That would have been a lame thing to do anyway. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him anything about Cobain. That, along with Kurt’s K Records tattoo led to a teenage obsession with the letter ‘K’ for me (again, seriously), and I would be lost for words years later when Calvin Johnson performed a gig in my living room. It has ‘Kurt’ written as ‘Kurdt Kobain’ in the sleeve. Bleach still sounds great, even though it’s a bit of a mess. It’s sound has dated, although it also still sounds loud and clean. The slick Butch Vig production takes away from from the songs as the years pass. Taking off the fan hat, and putting on a less partisan one, Nevermind has aged quite badly. Stereophonics (yes, seriously) covered ‘Something In The Way’ on the second UK CD single release of ‘Pick A Part That’s New’. Then I moved on to cover versions of Nirvana tracks. I think that was a different version of the ‘Come As You Are’ single. One summer, I ordered one from a Floridian store, and returned a year later to collect it, without thinking that it was slightly strange that a record store would mind something for a year until this weird Irish 15-year-old would come back to claim it, dollars earned from converting pounds from a paper round in hand. And on holidays to Florida each summer (my mum worked for TWA), I would hit the record store in the local mall, eventually amassing every release Nirvana ever put out, including every version of every single, Japanese imports and interview CDs, including one CD recording of Courtney Love reading Cobain’s suicide note. I bought all the Nirvana bootlegs I could find. We would swap and gift constantly, especially during the summer when we were less accessible and would post them to each other. At this point, I also had a heavy tape-sharing habit amongst myself and my friends. I would choose wisely each week, pulling at the sleeves of my Nirvana hoodie bought in Asha with thumbholes burned in the cuffs. As many of you will remember, Borderline in Temple Bar had shelves that catalogued countless concert tapes of Nirvana with badly photocopied two-tone printed sleeves and titles like ‘A Season In Hell’ and ‘Outcesticide: Rape Of The Vaults’. The second was bought in Borderline records. The first cassette was the album recorded on to a blank one by a friend. I owned the album recording of the studio session (which switches the tracklisting around) on cassette first too. Myself and Niamh watched Unplugged so much that eventually the tape in the VHS cassette wore out, glitching annoyingly at crucial points. I had one video, Disney’s Aladdin, and watched it every time the VCR appeared to the point that I knew the entire script off by heart. She had it on VHS, and my family only had a VCR in our living room when my Dad would borrow an ancient top-loading machine from the school he worked in for birthdays. The next time I saw it was a few years later, in my friend Niamh’s house. Kurt Cobain was already dead by the time the re-run of Unplugged came on one evening, late in the summer of 1994. Sex, theatre, pop culture and music collided in these videos I felt I shouldn’t be allowed to watch. So I would spend weeks during the summer sitting in her living room at night after she had gone to bed, watching Beavis and Butthead, and the types of music videos that MTV played at night Prince’s ‘Gett Off’ and Madonna’s ‘Erotica’. Late at night, in my granny’s house in Galway, it came on MTV. I don’t remember the first time I heard Nirvana’s Unplugged album, but I remember when I first saw it.
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