Art-punk band Sonic Youth talk to David Peschek

It's been nearly 30 years since Sonic Youth first blew the minds of music fans - and they're not flagging. The art-punk heroes talk to David Peschek

'Bands are usually a young man's game," says Thurston Moore, the guitarist with Sonic Youth for nearly 30 years. "Historically, they don't stay together. We never had any animosity towards each other. I guess we never felt like we hit a wall with what we were doing. We never really had any ambitions for reaching a certain goal. We never had a hit we had to repeat."

"Lots of bands don't survive that kind of spike in popularity, or ego, or finances," agrees fellow guitarist Lee Ranaldo. "We came into this feeling fairly serious about ourselves as artists and this is our medium, which happens to involve a collaborative group - it's just never gotten boring or rote. It's still incredibly fulfilling and interesting."

Sonic Youth played their first gig 28 years ago this month, at the Noise Fest in New York City. Few bands stay together for that long, and fewer still remain so vital. The quintessential New York art-rock group have survived and flourished both through a rare internal democracy (Ranaldo likens their composition process to "making a group sculpture") and, it seems, by simply being too busy to become disaffected. Sonic Youth's discography is a sprawling affair, now encompassing 16 official studio albums, various compilations and a slew of self-released, more experimental releases.

All four core members (Moore, Kim Gordon, Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, who have recently been joined by former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold) work extensively outside the group, producing poetry and visual art, solo albums and collaborations with other musicians and artists, and running record labels (Moore's Ecstatic Peace!; Shelley's Smells Like ..., and the band's own SYR imprint). They even have an exhibition on tour, Sensational Fix, which situates the band within a wider artistic community, and features work by artists such as Gerhard Richter - anyone, Ranaldo explains, the band have "worked with, been friendly with, or, beyond that, just liked".

Their new record taps into the rough-and-ready energy of a trio of late-80s releases - Evol, Sister and Daydream Nation - on which more conventional song structures coalesced out of powerful dissonance to vertigo-inducing effect. It doesn't feel nostalgic, but it is a thrilling primer in everything that made the band exciting in the first place. No wonder, then, that they have called it The Eternal. When Ranaldo talks of the no-wave movement that birthed the band, he could just as well be talking about Sonic Youth in 2009: "You went to those gigs and felt liberated and rejuvenated, you were seeing something being created anew."

It's hard to imagine Sonic Youth existing anywhere other than Manhattan; they are in America but not quite of it. More than that, Sonic Youth represent the intersection of multiple artistic legacies in a way that perhaps only New York could foster. In their DNA you find the Beat poets (the new song Leaky Lifeboat is inspired by Beat alumnus Gregory Corso); the breakneck thrill of early 80s hardcore punk refracted through the freer, spikier diversions of no wave; and a local musical lineage that also includes Ornette Coleman, Patti Smith and Television. You find what has been hailed as the most innovative use of rock guitar since Jimi Hendrix, and you find the Velvet Underground - themselves a paradigm of art meeting rock'n'roll, of the hybridisation of pop with formal experimentation.

There's certainly something Warholian about the band's playful pragmatism. They were heroes of the underground in the 80s, who helped establish the network that supported alternative music in the US and became powerful patrons of new music; to this day, they take care in selecting bands to tour with, because it's "about fostering a sense of community", according to Ranaldo. But in 1990 they signed to Geffen, a major label, hoping for better distribution. "Gary Gersh, who signed us, had some sort of idea that 'You guys could be the next Pink Floyd,'" Gordon remembers with a smile.

"There was a perception that we could be this professional, progressive rock band coming out of the American underground," Moore continues. "Possibly. But I don't think anyone knew what was going to happen."

What happened was that Sonic Youth experimented with big-budget production for a couple of albums and had a handful of near-hits. Then, with credibility undented, they continued to put out records - most of which, Ranaldo acknowledges, would have got any other band dropped. In 2008, they even released a compilation album through Starbucks, to howls of outrage from purists - but that hasn't stopped The Eternal, their first set of new material since 2006, being one of this year's most anticipated releases.

Ranaldo is sanguine about the Starbucks record: "'It didn't take a lot of blood and sweat from us. We thought we'd try it and see what happens. There's a certain side to this group that likes perversity, and that's a pretty perverse concept. At that time, Starbucks were selling records when no one else was. The majors were throwing up their hands. The irony is, for all the spewing it caused on the blogs, it is our most rare record. I have never seen a copy in a store, and I've never met anyone who's seen a copy in a store."

For The Eternal, they are back on an independent label, Matador, which has offered a home to scores of the major American alternative bands of the last 20 years or so - Guided By Voices, Cat Power, Pavement. Do they now feel freed from what Gordon sang about in Kool Thing, their first single for Geffen: "white corporate aggression"? "Yes," Gordon replies with an emphatic laugh, "I do!"

"[Geffen] weren't doing much for us besides putting the records out," Moore qualifies. By the end of their time with the label, Ranaldo says, "It was so anonymous and divorced." The high turnover of staff left the band with few in-house contacts (David Geffen himself had sold the label to Universal the year after they'd signed), and the major-label marketing tactics just didn't work for their records.

In contrast, Matador is co-run by Gerard Cosloy, who put out the band's third album on his label, Homestead, back in 1985. "There's a bit of coming back to family," explains Ranaldo. "[Cosloy] booked a show for us in Boston in 83 or 84, when he was still in university. He wrote some of the first really positive reviews of the band. We're within a community of people that we much more seriously relate to: they're music lovers, they're out at gigs every night, they're not talking about the bottom line." That said, as Gordon points out: "Matador have got really good at selling records."

The band could, of course, have put out the album themselves, but chose not to because, as Gordon says, "there's a whole machinery you have to build up." Radiohead did it, though, with In Rainbows, initially released online for whatever fans wanted to pay.

"I don't really think they did it by themselves," Gordon counters. "They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out. It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn't catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don't sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever. It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I'd thought of it! But we're not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we'd done it ourselves: it's a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music."

"That's boring," says Moore, simply. "I want to make records. With being in a band for me, one of the primary joys is making records. People can listen to it any which way. I don't have format prejudice." For Ranaldo, "probably the most fun thing we do in our lives is getting up on stage. I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set and we would die if that were the case. Once the summer comes and we've got the new record learned, we'll be playing 75-80% songs written in the last two years. It's not as if we're existing on a back catalogue,
on reminiscence."

However, one thing that sparked their new lease of life was revisiting Daydream Nation for the Don't Look Back series of concerts, in which bands play one of their notable albums in its entirety, in 2007. Ranaldo points out: "That was not something we did willingly - we're not a nostalgic band. [Promoter] Barry Hogan from All Tomorrow's Parties just kept twisting our arm until we said OK. But actually it tapped us back into this energy level in 88, 89 - when we were 30-year-olds, not 50-year-olds. I have no doubt that some of that rubbed off on this record. If it feels more raucous and rocking and high-energy, then that's why."

Bands, scenes and movements come and go, and Sonic Youth endure. After all this time, do terms such as alternative, independent and - most benighted of all - punk rock mean anything any more? "They're cooler than corporate and major," Moore shoots back to general laughter. Rightly, he points out that punk isn't just a discrete period in the past - it proved catalytic, and has seeped into the culture. As if proving his point, in 2006 Daydream Nation was added to the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress, where it sits alongside Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Sonic Youth remain a band confined by neither genre nor expectations. "I don't view Sonic Youth purely through the prism of punk rock any more or less than I think of them as an experimental group or a jam band or classic rock or what have you," says Gerard Cosloy. "There's all of those things - sometimes at once."

And then, with an admirably punk-rock directness, he nails the real nature of their legacy: "They cast a pretty huge shadow over whatever you might call the global community of non-sucky musicians."

The Eternal is reviewed on page 13

David Peschek

The GuardianTramp

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