Radio Ethiopia, is just as good, except of course that you can never experience that shock of awakening in quite the same way, after the first time...)