Alongside John Cale, another of the key speakers at the conference side of last week’s Liverpool Sound City festival was Thurston Moore being interviewed by Dave Haslam. Their conversation took in the early influence Moore took from British bands, mentioning Wire, The Pop Group, The Raincoats and The Slits, calling their landmark 1979 debut Cut "an incredibly great experimental record", and adding: "I used to have these fantasies in the 70s about leaving New York and coming to London to hang out with Public Image". They also talked about, among other things, the primacy of live performance to Sonic Youth – "It was all about in the moment and about understanding the theatre of the situation, and that’s what really worked for us as a band" – and why neither Goo nor Dirty sold as well as Nirvana albums: "I don’t think our music had any commercial appeal whatsoever; I mean, maybe a little bit. But Dirty didn’t have that simplicity of pronouncement and it didn’t have the magic that was coming out of Kurt’s throat. That was really what it was; if there had been any other singer in that band we wouldn’t be talking about them now. It was complete magic, it was beautiful".
Listen to the conversation via the SoundCloud embeds above and below.
