BUSH SIXTEEN STONE

A significant sonic shift. The debut by British grunge hopefuls sells six million copies, turning Bush into US superstars, though domestic recognition remains elusive LANGER: We’d actually met Gavin [Rossdale, singer] before, when we were making a Marilyn record. He was an amazing footballer, really charming, pretty, talented. He kind of had everything. WINSTANLEY: We got given their demo, and it sounded good. Then we went to see them at Camden Lock. Grunge was so different to anything we’d done before. I knew Gavin liked Pixies and Nirvana, so I listened to a lot of that stuff. That’s how we got that sound on the first album. LANGER: To me it’s all pop music. We were brought up with The Kinks, and it’s not that far away from that. You just approach it in a slightly different way. The album was put on hold for a year and in that time there was a space, after Kurt [Cobain] dying, for them in America. K-Rock played it like fuck, and it travelled through the shopping malls of America. I went to see them in New York and there were teenage girls pulling their tops up. It was a weird spectacle. Then Gavin would come back to his house in Primrose Hill, and no one knew who he was! I got the feeling he would have liked to have made it more in England. For us, we’d had a certain amount of success in America, but not that much. We were a very English brand, so it was bizarre that we had this mega record in America, yet it’s not a hit in England. It was great for paying off our mortgages.