Sonic Youth’s gig at Manchester Academy sold out well before Christmas, so walking down a misty Oxford Rd to get to the academy building was to run a gauntlet of touts and mournful fans all desperately hoping for the miracle of a spare ticket. Inside, a packed crowd that ranged in age from teenagers to somewhere near the pensionable listened to The Pop Group, a five-piece who show that age is no barrier to playing music so loud that your rib cage comes away with mild bruising. The vocals are heavy with reverb and political intent, alternately meshing and jarring with the screeching guitar feedback. They’re a fine support band to have, but the enthusiastic applause carries within it an impatience for them to give way to the band that everyone’s desperate to see.
Finally, after half an hour of tinkering by the roadies to tune the racks of guitars that line the stage, Sonic Youth emerge. This is the third time I’ve seen them, and it’s no surprise when they take up the same positions on stage: the greying Lee Ranaldo to the left, Kim Gordon centre stage, and Thurston Moore – the Dorian Gray of alt rock – to the right, joined by Steve Shelley on drums and Mark Ibold to supplement the wall of guitar noise. After Thurston’s customarily polite greetings and thanks to everyone for coming, they launch into ‘No Way’ from 2009’s The Eternal. The playing is tight and bursts with energy. If a Bob Dylan concert these days is a game of guessing what song he’s actually singing, a Sonic Youth concert remains a blistering performance of avant garde rock, a series of frenetic variations on themes that have found their way onto various studio albums over the years.
The Eternal proves to be the main source for most of the tracks from this evening’s setlist. Highlights include Kim pirouetting her way through ‘Sacred Trickster’ like a seventeen-year-old on speed, a dirtier, heavier version of ‘What We Know’ than made it onto the album, and a ‘Leaky Lifeboat’ in which the banks of light bulbs behind the band develop a crazed pulse. However, fans of their considerable back catalogue weren’t denied either, with forays back to E.V.O.L. and Sister among others.
The first encore goes back to the classic Daydream Nation for ‘The Sprawl’ (still one of the best songs about the consumerist nightmare we live in ever written) and ‘Across the Breeze’, and the second encore is ‘White Kross’ and ‘Death Valley 69’, a feedback playground that brings the night to a gloriously discordant end, an hour and three quarters after they first walked on stage.
Simultaneously sated and wanting more, the crowd file back out into the sodium glow of the Manchester streetlights. Their conversations flick between highlights of the concert they’ve just seen and the wish that they had a ticket for the following night’s concert at Brixton Academy. The latter is testament to the way that, where once-radical bands are now happy to milk the current vogue of playing a classic album from start to finish, Sonic Youth seem to maintain an innocent curiosity over what each new feedback loop will add to a song. Every concert is a reinvention of what you thought you knew, a thrilling affirmation that in an age when every song lives in danger of an X-factor cover, there are still times when you just need to see the band in the flesh.