Patti Smith has revealed that she has written a song about the late Amy Winehouse.

The punk icon based the track on a poem she had written about the London based soul singer after her death at the age of 27, last July.

Advertisement

Smith told Uncut that the song will appear on her new album. She said: “The little song for Amy just blossomed in the studio.

“We were at [New York studio] Electric Lady doing a whole other song and I wrote Amy a little poem when she died and my bass player, Tony Shanahan, wrote a piece of music and the two matched perfectly.”

She added: “We wrote a very nice little song for Amy Winehouse, and I think a beautiful song for Maria Schneider, the actress who was a friend of mine in the ’70s. They just happened, like gifts.”

Advertisement

Schneider, who starred in Last Tango In Paris, died in February, 2011 at the age of 58.

Last year it was revealed that Patti Smith is set to adapt her best-selling book Just Kids for the big screen. The punk poet and songwriter will work with Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan on the screenplay, which they are writing on spec, rather than for a distributor, reported Deadline.com.

The book – which is based on Smith’s relationship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe – won the 2010 National Book Award for Non-Fiction in the United States.