The life and times of singer and guitarist Thurston Moore, from the band Sonic Youth. An important band for me for many years. I’d lost touch with their output after Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star in 1994. But there have been seven albums since this, so an opportunity to catch up and find out what they’d been working on.

As of July 2026, they are still on hiatus, and everything points to it being permanent, but you never know.

This is, at turns, a deeply personal book, whilst missing out a lot of personal details. I don’t remember many, if any, anecdotes that showed Thurston’s interaction with his other bandmates, apart from Kim. Was Steve Shelley even in the band? I get no sense of either his or Lee Ranaldo’s personality. I suspect this is intentional; there are moments when Thurston jousts with the press, proud that he’s discombobulated a journalist enough so that they got zero copy or at least, no juicy gossip from an interview.

He even goes as far as to spell it out, telling the reader they’ll be getting nothing about the reasons for his split with Kim

With children in the mix, you can respect this; it makes for a slightly less rounded character and characters around him, but it’s a sort of noble and understandable choice.

The book begins with family life, the relationship with dad cut tragically short and apart from a quick mention of his mum coming on tour in her late sixties, there is little mention of the family or his visits - again, purposefully to avoid prying, or a slightly cold, selfish individual? It’s hard to pinpoint.

On to the music, this is the bug that bit Thurston at an early age, and it is clear that art and music meant everything from a toddler to his current sixty-eight years; his passion/obsession is all-encompassing.

It began with Louie Louie and continued at a pace until, tired of getting hassled for breaking the strings on his brother’s guitar, he bought his own.

The poverty of New York formed the backdrop of twenty-something Thurston trying to get bands going, sneaking into seeing bands and trying to gather enough money through shitty jobs to get through the day.

This period was formative, getting to know the bands of the time, practising and experimenting and integrating into the NY art scene, mixing art and video and music and poetry.

Things developed slowly; the band we now know as Sonic Youth came together through a few iterations. By the time of Daydream Nation, Thurston is thirty, Kim Gordon is thirty-five; ten years or so have passed since they started their music careers.

Late bloomers, but it’s now a period of triumph: signing with DGC, kind of hit records and hanging out with Nirvana, they genuinely seemed to have a connection with each other, and it’s all the more devastating as to what happens to Cobain. A quick burst of nostalgia reading these parts as I realise I was there at Reading Festival when they played on the same night.

The book quickly wraps things up: there is a child together, the break-up of the marriage, the theft of a lifetime of customised guitar and music tech and new beginnings. You could be mistaken for feeling the remaining albums are phoned in, given how little is said about them, but they are up there with the best of Sonic Youth.

I finished the book feeling it was half a story, with Thurston himself a fairly flat, one-dimensional player, but maybe that’s what he wanted, getting one over on us prying for something juicy; all that’s left behind is the music, and that is fine with me.

I gave it 7 out of 10.