"Sorry about the smell of cat piss. That's why we have to cover everything in plastic."

Says Patti Smith, leading the Guardian interviewer through her house, which "looks as if it's been squatted by a class of particularly manky art students" and is "dark and dingy and stinks of cat."

Excerpt from the interview, 3 reasons why she gave up music performance and recording in the late 70s:

In 1977, she fell off the stage, fractured her back in four places and broke her skull (she needed 42 stitches in her head). She was never as mobile again. Then she fell in love with Fred "Sonic" Smith and married him. Finally, she says, she found fame too corrosive. "I didn't have time to read, I wasn't studying, wasn't writing. I was basically promoting, going to radio stations, performing, battling bronchitis because there was so much smoke in venues. I thought, I see a lot of potential fame and fortune, but I don't see a lot of human evolution. Nothing will stifle your human evolution more than fame and fortune." How? "It doesn't do a whole lot for making you a better person. I found myself being more demanding, or spoilt." Was she horrible? She balks at the suggestion. "No, just impatient, agitated. The main thing was I didn't think I was producing anything of extraordinary worth."

As Smith talks, I notice she's eating a tub of something. It seems to have appeared out of nowhere. What is that, I ask. "Wakame. Basically seaweed and sesame oil." My stomach's rumbling. I could murder that cup of tea.

ADDED:

Would she like a new Mr Patti Smith? She looks shocked. "I would never have a Mr Patti Smith. To me, I'm happy to have the man as king. I would never consider a man in that position."

Now it's my turn to be shocked. After all, this is Patti Smith, rocker extraordinaire and feminist icon. "I wouldn't care if he was a gardener or plumber or physicist, he wouldn't be in second place in our household." She'd happily be subservient? "I don't mind. I have no problem with a man being in first place. I know who I am. If a man would need to be in first place, what of it?"

AND: I looked up "manky" in the (unlinkable) OED:

Brit. colloq. Bad, inferior, defective; dirty, disgusting, unpleasant.

In quot. 1939 mankey is a play on monkey (cf. monkey nut n.), and may not have any admixture of this sense.

[1939 J. Joyce Finnegans Wake 337 Your hahititahiti licks the mankey nuts!]
1958 F. Norman Bang to Rights iii. 124 He would have to have all his teeth out as it seems that they were all mankey.
1971 B. W. Aldiss Soldier Erect 121 Have you chucked out that dirty manky beer you poisoned me with last time I came?
1973 A. Garner Red Shift 14 That's your manky palate, lad. The dressing and the wine have to balance.
1983 J. Kelman Not not while Giro 163 Away you ya manky swine ye, cried Sammy.
1988 Coarse Fishing Handbk. June–July 48/3 In addition to one really manky dead rabbit, we also netted over 2000 small roach.
1993 Daily Tel. 4 May 14/8 We could have been back in the Seventies—the unfashionably flowing locks, the manky T-shirts, the tight trousers.