Last week was the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, which I mostly celebrated by not feeling a need to wear all my dad’s clothes at once or thrash around my bedroom in a hormonal rage.
Nature really is a whore.
I did listen to it, though, just to see what it sounds like now. The lyrics seem a little confusing, which is disappointing, because they made so much sense back then. Didn’t they? I distinctly remember hearing ‘In Bloom’ for the first time and thinking: “God, he’s right, nature really is a whore”. Then I earnestly wrote it on my schoolbag with Tippex.
I cried for about six months after Kurt Cobain died. My parents were surprisingly patient for the first week or so: I remember my mum hugging me on the edge of my bed and my dad coming up the stairs with two mugs of tea, mumbling what exactly is it that’s happened again?
Being a sleepy village in North Wales, the little girl from down the road came over to comfort me, too.
“Why would anybody actually kill themselves?” she asked, nine years old and totally perplexed by suicide, suddenly finding herself comparing humans to lemmings.
“He hated himself,” I explained, sobbing. I was fourteen.
Mark says he was fourteen too, and what really helped him was to make a ‘cupboard shrine’ by removing the clothes and shelves from his wardrobe and filling it with Nirvana pictures and incense and candles.
A cupboard shrine! If only I’d thought of that, too.
“Oh god, stop,” says Mark, cringing.
“And if only we’d all had cameras back then,” I wonder. “We could now make a really great collection of Fuck Yeah Cupboard Shrines for the internet.”
Somehow, in the midst of our grief, Mark and I were both savvy enough to carefully file away the cancelled Nirvana tickets we had for Manchester, so that we could be millionaires once we were grown-ups. Not that we agreed with being millionaires or anything. We were Nirvana fans and we hated money! Sort of.
I still have my ticket, wrapped up in my parents’ attic: current value on ebay looking at about €20.
Annie’s blog won the ‘Best Personal’ category twice at the Irish Blog Awards, although some say that was a typo and she was actually destined for the ‘Most Personal’ award instead. She supports her habit by working as a photographer and as a graphic artist on costume dramas. She tweets here.
Hilarious. Nice one Annie:)
..I can’t believe it. Only €20?
This is lovely. Have you read Nick Hornby’s About a Boy? There’s an absolutely brilliant chapter in there about Kurt Cobain’s death; very much as you describe it.
What bugs me most about Teen Spirit is that it’s a brand of deodorant rather than some universal truth about the existential pain of being a teenager. Apparently Kurt Cobain just couldn’t help acting on Impulse, as it were.
I drove through Cobain’s birthplace in August (incidentally, not on some kind of pilgrimage) and the town sign reads: Aberdeen: Come as You Are. For one glorious moment, we thought that maybe all he’d done was write songs about things he saw around town. It turns out, perhaps fortunately, that they’d retro-fitted the sign. Almost a shame.
Oh god, I actually WENT to Kurt & Courtney’s house when I was in Seattle only a couple of years ago. I sat outside on the bench and looked at the garage where they took that picture of his leg sticking out, then I felt a bit silly and left again.
Apparently the Dublin tickets are dated for April 5th, the day they found him. Surely they’re worth an absolute fortune. Although as Fergal just pointed out on Twitter: “We need to wait until Nirvana fans reach their 60′s and have disposable income for nostalgia”.
Kurt Cobain’s death didn’t bother me. My only teen (rock-death-cult) obsession was Jim Morrison. Which, in hindsight, was pretty shit.
I got my ticket refunded! Gah! I think I looked it up once, for my more respectful husband, and it was still about $20, if memory serves.
“We need to wait until Nirvana fans reach their 60′s and have disposable income for nostalgia”.
….so very true!
Heh – I used to drive past Kurt Cobain’s Seattle house relatively often but only did the actual stop-and-gawp once, when British friends came to visit and insisted. There were vigils outside it on his birthday, and on the 10th anniversary of his death it more or less turned into a party on that little bit of ‘parkland’ (grass, basically) next to the house. I always thought it was such a sweetly domesticated house for the pioneer of grunge…
sarah: meet Annie. she is amazing. (though I have never met her – we have a certain amount in common) Her blog http://annierhiannon.blogspot.com/ is annoyingly, wonderfully good.
Emily-Jane
Aw, Emily! Shucks. I hope we get to meet soon. xx
Sarah: I would have given ANYTHING to be at the vigil they had in Seattle when he died. Although not really, as when my rebellious friend suggested that we “fly over there” I just said er, I don’t think my mum would let me.