FILTER BOOKS
Sonic Life: A Memoir
★★★★
Thurston Moore
FABER. £20
Sonic Youth co-leader’s glorious punk/alt-rock geekfest.
Losing his father young, teenage Thurston shuttles insatiably from cosy Bethel, Connecticut to Lower Manhattan to witness NYC punk alongside his gay wingman Harold. The pair stumble upon the deviant Cramps and edge-of-violence Suicide at Max’s Kansas City, and thus begins Moore’s odyssey through the left-leaning musical landscape, related with compulsive in-the-room detail. After making his ‘live debut’ shouting “up yours!” into Poly Styrene’s mike at CBGB’s, he falteringly crosses the audience/stage divide, meeting visual artist Kim Gordon as a new band mate. Moore narrates their relationship with respect, their courtship “an existence of timelessness and wonder”; after marrying in 1984 (a self-designed Sonic Life tattoo instead of a ring), being a public golden couple eventually leads to claustrophobia, and in estrangement he ultimately finds love with publisher Eva Prinz. For its visceral inside-track reportage on Nirvana and countless others, Sonic Life will be every alt-rocker’s binge-read this winter. Andrew Perry