Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon in conversation: ‘The best music books are about grief, politics, family, loss’

‘We bonded at a little old-man Irish pub and talked into the small hours’: Sinéad Gleeson at home in Dublin and Kim Gordon at home in Los Angeles. Photograph: Brid O'Donovan and Pat Martin/The Observer

Award-winning Irish writer Sinéad Gleeson was 16 when she first caught Kim Gordon’s eye in a snaking queue outside a sweaty dive called McGonagles in Dublin. Gordon, playing that night with her band Sonic Youth, casually strolled out of the venue to grab something from the tour bus: “And there was this huge, collective gasp from the crowd,” Gleeson recalls.

“She looked at me and I looked at her – [we] properly noticed each other,” she says. “Probably partly because the queue was 90% guys. She was such a figurehead to me and to so many female musicians who came after her.”