Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Sonic Youth, figureheads of New York experimental rock, were seldom far from my turntable in the 1980s and 1990s. I and like-minded friends pored over their masterpiece Daydream Nation when it came out in 1988 as a previous generation had The Dark Side of the Moon. To this agog English youth, they were the very acme of remote downtown cool. Never would I have imagined meeting their frontman in — of all places — the leafy south-west London suburb of Barnes.“We didn’t know anything about this area really,” Thurston Moore says of moving to Barnes with his wife, Eva Moore. They have lived in London since 2012, but mostly in Hackney, the inner-city borough with a more New York-ish mix of grit and gentrification.“We were forcibly relocated because the landlord wanted the real estate back,” Moore says. Hence the switch across the city to the haven of green open spaces and parents with strollers, where even the traffic seems to murmur politely. “We came out and went: ‘Oh, it’s quiet. And there are ducks and swans, and the Thames is right out there,’” he recalls. Crucially, there is also a record store. “That was, you know, a carrot.”The idol of my teenage stereo is now 66. He had a health scare last year with atrial fibrillation, a heart rhythm irregularity, which caused him to cancel a US book tour promoting his memoir Sonic Life. But he looks full of beans when we meet. His tousled sandy hair is much as it was in his Sonic Youth days. He chuckles and laughs more than an avatar of downtown cool should. And he has a fine solo album out, Flow Critical Lucidity, his sixth since Sonic Youth broke up in 2011.Characteristically — the character here being that of a life-long music geek, not the hip NYC radical of my youthful imaginings — Moore has scouted out Barnes’s obscure rock credentials. Marc Bolan’s death in a car crash in 1977 is one. “There’s a funky memorial, hidden behind some stones and bushes,” he says. “You have to really find it — it took me a while.”Another is Olympic Studios, where Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones made albums in the 1960s and 1970s. Now a cinema, it has a large loft space that is currently being converted into a recording studio, a nod to the building’s vaunted past. Moore has made this space into an unofficial headquarters, and it is there that I find myself sitting opposite him, in a room with Jimi Hendrix and Procol Harum posters, a piano, a row of electric guitars and amplifiers. Stretching out his long legs, Sonic Youth’s ex-frontman looks at home.“In some ways, this record was an epiphany for me,” he says of Flow Critical Lucidity. “That’s to say, letting things breathe a bit more, in relation to the last three or four records, which were very tightly composed. They were very hermetic in a way. It was all about the song, and everything was sewed up.”Made with regular accompanists, including My Bloody Valentine’s powerhouse bassist Deb Googe, the album will awaken a nostalgic ache in Sonic Youth fans. Moore’s drawled vocals are even more unchanged than his sandy hair. His guitar shares the same distinctively tuned tones as his old band’s work. One solo (this is meant as a compliment) resembles the incessant whine of a dentist’s tool.He co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981 while living in a dismal rented apartment in Manhattan’s then-perilous Alphabet City. He and his bandmates were part of the city’s so-called no-wave scene, an avant-garde rejection of rock clichés. “We got a lot of heat as we developed, claiming that we were becoming more of a traditionally song-based band, even though we were still employing lots of different weirdo ideas,” Moore recalls.The band split up in 2011 after his marriage to co-singer and bassist Kim Gordon collapsed. Moore attracted heat for that too (he was having an affair with his now second wife, a book editor whom he came to London with and married in 2020). But the tut-tutting has faded, and he has since settled into the life of an underground music luminary. He and Eva run a record label and publishing imprint. She writes many of the lyrics in his music.Dream states are a recurrent topic in the new songs. They have a hypnotic quality, as though unspooling in time. The effect has been influenced by Moore’s involvement in London’s free improvisation scene, a no-rules type of impromptu music-making.“Some of the greatest players are here,” he says, reeling off names such as David Toop, Evan Parker and Maggie Nicols. Moore has frequently performed with them. “I still don’t consider myself, quote-unquote, a real guitar player,” he says. “So it makes me a little anxious sometimes when I come to a session. I’m like: ‘You do realise I’m not going to be able to make those moves that possibly I should know now after 40 years of doing this?’”A convoluted question about musical nostalgia prompts him to wonder whether I am really asking about the chances of Sonic Youth getting back together. It turns out he doesn’t have a problem with it — nostalgia, that is. A Sex Pistols obsessive, he tried and failed to get tickets for an August gig by the punk old-timers. “I don’t really enjoy going out to venues so much any more,” he admits. “It’s like going to the airport. You’re being patted down, you’re being ID-ed. I really want to experience the music without all this claptrap.”As for Sonic Youth reuniting, he claims offhandedly that they should do it for free, but “the doors close when I say that”. The viral clip of Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell physically attacking his bandmate Dave Navarro at a recent reunion show by Sonic Youth’s alt-rock peers is a warning that doors are sometimes best kept shut. “The first thing I said after watching the Jane’s Addiction fight was: reunions are a terrible idea!” Moore says, with a hearty burst of laughter.‘Flow Critical Lucidity’ is released by Daydream Library SeriesFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
