Patti Smith has more than proved her writing credentials, but she always doubled as a superlative interpretive singer too. More than that, she blurred the lines between cover version and composition. From the b-side of ‘Piss Factory’ onward, her approach to canonical material involved makeovers so radical they constituted rewrites. Only a handful of vocalists could’ve stamped their mark so indelibly on old chestnuts like ‘Gloria’ or ‘Hey Joe’. Her biggest hit, ‘Because The Night’, was probably the straightest cover she ever attempted, and even that came replete with lyrical amendments, Bruce’s blue collar romanticism empurpled by Smith’s French Symbolist imagery.

In later years, she’s kept her hand in, revising Dylan’s ‘Wicked Messanger’ and ‘Dark Eyes’, Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ and the old spiritual ‘Trampin’. One night in Belfast a few years ago she ripped out an acoustic ‘Be My Baby’ so ragged-haired and charming it sounded like the natural heir to The Ronettes’ definitive article. The point being, this covers album was always a candidate for an essential addition to the Smith catalogue, rather than a mere digression.

That said, it begins inauspiciously. I’d say some songs just shouldn’t be covered, only she’s proved herself Hendrix’s equal before, but her take on ‘Are You Experienced?’ is superfluous at best, the band’s rather lumpen stodge-rock no match the dayglo psyche-out of the original. Same goes for the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’. The original recording was a menacing war dance and Dionysian rite. Here, after a promisingly spectral beginning, it devolves into a by-the-numbers barroom bashabout. Stick with it though. Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’, against all odds, gets away with it: a committed vocal and creepy arrangement that renders the lyric as weirdo death trip rather than acid fantasia.

Tears For Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’ couldn’t be more different: a crystal clear vocal with a firm grasp on the melody, the players’ tough but restrained performance adding muscle to the original’s synth pop sinews. Cut from similar cloth, Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy In The Bubble’ substitutes Soweto swing for southern blues shuffle, and the lack of clutter showcases a razor sharp lyric.

Elsewhere, Neil Young’s ‘Helpless’ and George Harrison’s ‘Within You Without You’ are recast as gentle, open air Appalachian folk tunes - from ragas to reels indeed – and Dylan’s ‘Changing Of The Guards’ is stripped of the ‘Street Legal’ big band sound and a hair or two faster than the original, migrating through successions of labyrinthine verses. It sounds like Smith studied, analysed and metabolised the near novella of a lyric (“She shaved her head, torn between Jupiter and Apollo”) – in other words, she knew her song well before she started singing.

Ditto The Doors’ ‘Soul Kitchen’ and the Allmans’ ‘Midnight Rider’, which are both wonderfully funky, low slung and bang on the money, while Stevie Wonder’s ‘Pastime Paradise’ – better known to some of you whippersnappers as Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ – is tailor cut (it’s worth pointing out, her voice is in better nick than at any stage in her career).

Arguably the most controversial choice on the record, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ also boasts the most sinister banjo since ‘Deliverance’, the bass and guitar lines detecting previously hidden Zeppelin and Sabbath strains, the opening “Load up on guns/Bring your friends” line sounding less like Gen X sardonicism than a scarifying rallying cry issued by the rednecks who blasted Hopper and Fonda off their hogs at the end of ‘Easy Rider’. It almost works, but at a crucial juncture seems to slacken, the tension seeping out of the performance at the point where the obligatory spoken word passage kicks in. Mind you, the backwoods instrumentation frames Smith’s woodgrained voice so aptly one wonders what she’d do with an all-Dylan album, or a Johansen style stab at arcane blues, gospel and folk rarities.

‘Twelve’ is a solid enough collection, but one can’t help wondering if it would’ve been better had she made like Fellini and called it ‘8½’.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.