The day the Teen Spirit died
Legacy of Nirvana frontman after suicide at 27
IT’S 30 years today since Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died, on April 5, 1994. Irish Mirror journalist was a teenager and huge fan of the band when it happened. Here, he looks back at that time and the singer’s legacy...
SQUARE sausages and sweet tea. That’s what I remember from the day we heard about Kurt Cobain. The Nirvana singer’s death was one of those generational moments, one of those where-were-you moments and I was in Glasgow.
Cobain’s body was found on April 8th, 1994, a date the band were originally due to play in Dublin and a gig many of my friends had tickets for. Tickets that would become collector’s items.
Not me though. I had chosen Packie Bonner over Kurt Cobain and ended up with Carl Muggleton.
Cobain was singer and songwriter for Nirvana, the focal point of grunge and the media-anointed voice of a generation.
The music was jagged, the lyrics raw and Nirvana made the mosh-pit a safe haven for misfits the world over. With the lights out or otherwise.
From the release of Smells Like Teen Spirit in September 1991 to his death in April 1994 they were the biggest band on the planet.
Nirvana made just three full studio albums, but along the way brought Seattle’s niche grunge subculture to the masses and inspired a generation.
Cobain and his wife Courtney Love were king and queen of the scene and such was the cultural impact there were models wearing plaid shirts and oversized jumpers on catwalks at the time.
Nevermind was a zeitgeist album that played a huge part in my formative years. When Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl released In Utero in September 1993, I got the tape and a book of guitar tablature for the album [notions!], playing Serve The Servants and Pennyroyal Tea for days on end.
The neighbours were very patient.
Behind all the success Cobain was struggling with drug addiction and the pressures of fame, but that was a different world to many teenagers who were obsessed with Nirvana and waiting to see them live.
I was one of them. We read about the band in NME and Hot Press and waited for news of new releases in Eamon Carr’s Evening Herald column or on Dave Fanning’s show. We bought the T-shirts, the posters, made tapes and watched the videos on MTV. We knew about the 1991 shows in Cork and Dun Laoghaire and the 1992 shows in Dublin and Belfast and read about them sharing a bill with The Pogues at Pukkelpop in Belgium.
Years later I learned from filmmaker David Markey’s tour diaries that Cobain and Novoselic had even looted The Pogues’ drink supplies while they performed on stage.
When Nirvana announced a date at the RDS for April 1994 it seemed like the stars had aligned, particularly as tickets went on sale on my birthday.
Only problem, it clashed with a trip to Glasgow with my local GAA team from Rush to see Packie Bonner play for Celtic and the ferry was already booked.
As things transpired, the RDS gig was postponed after Cobain was taken to hospital in Rome in early March following an overdose. A month later he was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His body was found three days later at his home in Seattle, leaving behind a grief-stricken Love and their young daughter Frances Bean along with millions of distressed fans. He was just 27.
The St Maur’s Under-14 football team were in Glasgow when the news came through, eating square sausages and drinking sweet tea.
The music world was changing too.
30yrs after his death Cobain’s work is still inspiring bands
A band called Oasis had played across the city from us the previous night at Glasgow’s Tramway venue for a BBC session that would set them on their way.
Suddenly Britpop was coming in and grunge was going out.
In the end, Bonner didn’t even play against Hearts the next day, dropped in favour of Muggleton, one of just 12 games the unsung goalkeeper would ever play for Celtic.
Meanwhile, in Seattle, 10,000 fans gathered for a vigil to listen to a tape of Love reading out a note left by Cobain.
In his note he said: “I haven’t felt the music or really written anything for years now. I don’t have the passion any more. It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Back home, Hot Press produced a four-page special of letters and poems from distraught Irish teenagers and a small vigil took place at the Phoenix Park.
Promoters MCD offered a full refund on the £16.75 admission fee for
the RDS show, but there were few takers, the tickets becoming a piece of music history – €1,850 was the asking price for one on ebay last weekend.
Cobain’s death signalled the beginning of the end for grunge, Soundgarden’s Superunknown had just been released and Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy was still to come, but the music and the energy of that time lives on.
In June 2021 Smells Like
Teen Spirit passed a billion streams on Spotify and the video has now been viewed over 1.8 billion times on Youtube.
And 30 years after his death Cobain’s work is still inspiring young grunge bands like Fangclub from Rush who recently released a new single called Attention. Dublin promoter Buzz O’neill was one of the lucky ones to see Cobain and Nirvana play live and a few years ago he spoke to me about witnessing their legendary 1991 shows in Cork, Dun Laoghaire and Reading.
He joked: “People talk about Nirvana and say it’s a shame they didn’t tour much, they didn’t play here much. I saw them three times in one week.”
Ah, but did you ever see Carl Muggleton play for Celtic? Now that really was a collector’s item...