Kurt Cobain was the last great rock star

IT IS hard to convey the impact that Smells Like Teen Spirit had on music of the late 20th century. Grunge was possibly the first post-punk musical movement that refined and redefined the lazy landscape of 1980s indolence. While Malcolm McLaren manufactured the music and the mood, encouraging nihilism, celebrating anti-music musicality and embracing the anarchy, the societal conditions that created the Seattle sound were anything but manufactured. They were real.

Neither New York nor Los Angeles, Seattle hadn’t even yet become famous for coffee or Frasier. The isthmus city was bleak, wet and struggling to be relevant. A massive tech boom in the 1980s caused property prices to surge and the gap between rich and poor to widen almost overnight. When the punks tore their jeans to create the look of poverty, many of Seattle’s musicians wore that look for real, and from such ostracisation and alienation was born grunge, spawned from the indie record label Sub Pop. Every movement has a leader, an iconic figure who shoulders the overbearing burden of an aspirant generation. Grunge was unwillingly led by the tortured and tormented frontman Kurt Cobain. Messy, moribund but mostly messianic, I’m not sure there has been a more reluctant rock star, a more flawed frontman, a less likely leader. Haunted by heroin, dogged by depression, Cobain took a shotgun to his head and joined the so-called “27 club”, dying a pathetic and premature death at the same age as Jim Morrison, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin et al. Cobain’s death was different somehow. While the rest were cloaked

in tragic excess, with the death of Kurt Cobain we witnessed the beginning of the end of the last, great musical movement of the modern era. Cobain would have been 50 last week, two years older than me. It’s difficult to imagine a middle-aged musical messiah. I can’t watch Jagger, the almost octogenarian pouter who looks more like an escapee from a Bernard Matthews turkey farm than a rock star. In a perverse way, much as I loved Nirvana and idolised Kurt, I’m glad he’s no longer around to witness the screaming chasm of vanilla-flavoured blandness that the music industry has become.

I was just too young for punk. Although I caught up with the less than three-minute, urgent dystopia of the Buzzcocks, The Clash and the Pistols, there was something vacuous about punk, a nihilism they celebrated and that alienated me. Deeply dissonant, decidedly darker and fuelled by frustration, is it any wonder that as I emerged from my teens, a heavy metal boy with horizons to widen, I would happen upon this sound. It was so fresh yet familiar. It made up for the gap in my life punk passed by.

One might argue that grunge was more punk than punk. While some of the Peterhead punks may well be up in arms with such a claim, I put this fact to you. When Nirvana’s second album Nevermind hit the number one spot in 1991, Cobain was still sleeping in his car. That has to be more punk than swearing on American TV.

There are a handful of deaths I’ll remember hearing about. Cobain will be one. Nirvana had just released their third album, In Utero. Unlike Nevermind this was unbelievably dark, yet more discordant, one might say macabre. It was very unexpected but it was brilliant. These were the days before global news media; the inter-web was infant. One moment Kurt is found overdosed in a Rome hotel room following his first failed suicide attempt, the next he’s held a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

I cried. I felt numb. How could he have been so selfish? He had a small child, he had an adoring global following, he had his whole life ahead of him. I had a small child, a child that grew up listening to Nirvana, a child that grew into a man and now plies his trade in the music business. I knew so little back then about the impact of depression and mental illness.

There will never be another Kurt Cobain. For me and many like me, he was the last great rock star, untouched by the insincerity of puff-piece primetime television, a bohemian rather than a brand.

This world is not short of irony so I’ll leave you with the opening line of Nirvana’s breakthrough song. “Load up on guns, bring your friends, it’s fun to lose and to pretend.”