Sonic Youth were interviewed for the ‘July 2009’ issue of Clash Magazine. Read the interview below
You’ve twenty minutes to question a band on a career spanning three decades, covering the release of albums so influential that half of your record collection probably wouldn’t exist without them.
That’s twenty minutes to engage Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley in conversation about their multiple achievements; their past, present and future; their own perceptions and perspectives on a band that still refuses to stay still and play predictable. Twenty minutes to feel fucking terrified.
Twenty minutes in a hotel room with a vocalist having her hair and makeup done – yes, that is the dryer you hear when playing your recording back – and room service serving refreshments mid-interview – yes, that’s the kettle boiling, cheers. Twenty minutes to find your footing and ask a pivotal question. Twenty minutes that fly by in the time it takes to draw your first breath after you step off a rollercoaster. Twenty minutes that even if they were doubled would still be several times twenty minutes too few to do Sonic Youth justice. Sonic. Youth. Reading the words back, together, now: shit, it was terrifying.
Where to begin? Back there, actually; but now you’ve made it this far, the basics. Sonic Youth formed in the early 1980s, after Moore moved to New York from his hometown in Florida. Fascinated by the punk rock scene, it didn’t take the guitarist long to hook up with like-minded souls – the most significant being Kim Gordon, who he not only formed the band that would become Sonic Youth with, but also married in 1984. While the band’s history recognises members that have come and gone, the core four of Sonic Youth have been together since drummer Shelley joined in 1985, guitarist Lee Ranaldo a co-founder from day dot. For their latest album, ‘The Eternal’, Sonic Youth recorded as a five-piece, with former Pavement member Mark Ibold joining the group.
If you’re feeling anywhere near up to speed right now, clearly you’ve never read a single thing about Sonic Youth before. There simply isn’t enough space here to properly explain the band’s huge relevance in modern rock music, their influence on a sea of ambitious songwriters who dared to buck convention for a shot at singularity, at originality that wasn’t bound by type, genre or demographic. Sonic Youth are an alternative to what became ‘alternative rock’ – too weird for the ‘Nevermind’ crowd despite Kurt Cobain’s much-professed adoration of them, too savage for the fair-weather hipsters, too clever for the jocks… but too important in the grandest scheme of things to ever be overlooked as anything but, to downplay their status, Pretty Fucking Significant.
Moore can articulate the above with greater succinctness: “I think some of our albums are discovery points for different people at different ages, for sure. I mean, those people that were throwing their arms in the air when ‘Bad Moon Rising’ came out – what happened to them?”
‘Bad Moon Rising’ was the band’s third album, released in 1985. It is, for some, the benchmark against which all Sonic Youth records are measured. For others, it’s 1989’s ‘Daydream Nation’; or 1990’s ‘Goo’; or 1992’s ‘Dirty’; or 1994’s ‘Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star’; or 2004’s ‘Sonic Nurse’; or even, a few months from now, 2009’s ‘The Eternal’, studio album number sixteen. “I think it depends on the person’s personality, as to which one of our records becomes that ‘moment’ for them,” says Shelley, “and we’re lucky to have more than one. We’re lucky that people can argue over which is our best album.”
Twenty minutes to try to focus on just the one album, the most recent album, the album that’s amazing in the way that most Sonic Youth records are in its embracing of a loosely established sound and the embellishing of it with unique traits only ever evident on single long-players. Twenty minutes to shut off thoughts of ‘Daydream Nation’ and ‘Goo’, to bite your tongue when you want to say: “So, Thurston, that video for ‘Sunday’, it pretty much freaked me out… cheers for that.” Twenty minutes that you could spend discussing the influence Jim O’Rourke had on the band when he became an official member for 2002’s ‘Murray Street’ album, leaving in 2005 to open the door for Ibold. Twenty minutes, several filled with talk of the ex-Pavement bassist.
“Ibold coming into the group was a kind of gradual thing,” explains Moore. You’re listening but not, because the twenty is ticking. “We weren’t really sure what we were going to do when it came to touring, as far as maintaining the support that we had with Jim O’Rourke, or rather what he developed in the band over the past few years. We knew we could continue as a four-piece again, which was exciting, but it was the live thing that we wanted to continue doing as a five-piece – particularly because Kim was liberated from playing bass on every song, and she could concentrate on singing, on performing. The five-piece line-up was a new chapter for the band, and while we weren’t really interested in replacing Jim – that was somewhat of an impossible task – there were aspects of what he brought to the live thing that we wanted to continue with.”
“Kim thought of Mark, because she’d played with him a lot in Free Kitten, and Pavement used to tour with us a little bit. We’d not really seen him for a few years, as he was kind of off the scene, but we met him on the street a couple of times in the street in New York and got reacquainted. Before that we’d really not seen him for years, but we soon got talking and then Kim said that Mark would be a good candidate for going on the road with us. We weren’t really sure in what capacity that was going to be – maybe he would sit on the side of the stage ’til his songs were up, and then he’d come running on! We really weren’t sure… Like, does he really know how to play bass? He seemed to in Pavement… (laughs) His personality is really congenial, and he’s always been a good dude, so he immediately locked in, and had really prepared himself to the point where he knew the songs better than we did when we were relearning things.”
Ibold joined the core foursome at the beginning of the writing process for ‘The Eternal’, the band’s first album for Matador after parting company with the major label set-up of Geffen. Says Moore on the move: “We didn’t really plan it – we knew we’d run out our contract with Geffen at some point, and then have to go into a new situation, but we weren’t sure what that would be until it happened, last year around this sort of time.” The label switch coincides with a more direct approach to recording, with sessions for ‘The Eternal’ restricted to weekends only, songs committed with a lot less consideration in comparison to the band’s long-players of recent history. That’s not to say quality doesn’t shine, as it does; simply that the band sought to capture and instantaneousness and electricity that perhaps wasn’t as evident on ‘Rather Ripped’, their last album of 2006. Shelley clearly enjoyed the experience, beaming as he rifles through his recent memory.
“It was like having a different project every week,” says the drummer. “We’d drive up to Kim and Thurston’s house and play for a couple of days in the basement; then they’d drive down to the city on a weekend and we’d try to record those songs we’d just worked on. It felt like we were doing a single every weekend, where we were really focused on just these few ideas. That was a lot of fun, and now people say the record sounds immediate, which I can understand. You kind of have to keep on your feet, because sometimes our songs do take a lot of time – like, we can come back to a song and spend ages thinking over just one minute of it. But for this one it was just: ‘Okay, we’re gonna record it this weekend… What’s my part?’ It felt a lot like bands’ first albums, made in a weekend, that sort of thing. Recording with Sonic Youth is always fun and interesting in certain ways, but the speed aspect to this album was very enjoyable.”
If you knew no better, you could easily conclude on a blind listen that ‘The Eternal’ was the work of a band half Sonic Youth’s age, but that feeling stems entirely from the fact that a plethora of today’s more ‘cutting edge’ rock acts are, really, simply recycling or at best reinterpreting ideas first coined by this amazingly important group a decade or more ago. Their touch extends far and expands wide, and shows no signs of receding. Hairs lose their colour and fall, faces wrinkle and joints begin to stiffen, but still the music sounds as fresh as the album you’ll be raving about twelve months from now. The music of Sonic Youth is as vital as that of Elvis, The Beatles, Charles Mingus, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven…
Your twenty minutes ended twenty minutes ago and, sitting on the Tube, all you can think about is what you’d ask if you had your twenty minutes all over again.
Words By Mike Diver
Photos By Phil Sharp
