"Any money I will make I will happily give away to others. Print that, because I will stand by that!" He said it would be "counter-productive" if his band's debut album was a huge success. Then it sold 20 million copies

On October 8, 1990, Eddie Vedder arrived in Seattle to play music with four men he'd never met before. One month earlier, a mutual friend had given the 25-year-old singer a cassette tape featuring five instrumental tracks by the band, and Vedder had recorded vocals for three of the songs, dubbed the songs over a copy of Merle Haggard’s Best of the ’80s compilation, and posted it to the bassist's Emerald City address.

When Jeff Ament opened the envelope he saw that three of the songs he'd recorded with his former Mother Love Bone bandmate Stone Gossard, ex-Shadow guitarist Mike McCready and drummer Matt Cameron, on loan from Soundgarden, had been given new names by the singer. Dollar Short was now retitled Alive, Agyptian Crave was now titled Once, and Troubled Times now bore the name Footsteps.

"I listened to it and thought, Man, that’s really good," Ament recalled. "And then I listened to it a couple more times, and by the third time I was like, This is the guy I think I’ve wanted to be in a band with my whole life."

Ament wasn't at all sure how, or indeed if, his musical career would continue following the tragic early death, on March 19, 1990, of his friend and Mother Love Bone bandmate Andrew Wood. But despite the band's acclaimed debut album Apple only reaching record stores two month, the bassist knew they had no future without their talismanic frontman.

"Mother Love Bone as a band is history," he told Metal Hammer. "Us going out and using the name, pretending in a sense that Andy's still there, was never even a consideration... Getting out on the road as a band and promoting [Apple] with a singer pretending to be Andy, would be a terrible waste. It would be just total prostitution. None of us got into music to be the next New Kids On The Block."

Ament also mentioned that he and Gossard were continuing to write together, but insisted "we aren't trying to force the next step." But hearing Vedder's voice on the three-act mini-opera he'd titled Momma-Son made Ament excited to bring the cassette to Gossard.

"My initial impression was, well, he can sing and it sounds cool,” Stone Gossard told me in 2016. “The only other things that I’d heard were from singers trying to be Andy, who were really into Mother Love Bone, so hearing Eddie was like, Thank God! I was like, Low and clear… that’s pretty interesting. It was the first thing we heard that worked at all musically. So if you have a guy that sounded pretty good and he was into it, don’t screw around, just start making music. We were pretty quick to go, Let’s just do it.”

“We wrote Release and a couple of other songs pretty quickly right when Eddie got there. So we were excited. It felt comfortable and it was so different from anything we’d ever done. I think that was the thing that made us the most excited: no-one wanted to go back to make something like Mother Love Bone again. It was time for something different.”

In early December, Eddie Vedder moved permanently to Seattle. By the end of January, his new band were making album demos at Seattle’s London Bridge Studio with producer Rick Parashar. And on August 27, 1991. Pearl Jam's debut album Ten was released to the world. On January 11th, 1992, the day Nirvana’s Nevermind album displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the Billboard 200, Ten crept onto the chart at number 155.

Around this time, ahead of Pearl Jam's first visit to the UK, Eddie Vedder gave an interview to Metal Forces journalist Malcolm Dome. Already, the vocalist sounded wary and anxious about the band's rising profile.

"I think I've landed on my feet, and plan to keep running," he told Dome. "Of course, there are a lot of weird things connected with being in the position that we're in... the attention we're getting now is hard to come to terms with. I'm still just Eddie. Nothing more."

When it was suggested to Vedder that Nirvana's success could encourage Pearl Jam's record label to push Ten to a mainstream audience, the singer accepted that this might be the case, but insisted, "I would love for everybody to listen to what we write, but I want it to be a slow process."

"I think it would be counter-productive for Ten to be a huge seller," he continued. "In order for people to get the most out of Pearl Jam, it has to be a slow growth. It does worry me that we will be a big success, and that our songs will be taken out of context. We are not user-friendly."

Vedder was adamant that, whatever success Pearl Jam may attain, it would not change who he was.

"I am broke at the moment," he confessed. "I live in a shack with my girlfriend. And I plan on staying broke. I'm not one for excess. And any money I will make I will happily give away to others. Print that, because I will stand by that statement! You know, the whole planet's in real trouble, barely keeping its head above water. And I am not prepared to try to raise myself above others. There is nothing special about me."

Pearl Jam fans thought otherwise. On the road, songs from Ten took on a transcendent quality, elevated by a frontman unrecognisable from the shy, sensitive soul who first showed up in Seattle.

"Ed turned into an animal," Stone Gossard told me "He started losing his mind. We’d have sections of the songs where it was just this chaotic, ritualistic, transporting noise, and Ed would lose himself in that sound, and just go insane. Watching him discover himself as a singer, and watching the crowd being just completely transfixed by him, was amazing."

In a bid to slow down their ascent, Pearl Jam refused to let their label release the ballad Black as a single, and asked for a time-out – no more interviews, no more photo shoots, no more videos. Regardless, Ten kept selling, appearing in Billboard’s Top 15 best-selling albums of the year in both 1992 and 1993, and go on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide. When Time magazine chose a photo of Vedder as the cover image of their October 25, 1993 issue (with the tagline 'Angry young rockers like Pearl Jam give voice to the passions and fears of a generation') their coronation as the biggest new band in rock music was confirmed. By then, Eddie Vedder, more than most, was already struggling to come to terms with life as a globally-recognised rock star.

"There's nowhere I can be by myself," he complained to Malcolm Dome. "Even if I'm taking a piss there's always gonna be someone knocking at the door, asking, 'Hey Eddie, are you in there?'

But when Dome asked the singer what would constitute success to him, his humility shone through once more.

"I want to make a difference to the lives of others," he said simply. "That's such a wonderful goal for anyone, surely?"

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