The Quietus were sad to learn this morning that Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore have separated.

A spokeswoman for the band said: "Musicians Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, married in 1984, are announcing they have separated. Sonic Youth, with both Kim and Thurston involved, will proceed with their South American tour dates in November. Plans beyond that tour are uncertain.

"The couple have requested respect for their personal privacy and do not wish to issue further comment."

The pair met in New York at the start of the 1980s but the unusually personal and reflective nature of the lyrics on Moore's recent Demolished Thoughts album he suggested to the Quietus that the couple had been going through some difficulties.

During the interview he was asked: "Did you have any trepidation about letting your acoustic guitar work stand out in the forefront so much?"

To which he replied: "To some extent, because I don't really have the traditional dexterity that people expect acoustic guitar players to have. But I also had some kind of confidence in the fact that from the get go, it was going to be... unorthodox! [laughs] I mean, I felt that I could play well enough... I didn't really have any qualms about exposing myself as a player. I was a little sort of... I did have some sort of trepidation with the lyrics that I was writing because they were very personal. I kept them somewhat coded in a way but they were all dealing with personal crisis feelings and I didn't know really how naked I wanted to go with that. So I realised that they had the propensity to be fairly kind of diaristic of some kind of disturbance going on in the world, whatever may be going on and that this might be a bit of a bummer for people. But then I thought, well, if it is, it is.

"What Beck [Demolished Thoughts producer] did, and he referenced this, because he knew what was going on. He gave it a lot of colour. And just by colouring it as such, it gave it a certain light and positivity, even though there's this line of sadness that goes through it. And because of this I felt good about it. I just made it more approachable for me personally. Especially playing it live, I'm able to focus on the musicians playing because they're such a delight to play with. So there's a certain delight to it even though there's a morose issue going on.

Gordon and Moore have a daughter, Coco.