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this was in this week’s time out (1 – 8 sept)
i love london
thurston moore from sonic youth"you know, in 1977, ’78, ’79, i was infatuated with london. i wanted to hang out with the slits ! i was going to marry viv albertine + hand round john lydon’s house w/public image Ltd ! me and lee ranaldo started off working with the composer glenn branca, who’d spent time in london. to us, it was like he’d been to the moon or something !
"we finally got to london in ’83, supporting spk and danielle dax at the ica. the next time we played the nme were calling us the greatest thing on eight legs. and it took off from there. we lived in london for a few months. i loved walking around london – the bookshops, the galleries – and started discovering different factins of the arts scene – free improvisation like derek bailey, even parker and john stevens.
"we’ve often had weird local bands as our opening acts when we tour. but, for some reason, in london they don’t accept them. stefan jaworzyn’s improvised jazz noise combo Decension supported us at the forum in 1996. i don’t think we’ve ever had such heat from an audience. it ended in a riot !
"i like challenging and engaging and inspiring the audience, not annoying them. it’s never an "us and them" thing, like we’re showing off. those guys are our pen pals ! but london is one city that really doesn’t jive with it. they get angry ‘cos it ain’t rock ! even when we played the festival hall with our "goodbye twentieth century" tour, playing modern compositions, london was the only place where we got heckled. "what’s this crap !" "play ‘teenage riot’! this is bullshit !" london audiences can be pretty cool but there are a few assholes.’
sonic youth play brixton academy on thur. they may play ‘teenage riot’.
btw, i was at the forum show + there really was a riot … + that whole opening band deal turned me off s.youth for quite a long while after that show … from the audience’s point of view, there was no way they could mean for anything else to come of choosing that band as the opening band other than to really piss people off … they were sooooooo bad … it was literally just noise for the sake of noise + it was so loud + freaky, you couldn’t carry on a conversation w/someone standing right next to you … in the end this girl got up on stage + attacked the drummer !!!!!! IT’S TRUE
… they stopped soon after that 
… i’m not into violence myself, but i just can’t blame the girl … contrary to what thurston says, it wasn’t inspiring AT ALL !! it was music to annoy – pure + simple … maybe in a different time + place, like at a jazz festival, that sort of thing would go down well, but when you pay to see a band – you kind of expect the opening band to be somehow in sync w/what’s to follow – you know ?maybe someone else saw this opening band + liked them ? i’d like to hear about that – if that happened – then maybe i’d rethink my position on the whole thing …
I was at the Brixton Academy seeing SY on the 2nd Spetember 2004. The first support band was pretty cool, 2 Japanese girls being loud and weird, the second support band though……..nothing more pretentious ever! I mean 7 people playing with effects randomly screaming for….24 minutes…..that was boring. But yeah when SY came on, that was awesome. And yeah they did play Teen Age Riot
SY are into the free jazz/modern avant classical stuff so you have to understand where they`re coming from.From an indie/alt rock fans perspective out there noise is over their heads but from someone who knows their avant garde jazz and wacked out classical music it`s probably quite exciting.SY should pass out copies of Coltrane`s Om to get people to understand the tradition they`re paying tribute to
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