Blood on Brighton Beach: Sonic Youth’s first UK tour and how it set the scene for Nirvana’s grunge revolution

Four decades ago, an unknown New York punk group with only $50 to their name landed in England for what would prove one of the most fateful months of their lives. Stevie Chick speaks with band members and their then-label boss about Sonic Youth’s riotous maiden tour of the UK – and how it paved the way for Nirvana’s multi-platinum domination of the early Nineties grunge scene

Better together: Sonic Youth, who never tired of supporting young underground bands, are to thank for Nirvana getting signed (Supplied)

They’d later be recognised as generation-defining pioneers whose bold fusion of punk rock, pop and the avant-garde paved the way for the multi-platinum success of proteges Nirvana – but when Sonic Youth arrived at Gatwick Airport in March of 1985, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and Bob Bert were unknowns with only $50 and a sackful of broken guitars to their name.

The band’s first UK tour, and the connections they made during it, would prove crucial to boosting their notoriety at home, and opening a new front for America’s insurgent underground scene.

The official release of a long-lost document of these shows, the live album Walls Have Ears, out on 9 February, revisits an embryonic Sonic Youth splitting punk rock’s atom. From the feral “Death Valley ’69”, revisiting the horrors of the Manson murders over a nightmarish surf-rock cyclone, to the acid-punk experimentalism of “I Love Her All The Time” and the earliest-recorded performance of their drone-pop epic “Expressway To Yr Skull”, these four sides of vinyl capture the future of American guitar music in protean form.