Kim Gordon: ‘There’s a wall of faceless men I have to climb over’
She’s the art-rock legend who made Sonic Youth punk – and now, at 66, she has made her first solo record. She drives our writer through LA to talk Donald Trump, existential angst and her anthem called Air BnB
Before she came to typify deadpan Downtown New York cool, Kim Gordon was a teenager in 1970s Los Angeles, smoking pot and listening to Joni Mitchell. It was the pot that landed her in “Disney jail”. Gordon and her friend were in a cave on pirate-themed Tom Sawyer’s Island, lighting up a joint, when the Disney cops swooped in.
“They took us underground,” Gordon recalls – to a netherworld where she saw “Mickey Mouse with a walkie-talkie” and endured creepy comments from the officers: “Does your mother know you’re not wearing a bra?”