Kim Gordon takes us through her inspiring new photo memoir, No Icon

IN contrast to her sometimes painfully raw 2015 autobiography Girl In A Band, written in the aftermath of the break-up of both her marriage to Thurston Moore and their group Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon’s new book, No Icon, was a breeze to put together. “This was basically just sifting through pictures - it’s not like writing, so it was pretty painless,” Gordon confirms down the phone from Los Angeles. Her main struggle was with embarrassment over “some outfits that I thought were really bad. But after a certain amount of time you’re like, fuck it!”

“I always wanted to be an artist - music was just something I fell into”
KIM GORDON

Her aims for No Icon may be modest - “They did one of Chloë Sevigny, which I wrote an intro for. And I just thought, this book has to be at least as good as that” - but the vibrant 270-page tome underlines just how much cultural ground Gordon has covered, from early no wave shows and DIY art “interventions” to feminist leader of the alternative nation, and her current multi-hyphenate status as visual artist, fashion designer, writer and noisemaker - often all at once.