Music articles blog

KURT COBAIN loved Abba, wasn’t from Seattle and didn’t invent grunge. Everett True, the man who pushed the singer’s wheelchair on stage for his last UK show, sets the record straight I was first flown out to Seattle at the start of 1989. I’d been asked by Melody Maker to write a cover story on Sub Pop … Read more

ONLY NOISE explores music fandom with poignant personal essays that examine the ways we’re shaped by our chosen soundtrack. This week, legendary ROCKRGRL editor Carla Black remembers how her sympathy for a grieving Courtney Love in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death twenty-five years ago sparked a decade-long journey to bring gender parity to modern rock.                                                           * LIKE … Read more

ROCK KILLS. The list of victims is too long and depressing to print here. We still raise an eyebrow when another tortured Narcissus bites the dust, but the impact has been dwindling ever since the cataclysmic nine months in the early seventies when Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all made the ultimate career … Read more

It is four years since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, but it is what people remember about Courtney Love. Yet she has her band, her Hollywood career and Frances Bean THE THING about talking to Courtney Love — indie pop star turned Hollywood actress — is you don’t. Talk much, that is. Instead, she delivers a series … Read more

Starring Nick Broomfield, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love Directed by Nick Broomfield Opens July 3, Cert tbc, 99 mins FOR FANS of Kurt and/or Courtney, but unfamiliar with documentary-maker Nick Broomfield, this film might prove jaw-droppingly offensive. For Broomfield aficionados, its a treat – as comic, bizarre and pathetically revealing as anything he’s done. Last year’s Fetishes disappointed some, inasmuch as the subject matter … Read more

Kurt Cobain, the rock martyr; Courtney Love, the widow who wants it all. In the years since his death, the question “What really happened?” has taken on a sinister life all its own. As a controversial documentary hits the US, Dave Thompson investigates the million-dollar death cult. LATE IN THE EVENING of April 19, 1997, a bald, … Read more

In July of 1993, Kurt Cobain gave a dramatically candid interview to respected British rock journalist Jon Savage. Freely discussed were such controversial topics as Courtney Love, homosexuality, heroin and Cobain’s relationship with his Nirvana bandmates. THE INTERVIEW you are about to read transpired late on the evening of Thursday, July 22, 1993, arranged as … Read more

They’re mad, bad and dangerous to know, and the apple of their mothers eyes. Caroline Sullivan examines the closest of all relationships… ROCK WIVES, rock mistresses and rock kids have all had their say. But what about those most long-suffering of relatives, rock mothers? Their lot is not easy; when not being ignored by their … Read more

When a pop icon disappears or kills himself, teenagers recognise that their own despair is being mirrored. IN THIS SEASON of suicide, in this decade of despair, teenagers are getting picked off the barbed wire, bloodied and tattered, every day. Arms were flung aloft and tongues tutted two weeks back, when the first anniversary of … Read more

AN ARTICLE in this week’s Melody Maker describes some of the dozens of letters the paper has been receiving every week since Richey James’s departure was announced. As had been widely reported in the music press, James, guitarist/lyricist with The Manic Street Preachers, periodically suffered from depression, an affliction which was expressed, as it often is, through … Read more

EVAN DANDO has been marketed as teen sex symbol, scagged out hippy doper and serious artiste, but now THE LEMONHEADS’ main squeeze is trying to wrest control of his career back from those who would prefer him to get his shirt off just one more time. JOHN HARRIS hears the sorry tale of the slacker who had to … Read more

I FIRST MET Kurt Cobain on the night of December 3, 1989. His band had been on the road for weeks, touring the European toilet circuit in a battered old van with Tad, and his scrawny 22-year-old frame virtually creaked with fatigue, but he happily complied with my request for a brief interview. “What are … Read more

What do you do when your dreams come true, and they’re not quite like you planned? For Kurt Cobain, the pain of fame became too much, says Caitlin Moran, a grieving fan EVERY TELEPHONE is engaged. Every single person I know under the age of 35 is on the phone — and when I finally get through to … Read more

HIS CUTTING-EDGE band brought punk rock ideals and alternative music to the American mainstream. He was a millionaire and a provocateur. He should have been sitting on top of the world and he knew it. Kurt Cobain – lead singer-songwriter guitarist for Nirvana – exited the world last week, apparently by taking a shotgun to … Read more

I STILL prefer to believe that Kurt Cobain’s life was saved by rock’n’roll. I picture him wearing his favorite T-shirt, the one with the image from Daniel Johnston’s Hi, How Are You on it, or covering any one of the three different Vaselines songs Nirvana performed, or hard at work on the liner notes to a Raincoats … Read more

The Melvins and Kurt are asleep at the wheel of fortune ON THIS January night in San Francisco’s foggy’ Richmond district, the Melvins sit in the Victorian house that guitarist Buzz Osborne and bassist Lori Black rent from her father and her mother, Shirley Temple Black. Tomorrow morning the band is scheduled to enter Brilliant Studio, … Read more

In the concluding part of our exclusive interview, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love attempt to explain the truth behind their controversial relationship and how distorted and painful the media perception of their marriage has been. EVERETT TRUE lends a sympathetic ear. THE STORY SO FAR… Courtney Love is still livid about the profile of her … Read more

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love are the most controversial rock couple since Sid and Nancy. Critics of their relationship have cast Courtney as a scheming, parasitic bitch who’s ruthlessly exploited her feeble, unwitting husband, whose career she seems determined to f*** up. In this exclusive interview with EVERETT TRUE, the couple come out fighting in … Read more

Poisoned by the chalice of instant success, bedridden with road-rash after a ton of amp-smashingly intense gigs – what’s happened to Nirvana’s tortured singer and distillery of teen spirit, Kurt Cobain? “All I need is a break,” he says… FOR NOW, Kurt Cobain and his new wife, Courtney Love, live in an apartment in Los … Read more