4. Sonic YouthEvol
Steve Queralt from Ride got me into Sonic Youth. My biggest period with Sonic Youth was from Evol, through Sister, into Daydream Nation. Goo is probably one of the coolest record sleeves I’ve ever seen. It makes a great t-shirt, but my favourite Sonic Youth music is that period just before that when they signed to SST Records and became a bit more poppy. I really love Evol and Sister. I could have picked either of those. Sister contains probably my favourite Sonic Youth song, ‘Schizophrenia’, but then Evol has more of a consistent listener friendly experience. I really like ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ and ‘Starpower’, they’re so beautiful and the whole Kim Gordon mystique is established on that record.
When I think back to the formative days of Ride, there was a Southbank show on Sonic Youth, which we memorised. There’s all these quotes, like Thurston Moore going, “People say we play our guitars out of tune, but they’re just out of standard tune”. And then there was a Kim Gordon quote that we used to say all the time which is like, “I have a smaller bass now so I feel more like a rocker”. They’re just regular quotes really, but to us they were just so cool, ridiculously cool people. As a kind of tall gangly kid, I really related to that, I wanted to be Thurston. I felt there was a way to be when I saw Thurston with a guitar.
