Two music stars joined in an emotional and personal interview at the London Literature Festival, held at the Southbank Centre, the United Kingdom’s largest cultural center. One of the current pop divas, Dua Lipa, interviewed the punk godmother Patti Smith during a new edition of her Service95 Reading Club. At the opening of the event, the Albanian-born singer said: “It is a great honor to be here as festival curator, and I can’t think of a more special way to spend Sunday night together than with the iconic and legendary Patti Smith.”
Both women are, in addition to being world-renowned artists, passionate readers. During their conversation, Dua Lipa and Patti Smith explored the potential of literature as a foundation for strengthening a life devoted to the pursuit of creativity, as well as the power of artistic freedom. The two maintained a tender and sincere conversation about the power of the written word to capture hard experiences and make room for difficult emotions.
Patti Smith, freshly arrived from Oviedo, where she received the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts 2026, stated that «books are a precious asset» and shared reflections on the everyday gestures, big and small, that constitute her “bread of angels”. This is the title that the writer and poet has given to her memoirs, described as a hymn to creation, love and hope.
A message she also underscored during her speech at the Teatro Campoamor. Then Patti noted that the prize she had been honored with serves as an incentive «to keep working and evolving» and to find «new ways of helping people in the best possible way» and to «give hope and stability» to the new generations.
Patti Smith and Dua Lipa in Conversation
Dua Lipa, who stunned with a sheer top from Schiaparelli’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection crafted in black transparent mesh, spoke in depth with Patti Smith about her memoirs. The two revisited some of the most important passages of this book, which traces from her post-World War II childhood in Philadelphia and her adolescence in New Jersey, to her solidification as a punk icon with the album Horses.
The two singers, during the interview.
In one of the most emotional moments of the chat, the performer of People Have the Power revealed to Dua Lipa that her entire series of autobiographical books arose from a promise she made to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe hours before his death in 1989. She then swore to him that one day she would write the story of both of them. At another moment, the two revealed which song they would have liked to have written for the other: Patti chose Houdini by Dua Lipa, while the British singer chose the American’s classic Dancing Barefoot.
The conversation also touched on Patti Smith’s family and her early experiences with art, from meeting Picasso at the age of 12 to her disaffection with the church when they told her there was no room for art there. They also discussed the fame that has always been hard for the American to accept and explored questions around the healing power of writing. And there was a moving memory of the singer’s late husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and his transformative and lasting influence on her life.
Dua Lipa’s Reading Club
The conversation between Dua Lipa and Patti Smith has been the latest in her successful Service95 reading club. In this podcast, she reviews and recommends books, as well as interviewing esteemed writers. “For me, one of the best things about reading is being able to chat with my friends about the book that fascinated me,” the singer stated in Spotify’s official press release when she launched this project in 2021.
Since then she has spoken with two Nobel Prize in Literature laureates such as Olga Tokarczuk and Kazuo Ishiguro and with other renowned writers such as Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith or Percival Everett. For now, the only Spanish author Dua Lipa has interviewed is Alana S. Portero. The two talked about her novel The Bad Habit, in a conversation that tackled topics such as transgender identity and the raw portrait of Madrid in the eighties and nineties.
