Next year it will be twenty years since Smells Like Teen Spirit.
And I know that statistically most of you will not be thirty three years old and therefore by definition were not fourteen in 1991. So I will keep this brief and to the point. But Smells Like Teen Spirit is THE anthem of my generation. Of anyone born in the mid to late seventies. It is our God Save the Queen, our Light my Fire our Sergeant Pepper, Mr Brightside or Wonderwall
I had acne, greasy hair and kissed by all accounts like an eel en gelee.
And I sat on the floor in a house in County Antrim and I watched Top of the Pops and was AWED.
Just a wall of pounding NOISE. Pulsing like a heart. Angry and beautiful and yearning and so sad it made you want to cry. And I remember yellows and blues and shouting and words that made no sense. And words that weren’t words. And wanting to punch. And hit. And fight.
He changed all of our lives, Kurt Cobain and more importantly, music. And he couldn’t bear it and shot himself in the face. I hear that song now and I remember the pubescent angst, embarrassment and pain. An acute ball of tension forms in my gut and a shiver runs down my spine. But by accident of birth or fate or chance it is MY song. Forever.
With the lights out its less dangerous,
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us.
Brings back memories… I was just 15 when he died, I was crying very much. They just don’t do music like this anymore (or it may be that I am just to jaded?)
I was in love with Kurt Cobain.
I was in the back of my parents’ car, being driven to my Saturday job (yes yes, spoilt middle class brat I hear you all cry) when I heard on the radio that he’d died. I started to cry and couldn’t stop, and my parents had no idea why; I couldn’t tell them that it felt like a bit of me had died too. When his suicide note was published I read it again and again until I’d memorised it; I still remember every word.
Yes, Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana, changed our lives.
*goes off for a little cry while listening to ‘Something In The Way’*
I had ticket to see Nirvana play in Brixton two months before Kurt Cobain gave some industrial cleaners a f&*ken’ headache of a job in a garage .
Instead I was forced to take my granny to Oklahoma. Either way, there were two venues in London that night that had people in tears.
I grew up in Vancouver, three hours north of Seattle, and that whole scene was definitely my scene. I used to see a lot of the bands that played with them before they got big, and booked them to play at a crappy community centre near my house… we spent a lot of time being bitter that the whole world tried to adopt our little scene at the back end of the world. Now that I look back on it, it seems quite cool kids over here in London were into what was happened in our backyards. Because I was a girl, Courtenay Love was, not my hero exactly, probably style inspiration is more accurate. And I remember wanting to be the characters in the movie Singles so so incredibly badly.
I saw Nirvana once, just before Kurt killed himself.
The day it was announced, a lot of kids wore black to school. They had counsellors in, in case some of us felt ‘inspired’. It was surreal.
I had been out to the pub and got back in about midnight and my Dad was still up. He says to me “The guy out of that band you like, he’s killed himself” and straight away I knew who he was talking about. But I didn’t quite believe it at first. So I went on Ceefax, the font of all knowledge pre-Internet and saw that it was true. And I cried my heart out. It’s strange but years later and reflecting back, it’s no wonder that it happened. It’s a sad, perverse thing to say but this is the way our music heroes are made. To those that love them they are fantastical, beautiful, talented but essentially they will always be marred by tragedy. Seems to be the rules.
Just supremely grateful for getting the chance to see them at Reading ‘92, they were f*cking amazing.
Excuse me!!! Cough, splutter. But I totally kissed you in 1991, even though u were 14 and I was 16 (so sophisticated, I know) and you, officially, did not kiss like an eel en gelee. Although, thinking about it, I am really adverse to eel, maybe you subconsciously ruined it for me…..
You made me the man I am today Ms S-B xx
i was sadly very slightly too young to be fully enamoured with nirvana (my foolish little pre-teenage heart had been stolen by the manics), but i remember the SLTS TOTP performance well, and thinking it was the best thing on television – the manics had nothing when they performed ‘faster’ in balaclavas. i discovered last year that my current boss is one of the 15 year old boys that jumps on stage towards the end, and have been extremely jealous ever since.