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
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.
“Sonic Youth always had a lot of luck – an ability to be in the right place at the right time,” says guitarist-singer Ranaldo of their somewhat serendipitous break. Now 68, and resembling an art-rock Robert De Niro, Ranaldo is reflecting on this make-or-break moment via video call from his book-lined downtown New York apartment, where he’s lived for 30 years. “We were pretty skint. But we knew we had something special. We were getting very little traction in the US.” American music magazines like Rolling Stone were mainstream-focused and paid little attention to groups like Sonic Youth. “But the UK had all these weekly music papers looking for stuff to write about. We had to get there. So, we made it happen.”
Moore, Ranaldo, and Gordon had formed the group in 1981, inspired by New York’s uncompromising post-punk No Wave scene, and all the art and counterculture reverberating around their city. “Merce Cunningham dancing to John Cage’s compositions; the experimental music of La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass; nightclubs like Tier 3 and the Mudd Club… it was all there for the taking, and we were soaking it up,” says Ranaldo. Their cheap thrift-store guitars “went out of tune pretty quickly, so we found other ways to use them”, he adds. Disciples of contemporary avant-garde composer Glenn Branca, they applied his methods to their instruments, thrusting screwdrivers under the strings and banging on their guitars with drumsticks.
These exciting sounds proved a hard sell outside the artsy Big Apple, but Sonic Youth were gutsy. Following a tour of Europe in the autumn of 1983 as members of Branca’s guitar orchestra, Moore and Ranaldo flew bassist/vocalist Gordon and drummer Bert over for Sonic Youth’s own debut no-budget blast around the continent. “No tour van – but we had Eurail passes, which meant lots of passing beat-up guitar cases through train windows,” recalls Bert, 68, from Hoboken, New Jersey, his home since 1981. “In Germany, the venue was full of glue-sniffing skinheads. We thought we were gonna get killed – but they loved us! No one knew who we were, but they’d never seen anything like us.”
Even a last-minute support slot in London at the end of the jaunt snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. “The drum kit fell apart. Thurston’s guitar fell apart. They dropped the curtain on us halfway through the last song,” winces Bert. “We flew home thinking we’d blown it. But then the reviews in NME and Sounds came out, and they were raving about us.” And when those music papers finally arrived in the New York record stores, “the audiences at our shows were twice as large as before”.
The European gambit had paid off. But when Moore fished around for a UK-based label to release their forthcoming album Bad Moon Rising, nobody bit. Sonic Youth might have blown minds across Europe with their guitar-based assault, but Britain was still firmly under the spell of synth-pop. “We were antithetical to that,” Ranaldo says. “People in the UK would tell us, ‘Guitar bands are on the way out.’”
This was not the story across the Atlantic, however, where hardcore – a super-aggro strain of punk that had thrived in early Eighties America – was mutating into something with more of a future. Thurston Moore had dug hardcore’s energy and idealism but favoured “these weirdo groups that didn’t fit within hardcore, like Black Flag, or Meat Puppets, or Butthole Surfers,” he told me in 2015. “They were inventive, and more interesting.” These “weirdo” groups evolved past hardcore’s brutalist origins, drawing other influences – metal, psychedelia, country, and pop – into their maelstrom. Moore saw Sonic Youth as part of this loose, nationwide scene, and championed his contemporaries as passionately as he did his own band.
The UK was yet to register this subterranean revolution across the pond. But when Moore’s friend Lydia Lunch, ex-vocalist with No Wave innovators Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, passed a cassette of Bad Moon Rising to part-time label-owner Paul Smith, she set their success into motion. “Sonic Youth’s music made total sense to me,” Smith told me. Back then the cost of dialling America was “frightening”, but he immediately phoned the group. Ranaldo answered and offered the rights to the album for $10,000 – too rich for Smith’s blood.
“They eventually signed for £500, which meant I had to skip two mortgage payments, with permission from my then-wife,” Smith recalled. He started a new label, Blast First, to release the album. Modest of budget but grand of vision, he booked Sonic Youth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, up the road from Buckingham Palace. His bare-bones team had already secured Bad Moon Rising a glowing review in NME that Smith reckons “sold 5,000 copies straight away”; the audience would be full of critics and industry tipsters. “I was in zealot mode,” he says. “I believed everyone else would see their greatness.”
Sonic Youth arrived at the ICA on 20 March 1985, the opening night of their first UK tour. Smith’s budget didn’t stretch to pyrotechnics but did cover a cartload of pumpkins – a reference to the burning Jack O’Lantern on Bad Moon Rising’s cover, itself a hint at their fascination with America’s darkness. Unlike the Halloween pumpkins Ranaldo had grown up with, which he describes as “orange and bigger than your head”, these were “green and tiny, the size of cannonballs”. Nevertheless, the group got carving, and the gourds were strewn across the ICA stage.
We’d often wear Madonna and Bruce Springsteen T-shirts onstage – people thought we were taking the piss, but those artists were fascinating to us
Shortly before stage-time, however, Moore fell ill with flu-like symptoms. “My nervous system began to attack me,” he wrote in his memoir Sonic Life, published last year. But whether sick or merely stressed out, Moore knew he couldn’t blow this show off. Donning every T-shirt he’d brought with him to calm his shivers, he led the band onstage.
What followed is still burned into the memories of all who attended. Sonic Youth’s heretical reinvention of the humble six-string and artful steamroller of feedback, drone and noise were unlike anything this audience had ever witnessed. “It felt like a force of nature,” remembered NME critic Mark Sinker. “There was more sticking drumsticks behind strings and banging of guitars than ‘straight’ guitar-playing. I was so excited by it.”
“The show was so ferocious, we surprised ourselves,” adds Ranaldo. Smith’s jaw “was on the floor at the intensity of it”. By the show’s climax, Moore had peeled off his many T-shirts, leaving his gangly, sweaty frame clad in an ill-fitting Madonna tour T-shirt. The Material Girl was a totemic heroine for the band. “We’d often wear Madonna and Bruce Springsteen T-shirts onstage,” says Ranaldo. “People thought we were taking the piss, but those artists were fascinating to us. We were saying, ‘Our music can exist side-by-side with the mainstream; we don’t belong in some ghetto.’ Michael Stipe was in the audience at the ICA that night. Years later, he’d take off multiple T-shirts onstage in arenas with REM, and I wondered if he’d got that idea from us.”
As the house lights came on, Paul Smith remembers the room being “half-empty. I told [Blast First PR Pat Naylor], ‘People left in droves!’ But she said, ‘It doesn’t matter – the ones who stayed were journalists!’” Also among the stragglers was Mick Harvey, ex-guitarist with notorious Australian post-punks The Birthday Party. Harvey’s new band with Nick Cave, The Bad Seeds, were playing their own first UK tour the following month, and Harvey reckoned booking Sonic Youth as openers would give Cave the “kick up the arse” he needed.
Sonic Youth played two more London shows that week, before embarking on a whistle-stop European tour. They returned mid-April to tour with the Bad Seeds, playing hallowed venues like Nottingham’s Rock City and Manchester’s Hacienda. “Those shows introduced them to a big audience,” says Smith. “And the Youth kicked the Bad Seeds’ ass every night.” “Word had started to creep out about us,” Ranaldo adds. “The Bad Seeds were tremendous, desperate men with a point to prove. And playing with them gave us such a boost of confidence. It felt like we were actually getting somewhere.”
The tour concluded with a riotous show at Hammersmith Palais. “That was pretty epic,” Bert recalls. “The Jesus and Mary Chain and Mark E Smith [frontman of The Fall] were backstage.” It would be one of the drummer’s final shows with Sonic Youth, however. “I was a newlywed, away all the time, and I’d come home with no money, to bills piled up to the ceiling,” he says. “And Paul Smith thought he was [The Beatles manager] Brian Epstein, with all these plans for the future. I felt he was booking up my entire life.”
We thought it would be cool to see what happened if Nirvana signed to [the same label as us] Geffen. And it happened – very quickly
Bert announced his exit shortly before the flight home. “We were flabbergasted,” recalls Ranaldo. “For whatever reason, he didn’t see a future.” The drum stool wasn’t empty for long. Steve Shelley, former drummer with Michigan punks The Crucif**ks, had been housesitting Kim and Thurston’s apartment during the tour, and joined the group on their return, helping Sonic Youth – now basking in the glow of further rave reviews in the influential UK press – to book their first proper US tour. They returned for another European and UK tour that autumn.
“The world felt wide open,” remembers Shelley. “I’d hardly been on a jet plane at this point and had not been to Europe. Every day was excitement and opportunity.” His first UK tour would witness more of Smith’s maverick promotional activity, including a “magical mystery tour” with the press to Brighton in November. The trip culminated in a gig on the beach; Shelley was unimpressed. “It was a makeshift stage and a makeshift PA system,” he says. “We squalled away, it was cold. There were maybe 50 people there.”
Their show at Brighton’s Zap Club later that night proved more rewarding, closing with a new song, “Expressway To Yr Skull”, an ambitious, psychedelic epic that climaxed with minutes of blissful drone. “It was a real transitional period for us,” Ranaldo remembers. “We lost a little of the fierce primitivism of the early music but gained a lot of dexterity.” Certainly, you can hear that transition in process on Walls Have Ears, which Smith compiled from tracks he’d recorded on those 1985 UK tours, and released the following year – without the group’s permission.
“I’ve always been of the opinion you should bootleg yourself and keep the money,” says Smith, who presented the band with the album and profits – “something like £12,000” – in New York. But they were dismayed. “We didn’t approve the tracks or the artwork,” explains Shelley. “And the bootleg came out just a few weeks before our next album proper, Evol, and f***ed up our relationship with SST, our label in the US.”
Smith swiftly deleted Walls Have Ears, but then actual bootleggers pressed up illicit copies to meet demand. An official release finally arrives this week, 38 years later, the latest in a series of archival releases since Sonic Youth went on hiatus in 2011. “The fans love it,” says Shelley. “That’s why we’re reissuing it.”
Bob Bert, for one, is happy. “The recordings rule,” he grins. “That’s me at my best with Sonic Youth. I listen to it and I’m surprised I left the group!”
I don’t know what drew people to see this basically unknown band at the ICA that night
In 1985, Sonic Youth were evolving, becoming anthemic – and more accessible. Their following would only grow across subsequent landmark albums, a tide that would raise the boats of the entire US underground scene in which they were enthusiastic participants. And just as Smith had boosted Sonic Youth’s profile at home and abroad, he’d also prove a lusty celebrator of this caustic new American music.
On that first visit, Moore handed Smith a list of bands he felt should be signed to Blast First. “Thurston had imagined I was some big businessman who could sign all these groups,” Smith says. “He was disappointed that I was his age and wore ripped jeans, too.” But Blast First’s subsequent output often adhered to Moore’s list, including deranged Texan noisers Butthole Surfers, Chicagoan equal-opportunity-offenders Big Black, and the ear-bleeding country of Massachusetts’ Dinosaur Jr.
“Blast First became the home for these bands,” says Ranaldo, “and it stemmed from our enthusiasm. The solidarity of numbers definitely helped us all.”
Indeed. Smith made these groups’ records available in the UK and Europe, creating new markets for their hitherto unmarketable noise, and encouraging other UK labels to take a chance on signing artists from this percolating American underground. Meanwhile, media and audience interest on this side of the Atlantic increased these artists’ standing at home, just as it had for Sonic Youth in 1985.
By the decade’s end, Sonic Youth had parted ways with Smith and signed to a major label, Geffen Records, a move that would have seemed unimaginable five years earlier. But now numerous underground acts had been picked up by the majors, including Husker Du, The Replacements, and even those most radio-unfriendly reprobates, Butthole Surfers. The landscape had changed – and it was about to change further. Seismically so.
Sonic Youth, who never tired of supporting young like-minded bands, told the exec who signed them to Geffen, Gary Gersh, about a trio from Aberdeen, Washington they’d been touring with, made up of Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic. “I told Gary, ‘The best band out there right now is Nirvana,’” Moore told me last year. “He saw them play with us, and thought they were fantastic.” And when Gersh offered to sign Nirvana to Geffen Records in 1990, Moore said, “Kurt thought, ‘Sonic Youth have done it.’ We thought it would be cool to see what happened if Nirvana signed to Geffen. And it happened. Very quickly.”
The success of Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, revitalised guitar music for a generation and dragged the sound that Sonic Youth had helped mint into the mainstream. Thirty years on, Nevermind has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Perhaps it’s a stretch to suggest none of this would’ve happened if Sonic Youth hadn’t bought their one-way tickets to London in 1985, taken that great leap into the unknown and introduced our synth-obsessed country to feedback, distortion and detuned guitars – but I’d argue it’s not as much of a reach as you might think. That first UK tour had more of an impact than the members of Sonic Youth could ever have dreamt.
“I don’t know what drew people to see this basically unknown band at the ICA that night,” says Ranaldo now. “But we made an awful lot of really good friends on those first performances in the UK in 1985. Everything clicked in a wonderful way.”
The reissue of ‘The Walls Have Ears’, originally bootlegged in 1986, is out on 9 February via Goofin’
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