Award-winning Irish writer Sinéad Gleeson was 16 when she first caught Kim Gordon’s eye in a snaking queue outside a sweaty dive called McGonagles in Dublin. Gordon, playing that night with her band Sonic Youth, casually strolled out of the venue to grab something from the tour bus: “And there was this huge, collective gasp from the crowd,” Gleeson recalls.
“She looked at me and I looked at her – [we] properly noticed each other,” she says. “Probably partly because the queue was 90% guys. She was such a figurehead to me and to so many female musicians who came after her.”
Why? “Because everything she did was on her own terms, including the way she sang and played the bass – very not like anybody else.”
They would finally, formally, meet in 2019 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Gordon was playing with her experimental guitar duo, Body/Head, while Gleeson was there to interview her: “And I did this big speech about how much she meant to me, trying to rein myself in … then afterwards we bonded at a little old-man Irish pub and talked into the small hours.”
The pair are now co-editors of an ambitious new collection of women’s writing about music, This Woman’s Work, and the three of us are talking on Zoom. Gleeson is at home in Dublin, in her composer husband Stephen Shannon’s studio, chock-full with Moog synthesisers, which she played with while writing her essay for the book, on electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos.
Gordon joins us from her home in Los Angeles, an impossibly cool, somewhat shy presence on the screen. She had been looking for someone to work with after her UK editor, Lee Brackstone, came to her with the idea for the project, but no one had yet scrubbed up. “And then I met Sinéad. She was incredibly sharp and loved music. I just trusted her.”
Gordon is an author too: 2015’s Girl in a Band was one of a slew of no-holds-barred memoirs by women that revolutionised music publishing in the last decade. The book begins at a devastating moment – the simultaneous breakdown of Sonic Youth and her decades-long relationship with bandmate Thurston Moore – then picks apart what it was like to create in a male-dominated world. She met Gleeson after the Irish writer had just published Constellations, the story of her life through her body – from hip replacement in her teenage years to leukaemia and childbirth later.Gordon really admires Gleeson’s writing. “It’s like the way she speaks – so focused and spot-on. She never misses anything. She’s also able to portray the emotions that she has towards the music. There aren’t that many people who can bridge the analytical and emotional. She knows that music has vibrations – it goes into the body – that it’s not just cerebral.” (Guardian)