Girl Talk: Hot Press catches up with Kim Gordon

Although Kim Gordon is undoubtedly best-known as a founding member of influential New York alt-rock band Sonic Youth, she never really saw herself primarily as a musician.

“Yeah, that’s true,” the 61-year-old blonde icon nods. “My whole life I was geared to be an artist, but I guess punk rock kind of opened up all these things. You ended up getting involved in places you didn’t think you’d ever go.”
Gordon has just published a memoir, Girl In A Band (so titled because apparently UK rock journalists used to always ask her “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?”). It’s a well-written, star-studded and deeply introspective work, which sees her reflecting on her childhood, her work in visual art and fashion, her illustrious music career, her failed marriage, her relationship with her daughter, and numerous other milestones in her eventful life.
“I don’t know if it was cathartic,” she says of the writing process. “Writing is a way for me to figure out how I’m feeling or thinking about something, and sometimes I can’t even think unless I’m writing, so it was more like, ‘how did I get here?’ and then a long look back, you know?”
She and her older brother were born in upstate New York in 1953, but spent their formative years in Los Angeles, a city she describes as being “a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realise deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want.”
Her father was a sociologist at UCLA and her mother a seamstress who worked out of their house.
“I didn’t feel like a happy child,” she muses, “but I had a very stable environment, a middle-class upbringing. But I always felt an existential sort of feeling of loneliness. I don’t know, I realised for some reason I think of myself as this kind of traditional person because I was brought up in this middle-class environment, but then I realised my life isn’t that way at all, and I’m not drawn to anything conventional, so maybe I should stop thinking of myself like that. It’s a habit.”
She moved to New York City in the early ’80s, where she formed Sonic Youth with her future husband Thurston Moore. It’s at that point that her memoir really takes off, as she encounters a wide and varied cast of characters, all of whom were crucial to the burgeoning art, fashion and music scenes that shaped a new generation. From William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Richard Prince to Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain and Philip Glass, all forms of talented human lives are here.
Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, and Gordon was very friendly with Kurt Cobain. However, she scowls slightly when grunge is mentioned.
“Well, ‘grunge’ is just a made-up word, first of all,” she sighs. “We didn’t really identify with grunge and we played with those bands, but we were coming out of the New York experimental scene. We weren’t punk exactly, either. We didn’t really fit into any sort of genre; we didn’t wear all black, so it’s more like, ‘is it punk versus hippy?’ It’s the old argument.”
She laughs: “It’s all about haircuts when it comes down to it.”
How does she feel about the fact that Sonic Youth, who were never hugely successful, influenced a lot of copycat bands who went on to sell millions of albums?
“I don’t know,” she says. “The Velvet Underground wasn’t a massive band, you know? They hadn’t sold many records during their career. I guess we fell more into that category of history versus money. You’re doing it for the dialogue, it looks like.”
Having produced Hole’s debut album Pretty On The Inside in 1991, Gordon is quite dismissive of Courtney Love in her memoir (describing her as “someone to avoid and ignore”). She now sounds as though she regrets writing so dismissively of her.
“You know what? I actually didn’t really care to talk about Courtney. It was something my editor kind of nudged me into. I have a lot of empathy for her; I think she’s a fascinating person. I was really just trying to set the record straight because you hear so many different things.
“Basically they didn’t feel like there was really anything that anyone else didn’t already know or hadn’t been talked about in some way, so I was just trying to create a context of information into my story. You know, people think we were friends. I was just trying to explain things. I wasn’t trying to slag her off.”
Girl In A Band opens with a description of Sonic Youth’s last ever concert in Sao Paulo in 2011. Although she and Moore had recently ended their 27-year marriage following her discovery of his lengthy extra-marital affair, they still had touring commitments to fulfill. As the pair walked out onstage they hadn’t spoken more than 15 words to each other in the previous week.
Her anger, heartache and bitter disappointment over their break-up is obvious, as she writes, “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock ‘n’ roll world, was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure – a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”
She goes silent when asked if Moore has read the book. Em… are they in touch at the moment?
“Next question,” she growls.
How long did the book take to write?
“It took about a year-and-a-half for the whole process, maybe two years from start to finish. I liked to start right in the morning. I rented a house out here in LA a year ago, worked on it in a more focused way. Some parts were fun to write and other parts were boring and just getting out the nuts and bolts and stuff that you feel like maybe you’d talked about before. I don’t know.”
Did she learn anything new about herself from the writing of it?
“One thing was that I probably need to stop thinking of myself as this very traditional person because I realised that I’m not, and I have a kind of bohemian lifestyle and that I don’t know why – I guess when I was raising a daughter – I maybe thought that that was sort of important. I tried to recreate this sort of stable environment and, now that she’s in college, I actually don’t have to feel like that anymore.”
Following her break-up with Moore and the subsequent implosion of Sonic Youth, Gordon now has a new band called Body/Head. What’s happening with them?
“We just played some shows in Australia,” she says. “We’ll probably record an album this summer. We did a 7” that came out in the fall, but mostly right now I’m concentrating on other projects.”
Such as?
“Well, I’m working on these two art shows. My immediate thing is I have to go on a book tour but then I have a show in New York, and then I have another show in Athens, Greece in June, so I’m concentrating on that and getting back in my studio. I’m also scoring a soundtrack for this James Franco movie, Zeroville. I have a lot of things going on.”
Will there be another book at any stage?
“Oh God, I don’t know,” she groans. “I haven’t really thought about it.”