In 1978, the 19-year-old Thurston Moore left Connecticut for New York, intent on forming a band. There were a number of false starts – founded four years later, Sonic Youth didn’t really come into their own until their 1985 album Bad Moon Rising, the first in a string of releases that made them the most revered US indie group of the pre-Nirvana era – but, reading Sonic Life, it’s hard not to think it was probably only a matter of time: if anyone was born to lead the most revered US indie group of their era, it was Thurston Moore.
He appears to have come out of the womb with impeccable alt-rock taste. No embarrassing prepubescent flirtation with whatever the mid-60s US equivalent of the Wombles or Crazy Frog was for him; the first single that turns his head, aged five, is the Kingsmen’s garage-rock classic Louie Louie. By the end of the decade, he’s graduated to the Stooges, Can and Captain Beefheart. His first instinct on availing himself of an electric guitar is not to learn to play, but to start making the kind of fearsome atonal noise that regularly punctuated Sonic Youth’s oeuvre: the delight of his family’s neighbours at this development can be well imagined. Even after he gets to New York, his tastes mark him out: he’s forever the last man enthusing at gigs that have caused the rest of the audience to hurriedly leave, fingers in their ears.
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