Pearl Jam had become one of the world’s biggest bands by the mid-90s but huge success did nothing to dampen the creativity of the Seattle giants. The group themselves had managed to release three classic albums in three years – 1991’s Ten, 1993’s Vs. and 1994’s Vitalogy – but the work of Pearl Jam’s members away from the band over that first half decade was even more staggering. Before they’d even recorded a note as Pearl Jam, there was Temple Of The Dog, the tribute to ex-Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood that saw the fledgling band hook up with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron for an album. As well as Vs., 1993 saw Stone Gossard’s offshoot Brad release their debut Shame, Eddie Vedder add guest vocals to the Bad Religion album Recipe For Hate, a collaboration with Cypress Hill for the Judgment Night soundtrack, another Pearl Jam/Soundgarden (under the handle M.A.C.C. team-up on the Jimi Hendrix tribute record Stone Free.

They were on the crest of an artistic wave, one that continued into 1995, the peak of Pearl Jam’s extra-curricular excellence. That was the year that the band went into the studio to work as Neil Young’s backing band on what became the rock icon’s 23^rd album Mirror Ball, with a pair of Vedder-fronted tracks released on the accompanying Merkin Ball EP under Pearl Jam’s name, as well as an appearance from Vedder on the solo debut from highly-respected Minutemen bassist Mike Watt and a track with punk-poet Jim Carroll for inclusion in the film about his life, the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring Basketball Diaries.

None of those projects, though, could reach the heights of the other Pearl Jam-affiliated release that year. In March, Mike McCready’s Mad Season released their one and only record, a cross-pollination not just of some of grunge’s best bands but its most striking songwriters and singers. Titled Above, the album that turns 30 in March was a coming together of guitarist McCready, Alice In Chains vocalist Layne Staley, future Walkabouts bassist John Baker Saunders, Screaming Trees pair Mark Lanegan (a guest vocalist on the album) and Barrett Martin.

From the off, there was more to the union than making music, McCready viewing the band as a way for its members to try and shake off their troubled personal problems. That goes right back to its roots, when McCready and Saunders met in rehab in Minnesota. Reconvening in Seattle after the stint, they brought in Martin on drums with an idea to start a band, with the guitarist having the idea of bringing in Staley, by this point in the throes of drug addiction, on vocals in the hope that being surrounded by sober musicians might encourage the frontman to get clean.

“I told him, ‘You do what you want, you write all the songs and the lyrics, you’re the singer’,” McCready told Rolling Stone’s Charles R. Cross after Staley’s death in 2002. “He’d come in and he’d do these beautiful songs. I was under the mistaken theory I could help him out. I wanted to lead by example.”

Tragically, McCready’s intentions didn’t work out, with both Saunders and Staley dying from heroin overdoses a few years later. But the sole record they made captured a band with a rare, mesmeric alchemy, an album that gracefully glides from soulful, yearning rock and aching, airy ballads. There’s a restraint and airiness to Mad Season’s music that you just didn’t usually get with grunge bands that makes these songs – River Of Deceit and the title track, for example – sound even more beautifully minimalist.

The coming-together prompted a creative purple patch, as remembered by McCready in the Pearl Jam book Twenty. “We did all the Mad Season music in about seven days,” he said. “It took Layne just a few more days to finish his vocals, which was intense, since we only rehearsed twice and did four shows. So, this has been the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever been involved in. This was done even quicker than Temple Of The Dog, which took about four weeks.”

The success of Above, which had hits in River Of Deceit and I Don’t Know Anything and was certified gold to commemorate 500,000 sales in the US, prompted McCready to try and get the gang back together for a follow-up, but it never happened. Perhaps that’s for the best, cementing Above as an astonishing trick not to be repeated. For a moment at least, it was an album that helped to pull its members out of the mire and offer respite from the turmoil. It might not have had the profile of some of the 90s other big records, but it remains an under-appreciated classic.

Legendary pop icon Mariah Carey has revealed that she is still hoping to release the infamous secret grunge album that she recorded in the mid-90s. 

In September 2020, the Queen Of Christmas revealed that she had written and recorded the record, titled Someone's Ugly Daughter, during sessions for her 1995 album Daydream, Tweeting: "Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making [1995 album] Daydream. Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days."

Now, Carey has confirmed that she still hopes to release the album at some point. “I’m so mad I haven’t done that yet," she tells the Las Culturistas podcast, adding: "It’s a good album. OK, you will hear it. I was getting life from that, seriously. It was jokes, as well. They’re everlasting."

When Las Culturistas host Matt Rogers suggests Carey could pull a punk rock manoeuvre and release the album via Garage Band, Carey replies: "I could do that."

Expanding on the reasons she decided to record the album in her 2020 autobiography The Meaning Of Mariah Carey, the singer explained: “I’d bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff. They would pick it up and we would record it immediately. It was irreverent, raw, and urgent, and the band got into it. I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character.

“I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image. They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured.

"I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery," she added, "but I also wanted to laugh. I totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night."

Watch and accessories brand Nixon are no stranger to crossing over into the world of music, with the Californian company previously collaborating with artists including Metallica, Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones for timepieces and merch.

Now they’ve delved deep into the heady days of grunge with four new Nirvana watches - and the designs might be their best yet.

First up is the Nirvana Sentry Wobble featuring Kurt Cobain’s famous smiley face design. Most eye-catching of all is that the watch face has been folded and contorted to give it its ‘wobble’ look. It has a 50m waterproof rating and is available to buy for $325/£295.

That’s followed by the limited-edition All-Black Nirvana Sentry Wobble which follows the design of the yellow wobble, but presented completely in black. This watch is limited to just 152 units worldwide and, unsurprisingly, has now sold out.

Next is the Nirvana Sentry Leather which has a sunburst colour design on the face, while the band name is displayed around the circumference rather than traditional numbers. It also has a fuzzy sweater-like band for comfort. It’s priced at $225/£205 and is available to purchase right now from Nixon.

The fourth and final watch in the new range is the Nirvana Time Teller. It’s features the smiley face logo in the centre of the face in black, with the numbers and text presented in yellow. It’s available for $175/£160.

The three available watches can all be purchased directly through the Nixon website in both the US and UK.

Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell reflects on the development of the early grunge scene in a new interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato, and recalls how numerous Seattle bands paved the way for the breakthrough of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the early '90s, via “stepping stones” laid down by their own small victories. 

“It was an interesting time,” Cantrell remembers. “There was so much great music. Music was already changing in the late '80s, there was a heavier, more aggressive element to it, not just in our town, but across across the globe.”

The guitarist recalls the Seattle area being “just littered with bands” in the late '80s, and points out that with Jimi Hendrix, Heart and Queensrÿche, the city already had some rock heritage.

“It was a pretty vibrant scene all along,” he continues, “music and the arts are celebrated there. Also it's kind of out of the way, and I think that's a big part of maybe why we had time to gestate, and develop into what we we developed into, without any meddling from anybody. Nobody gave a shit about the Northwest until we made made them give a shit about it.

“You felt like something was happening, and you were actually part of it. And that's a pretty cool feeling for a young fella of 19, 20 years old.”

When Beato points out that Alice In Chains were actually the first 'grunge' band to score a gold record (signifying 500,000 sales) in the US, for their 1990 debut album Facelift, Cantrell is quick to point out that other bands too played their part in drawing attention to the community, and elevating their peers.

“We were the first band to kind of break MTV open... but you can't look at it in that microcosm,” the guitarist states. “Because [there were] Soundgarden's records and their videos, and [Mother] Love Bone too was a really important band, and Mudhoney, and even before that, Green River. They're all little stepping stones.

“And even though we weren't working together, we were all helping each other with all the success that we kept having individually, and also as a group collectively, even though it wasn't planned that way. So with each one of our successes it gave it rise to a bigger thing until it gained critical mass and Pearl Jam and Nirvana happened.”

You can watch the full interview below:

Speaking recently to Classic Rock magazine, Cantrell spoke about his pride in the fact that Alice In Chains have a legacy, and also remain relevant to young music fans.

“To keep a group together and create a repertoire and a body of work over 30-40 years and still care about it yourself, and have people care is pretty amazing,” he says. “That’s the goal: you want to be the Stones, you want to be Metallica, you want to be Heart, to make some music that maybe people pass down. I think that we've achieved that with Alice, and it's really humbling and a fucking honour.” 

Ian Gillan has declared who he believes to be the "most important" from the "unholy trinity" of British rock bands, a term which he explains was coined by the press.

In a new interview with The Sun to promote Deep Purple's 23rd new album =1, the vocalist notes, "Just like ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’, the ‘unholy trinity’ was created entirely by our good friends the music journalists. 

"We knew them, drank with them and they put into words what everyone was doing — something distinctive and identifiable.”

Weighing up the trio of bands - which includes Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin - and their impact on music as a whole, Gillian, who performed as frontman to the Brummie metallers from late 1982 until early 1984, continues: "To a certain extent, Sabbath were the most important because without them there would have been no Seattle (grunge scene) or heavy metal. 

"What Tony [Iommi] was delivering in those early days was just awesome. It was so powerful.”

Though he might view Sabbath as the most culturally significant, Gillan muses how altogether, the three bands "did something that had never been done before", adding that "they were putting into action all the things that had been building up over the previous ten years.”

Elsewhere, Gillan reflects on the creation of Deep Purple's legendary hit Smoke On The Water from 1972's Machine Head. He explains: "We needed six more minutes of music to complete the album and we were short of time. We had this jam, so we quickly wrote lyrics that were a biographical account of making Machine Head, and that was it.”

"Many months after the record’s release, during an American tour, a guy called Russ Shaw from Warner Bros came along to see us and he saw the crowd reaction to Smoke.

"He tried to figure out why we hadn’t released it as a single. Of course, it was six minutes long, so no radio station would touch it. We edited down to three minutes 54 seconds and put it out a few days later. It became the most played song in the world at the time."

Gillan concludes, “It becomes stuck in the mind. Very simple song, very hooky, great riff.”

Deep Purple's =1 is out now via earMUSIC/Edel AG.

Formed in Seattle in 1984, Soundgarden helped lay the groundwork for grunge. Success came with 1991’s breakthrough album Badmotorfinger and 1994’s multi-platinum Superunknown, before the band split in 1997. They would eventually reunite in 2010, but five years before that, drummer Matt Cameron, bassist Ben Shepherd and late, great singer Chris Cornell sat down with Classic Rock to look back on the career of one of rock’s most unlikely success stories.

When Soundgarden’s world tour wrapped up in 1997, it seemed like the end of just another successful record-tour cycle for the band. Their latest album, Down On The Upside, was a global hit, they had become the first ever band to appear twice on Lollapalooza, and they had just wrapped up a lengthy headlining tour of their own. But behind the scenes it was an entirely different story.

“The [recording] sessions were certainly strained,” drummer Matt Cameron remembers. “So I knew something was up, something was certainly going on. And then once when we started touring for that record, the shows were just increasingly bad. It was just horrible; a lot of drinking, a lot of bad vibes, a lot of temper tantrums, a lot of rock-star bullshit. I was actually thinking about bailing at that point. It was really tough. We couldn’t get through a show, basically, without someone storming off the stage. It was so not about music.”

On February 9, Soundgarden played the final show of the tour, at the Blaisdell Arena in Hawaii. On April 9 the group announced their break-up.

Before their demise Soundgarden were one mean rockin’ machine, a leading light in the world of grunge. Equally influenced by Black Sabbath and Bad Brains, the band perfected a style that had its origins in the early 80s with the likes of Melvins and Black Flag – slowing down punk’s fury to a sludgy crawl. And while Nirvana were the band that blew the roof off the 90s Seattle rock movement, Soundgarden were the ones that did the legwork. They were one of the first groups from the scene to record for the Sub Pop label, tour nationally and sign to a major label. Soundgarden were also responsible for some of the 90s’ best rock albums (Badmotorfinger and Superunknown) and songs (Rusty Cage, Outshined, Black Hole Sun). Along with Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Nirvana, Soundgarden effectively exterminated glam metal.

Frontman Chris Cornell, a former cook, and guitarist Kim Thayil, a philosophy graduate, were the men who put Soundgarden together. Both from the Seattle, Washington, area, Cornell and Thayil had crossed paths thanks to a mutual friend, Hiro Yamamoto. Cornell was a roommate of Yamamoto’s and they played in a band together, The Shemps (for whom Cornell played drums); Thayil and Yamamoto were friends since their early days in Chicago, before they relocated to Washington together to go to college. In 1985 the trio decided to form their own band – Thayil on guitar, Yamamoto on bass, and Cornell ‘doing a Phil Collins’ and handling both drums and vocals. Taking their name from The Sound Garden – an art installation in a nearby Seattle park – Soundgarden were born.

The three-piece line-up only lasted only for a few shows, however, before drummer Scott Sundquist joined and Cornell focused solely on vocals. “I played the drums and sort of fell into singing by accident,” recalls Cornell. “I was playing drums and singing and we didn’t know which was easier to find – a singer or a drummer, so we looked for both. The decision was based on the fact we found a drummer first, so I became the singer.

Producer Jack Endino happened to catch the band’s debut gig as a quartet. “They played half the set with Chris on drums, then he came out, and said: ‘Okay, we want to introduce our new drummer, and I’m just going to sing now’. Scott came out, finished the set, and Chris just stood there and sang. It would have been one of their very early shows – probably in early ’85.”

Endino, who was then a member of another up-and-coming Seattle band, Skin Yard, recalls Soundgarden’s early sound: “Scott was an older guy. He had a Ginger Baker touch on the drums, a rolling, jazzy sort of feel that was really dynamic and very fluid; it wasn’t so ‘conventional heavy rock’ as they became later. It was a slightly psychedelic kind of vibe. And at times it was really pretty amazing. Even though technically he wasn’t anywhere near the drummer that [Matt Cameron would be].

“After they got Matt in the band,” Endino continues, “they became more focused, and zeroed in on the sound they became known for later. Soundgarden were a little inconsistent live, you never knew what was going to happen. There was definitely an element of chance going on, craziness, and fun. There were some amazing Soundgarden shows in the early days.”

In addition to becoming Soundgarden’s focal point on stage, Cornell was also quickly becoming the group’s chief songwriter. Cornell recalls realising early on that life in a band was not as simple as he had thought. “I thought it would be a lot easier than it ended up being, to write and make records of quality,” he says. “It shouldn’t be in-fighting; there shouldn’t be clashing egos; there shouldn’t be this constant editing of ideas out of fear of what other people might think, all that stuff.”

1986 was an important year for Soundgarden. The band made their first ever appearance on vinyl – the CZ Records compilation Deep Six – and experienced the first flutter in their line-up. It was becoming obvious that the band would have to venture outside the Pacific Northwest region to further their career, so Sundquist (who was a husband and father) opted to leave. It was a decision that enabled Matt Cameron to occupy the drum stool.

“I’d seen them play a few times, and they were my favourite band in Seattle,” Cameron says of early Soundgarden. “I heard that Scott left, and I called Kim. I said: ‘I’d like to try out.’ And I did. I knew a few of their songs – there was one called Heretic that I knew, and I knew Incessant Mace, and a few others – so I showed up semi-prepared. I remember Chris really liked the way I played – he said that I played everything perfectly. They had a gig in a week’s time at the Central Tavern, so it was baptism by fire. I just threw myself in there and never looked back.”

Making believers out of local rock fans, the band left a profound impression on one admirer, punk rock malcontent Ben Shepherd. “They were playing a show down in Olympia, one of those daylight shows,” Shepherd remembers. “There was a bunch of bands. Seattle was totally cool back then. The music scene was totally happening; people were fun, life was cool as fuck, and there they were. So that was the first time in Olympia getting to see Matt play. It was like: ‘Wow, they’re the real thing now.’ Chris was just singing, and Hiro and Kim – that was the true Soundgarden. The very first show I saw, they blew some national act away.”

With the Cornell/Thayil/Yamamoto/Cameron line-up now in place, Soundgarden set out to go beyond the demo stage and undertake a professional recording. Already pals with Jack Endino, the band asked the producer – who had landed a job at the nearby Reciprocal Recording Studio – to oversee the sessions.

Endino: “We worked very hard at getting the right performances. We spent a ridiculous amount of time mixing it, just making it exactly so; just as good as we could possibly get it with the gear and the budget that we had available – nobody had any money around here. Sub Pop didn’t really exist yet. I think it was something that came up partly through the recording – ‘Oh, these guys we know are talking to us about maybe releasing it’.”

Recorded quickly and mostly live (Cameron recalls that they “only had three or four days to get the rhythm tracks done, because we had day jobs”), the six tracks were released in October 1987 as the Screaming Life EP, through the Sub Pop label, which was co-run by Bruce Pavitt (an old pal of Thayil’s) and Jonathan Poneman.

“I remember listening back to the mix of Nothing To Say,” Cameron recalls, “and I just couldn’t believe that I was playing in a band so good at such an early stage of development.”

Shepherd agrees with Cameron’s assessment. “Screaming Life is still my favourite record of theirs. That’s what Soundgarden sounds like to me – dark, black and blue. It sounds like the overcast days of Seattle. They sounded huge, and the riffs weren’t stupid or anything – there was something more to them, something disturbing.”

Wasting little time, a follow-up EP, Fopp, was issued through Sub Pop in August 1988. Working with producer Steve Fisk, it was recorded at Seattle’s Moore Theater during an afternoon with a mobile truck. Fisk recalls realising that Seattle’s buzz was growing: “At one point, a jackhammer crew went to work on pavement, and we couldn’t hear anything in the truck,” he says. “We got the crew to move and come back later in the day, because although they didn’t know who Soundgarden were, they knew Seattle bands were starting to get some attention. So they moved to be cool.”

With major labels starting to sniff around, the band opted to stay independent for their full-length debut, and Ultramega OK was released in November ’88 via Black Flag’s SST label. (The following year the album would go on to be nominated for a Best Metal Performance Grammy Award.)

Cameron remembers more rapid-fire recording. “We had a little more money to record with. We went down to a home-made studio that was pretty good. It was in this place called Newberg, Oregon. Again, we didn’t have a lot of time – I think we had two weeks to do it all. We recorded some up here in Seattle, in an abandoned warehouse, recorded some drums there, then we finished the rest in Newberg.”

With other Seattle groups following Soundgarden up the ladder (Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Mother Love Bone), the band decided that the time was finally right to sign with a major label. After signing to A&M, Louder Than Love (produced by Terry Date) was released in September 1989. It wasn’t the record that broke Soundgarden commercially, but it certainly helped, with the videos for both Hands All Over and Loud Love receiving late-night MTV rotation. It was also supported with a year’s worth of live dates.

But it was a period that was far from smooth sailing, with Yamamoto leaving the band when the album sessions were wrapped up. With an extensive American tour looming with Faith No More and Voivod, Soundgarden arranged try-outs for prospective bass players. They whittled the competition down to two – ex-Nirvana guitarist Jason Everman and Ben Shepherd.

“They were crunched for time,” Shepherd remembers. “Once we got to the rehearsal room, I didn’t say anything; I just walked over to the amp, turned it up and started playing. We jammed for three hours – we didn’t play any of their songs. We didn’t even talk, we just played music the whole time. They took Jason because he knew the songs. He was more connected and on-beat with it.”

While Soundgarden completed the ensuing tour with Everman, they soon realised they had chosen the wrong bassist. Upon returning home in the spring of 1990, they asked Shepherd to join. He was pushed straight in at the deep end.

“We rehearsed for a couple of weeks, then we went straight to touring Europe,” he recalls. “The first place I played was the Roskilde Festival [Denmark]. We come on stage and the crowd is chanting: ‘Hiro! Hiro!’ I’m like: ‘Oh, goddamit!’ We did this three-week tour, then we came home, then we had another tour all ready to go. So it was like jumping right into the fire. It was awesome. So fucking fun.”

After a tour with Danzig finished in September, Soundgarden focused on their next studio album, which was again to be produced by Terry Date. But since their previous recording, something had changed; there was something in the air about the Seattle scene, which Shepherd remembers noticing: “You could see everybody was ‘on music’ at that point. Music was suddenly alive again and doing something. Sometimes it’s film and writing that does that culturally, but that time it was music.”

Shepherd remembers the sessions – at Studio D in Sausalito, California (at the behest of their Faith No More pals) – being extremely laid back: “It was so fun, we invented this game – it takes a Frisbee and a Nerf ball to play, two-man teams. We’d play that all the time when we weren’t tracking. A home away from home. It’s way outside the city, a cool old barn turned into a recording studio.”

Just as the sessions had been completed, a side project that included Cornell and Cameron (plus former members of Mother Love Bone and a then-unknown Eddie Vedder) released the Temple Of The Dog album. It was a tribute to Andrew Wood, the singer of Mother Love Bone, who had recently died from a drug overdose, and would also prove the launchpad for what would become Pearl Jam. “It was initially my idea because of a couple of songs I recorded,” Cornell explained at the time. “It didn’t feel like a morose project. It felt sort of celebratory.”

Cameron: “Chris and Andy had been room-mates. I think the original idea was to do a single on Sub Pop in tribute to Andy. We got together, and just started to write more songs. Chris had a bunch of really cool songs, so we decided just to do it. So it was, once again, organically produced. A&M really liked it and put it out.”

Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, released in October 1991, was where it first all came together for the band in the studio. It was their strongest and most consistent album. It also didn’t hurt that it came out right as grunge was really taking off, helped hugely by the recent releases of Pearl Jam’s Ten and Nirvana’s Nevermind (and, earlier, Alice In Chains’ Facelift). Additionally, Soundgarden landed some prime touring spots.

In the same week as the release of Badmotorfinger, Soundgarden played alongside Metallica as part of the mammoth Day On The Green Festival in Oakland, California. Two months later they played a string of arena dates opening for Guns N’ Roses, who were still in all of their out-of-control glory, followed by dates with Skid Row. “We were in the metal trenches at that point, just fully paying our dues. We were kind of ‘the opening act’ for ’91/’92,” Cameron says.

Despite coming from opposite ends of the spectrum to GN’R, Shepherd remembers the tour with them fondly: “We had a blast. The whole crew of theirs and their whole band are really fucking nice. And me, I’m a punk rocker fuck-up, and I’m all cantankerous – my nickname was Manimal back then, and we were called Frowngarden. We weren’t rock stars and shit, we’re not like that. I’m all grumpy – ‘Goddamn it, these guys are nice, I can’t even fucking hate ‘em! I hate their music, but they’re nice.’ Same thing with Skid Row – fucking hated their music, they knew it, but they’re all so fucking cool. Pissed me off, now I don’t even have a reason to be pissed off. What the hell is this? My life is going to shit and it’s beautiful at the same time.”

It was also around this time that rock photographer Ross Halfin began working with the band: “The thing about them – they were all actually quite quiet. They were very nice, but they were one of those bands that as soon as they started drinking… It got to a point where they ended up getting security in England. Ben was walking across Camden Town, there was a bunch of guys outside a pub, and he’s like, ‘Fuck you assholes,’ and they came over and whacked him. So security was needed because they would just go off when they drank.”

With such songs as Outshined and Rusty Cage getting significant airplay, Badmotorfinger served as Soundgarden’s commercial breakthrough. And as a reward, the group nabbed a spot on Lollapalooza II in the summer of 1992, alongside the Red Hot Chili Peppers and their pals Pearl Jam. “That was our payback for opening for all these weird heavy metal bands that we had nothing in common with,” laughs Cameron. “Once we got to Lollapalooza, we were back with our friends. That was a really fun tour.”

But it was also during this time that Shepherd began hitting the bottle heavily. “I would hang out with the Jesus & Mary Chain, I was the only guy that would talk to them – share my whisky with them or whatever. I started drinking too much on that first Guns N’ Roses tour. I would just get really depressed and that was the only way out, or so it seemed. A lot of touring is ‘hurry up and wait’ – you get there and then you wait. You’d see guys that had been out for a couple of years in a row – you hit this wall where it’s like: ‘Why go back? Why go home? There is no home, there’s nothing! Let’s just keep going, we’ll play another show.’ It gets really surreal.”

By the time their 1991-92 tour was at an end, there were three Soundgarden-related albums on the charts – Badmotorfinger, the Singles movie soundtrack and Temple Of The Dog. Having toured non-stop for over a year, Soundgarden took a much-deserved break for most of 1993, during which Cornell ‘celebrated’ by shaving off his long hair, and Cameron/Shepherd launched a garage rock band, Hater. In fact, the only shows Soundgarden played the whole year were two weeks’ worth of dates opening for Neil Young in August.

The majority of the year was spent at Seattle’s Bad Animals studios with producer Michael Beinhorn, preparing the album that they hoped would be the final push over the top.

“I think creatively we were really peaking at that point,” says Cameron. “All pistons were firing – we were writing really cool music and we were playing really good together. I think the arc of the band was fully peaking at that point. We really wanted to be prepared and we rehearsed a lot. Worked on the arrangements of the songs and everything.

“I remember those sessions being pretty intense – it took like four or five months to track that record. There was a lot of wheel-spinning going on – like we would spend three days on a guitar part. It got really silly. We knew we had a good record in there, but I think we were all just sick of it, we just didn’t care anymore. Then Brendan O’Brien mixed it, and he did it in about two weeks – the complete opposite of the way we were working. Just knocked it out. At that point, when I took the mixes home, I realised we had a really good record.”

Shortly before the album’s arrival, a press release was issued, in which Shepherd explained: “Bands like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin made records where every song counted, and I think that’s what we did.” He wasn’t kidding: Superunknown was not only one of the greatest rock albums of the 90s, but of all time.

Released in March of 1994, Superunknown would debut at the top of the US album chart, and prove to be a worldwide smash on the strength of such hits as Spoonman, Fell On Black Days and, especially, the moody-yet-melodic Black Hole Sun.

Cornell recalls that the latter song helped the group start thinking outside of what was musically ‘expected’ of them. “At some point, there was an idea that we had to decide: ‘Is this or is this not a Soundgarden song?’” he remembers. “And after Badmotorfinger it was like, Black Hole Sun? No, it’s not a Soundgarden song. So we had to look at ourselves and go: ‘It is if we play it’.

“Black Hole Sun was a song that I wrote and recorded entirely in my basement, 16 hours a day and then offering a tape of a song, already finished, to a band that then learns it. It was refreshing and kind of cool for a moment because we hadn’t worked that way and we came up with ideas that did sort of reinvent us as a band. But in the long run, even when I look back at it, some of it was a lonely, miserable time. Only half of what I might have worked on would end up being liked by other members of the band. It’s weird for any band member to be dictated to: ‘Here’s [the] song in a final form – learn it’.”

With the album’s worldwide chart success, Soundgarden were now part of rock’s elite. But a month after the album’s release, the world was shocked by the suicide of Kurt Cobain, which spelled the end of Nirvana. Couple that with Pearl Jam losing the plot and touring less (in part due to a battle with Ticketmaster), and suddenly, Soundgarden were the leaders of the pack.

On March 1, 1995, Soundgarden took home two Grammy Awards – Best Hard Rock Performance for Black Hole Sun and Best Metal Performance for Spoonman. How did the group handle their new status? Halfin remembers that the band “were fine with that, I just think they didn’t care. It’s very much that ‘down’ Seattle mentality. One of the things I think they had over Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam, despite all their anti-everything stance, still very much liked the trappings of being rock stars. The bodyguards, the this, the that. Whereas Soundgarden didn’t really have that – they were very accessible where Pearl Jam were: ‘Keep everyone away’.”

Despite the success, Cameron remembers the first chinks in the armour showing around this time. “For the most part, the tour was pretty fun,” he concedes, “and then towards the end of that tour, the whole fabric of our group was starting to unravel a little bit.

“We weren’t really getting along that good. The pressures of touring so much, just being on the major label machine of record-tour-record-tour sort of took its toll after a while. After that, I think we took a little break, then we started to try and get some songs going for Down On The Upside.”

Produced by Adam Kaspar, Down On The Upside was released in May, 1996. While the album peaked at No.7 in the UK charts (No.2 in the US) and contained its share of highlights (Pretty Noose, Blow Up The Outside World), it didn’t exactly measure up to its stellar predecessor.

“It was my idea to record it at Studio Litho with Adam Kasper,” states Cameron, “because I felt our last situation was so kind of intense with all these big-name producer guys involved. It just wasn’t our scene at all – we just went back to the homemade method of making records with our buddy Adam. It was good, but we weren’t all on the same page. I was certainly trying to keep everyone motivated and just try to get it off the ground, but if people don’t want to do things, it’s really hard to get them going. I just think that at that time, we just weren’t enjoying the process as much as we had been.”

And as Cameron recollected earlier, things only got worse once Soundgarden hit the road in support of …Upside, first as part of Lollapalooza once more, and then their own headlining tour. By the time the tour was winding down in Australia and Hawaii, Halfin could see the writing on the wall. “Ben kept walking off stage halfway through the last few shows – you got an idea they weren’t getting on. You’d be in Australia, and they’d just be holed up all day – Chris would just stay in his room all day, you never saw him.”

Shepherd recalls what put him in such a foul mood during their last few shows. “That last show we played in Hawaii was the night that I found out it was our last show. Because our bass tech, I’d gotten him out of rehab, which is another harsh thing about our family that was going on – but that’s a whole other story. But anyway, I got him over to Hawaii, and he called a band meeting. He’s the only guy besides one of us that can call a band meeting – he had seniority. He goes: ‘What’s this shit I hear that this is your last show and you’re breaking up?’ And I’m like: ‘What?!’ And everyone didn’t rebut that, they just sat there. I was like: ‘Oh my God, what the fuck’?

“And of course, my equipment died that night. It completely died, and the other opening band had already left, so there was no other fucking equipment in the building. So I got all pissed off and smashed my bass. I was totally out of my head – angry and pissed off, drunk. I left the stage because there was no sound. I’m not going to stand up there and monkey around like I’m playing. It was almost right away; I think I got to play six songs, if that. And I was so lividly sad, because that was the end of the tour after my honey had left me. And that was it, the last show of the tour that she should have been with me on. It was the most creative and destructive music that I’d ever heard or been part of. The final magic.”

Two months later, Cameron was surprised to find a mystery visitor one morning at his Seattle home. “I took my dog out for a walk, came back, and Chris’s truck was in my driveway. I was like: ‘Cool, Chris never comes to visit. Awesome man – we’ll work on some stuff. What a great opportunity.’ So I go into the house, and my girlfriend – who’s now my wife – she goes: ‘Hey, Chris is in the basement.’ I go down there, and he just reeked of alcohol. I think he’d been up all night drinking, and he looked a little odd, so I said: ‘Hey, what’s up man?’ And he was like: ‘Well, I’m here because I’m leaving the band’.”

Looking back at Soundgarden’s split nearly 10 years later, it’s clear the group did the noble thing, and shut things down at their peak (à la The Police and The Beatles). Cornell agrees: “I feel like the entire career of Soundgarden, if you look at it in a capsule, I couldn’t have imagined it artistically going better. I mean our last record is my favourite record. It sold, like, two million copies. We didn’t sort of meander into obscurity and continue going on the road and making records that I wasn’t proud of. None of that ever happened.”

Ultimately, the band fell victim to their own phenomenal achievement. As Cornell admitted at the time, Soundgarden’s break up was a “an act of self-preservation. We were so self-contained in the beginning, but I don’t think we ever really adjusted to the success part of it.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 83

Krist Novoselic's new band, The Bona Fide Band, played their first shows last week, and the bassist evoked memories of his previous band by performing a cover of Love Buzz, a song previously covered, and released by, Nirvana.

The new group - in which Novoselic is joined by ex-Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel, vocalists Jillian Raye and Jennifer Johnson (both members of grunge supergroup 3rd Secret), and guitarist Kathy Moore, leader of Seattle Washington's The Kathy Moore Super Power Trio - made their live debut on June 20 at at Easy Street Records in Seattle, and followed this up by playing in Aberdeen, Washington, on June 21, as part of the town's Make Music Day celebrations. Aberdeen is globally famous as the birthplace of Nirvana, and the former hometown of Novoselic and Kurt Cobain.

While the quintet's set on June 21 largely consisted of songs by 3rd Secret and Novoselic's Giants in the Trees, they also made room in their setlist for a cover of Dutch pysch-rock band Shocking Blue's single Love Buzz, covered by Nirvana and released in 1988 as their debut single on Sub Pop.

Watch footage of the performance below:

According to Billboard, Novoselic formed The Bona Fide Band in an effort to raise awareness for his new political party, The Cascade Party.

The bassist told Seattle's KOMO News, that in order to establish the Cascade Party as a bona fide political party, he needs to host conventions, and secure 1,000 valid signatures, which is where the Bona Fide Band’s live appearances come in.

“There’s not going to be hardly any speeches from the stage,” Novoselic told KOMO. "Basically, please sign the petition if you want to see a new party in Washington State."

Speaking of his hopes for the gigs, the bassist added, “If it brings back memories and feelings for people, that’s the magic of music.” 

Grunge is not a scene associated with clean-living and abstinence. As you can gather from some of the genre’s much-missed casualties, it was often a messy and drug-addled environment but you might be surprised about the title-holders when it comes to what has been touted as grunge’s most debauched tour: that honour would go to LA-formed Seattle invaders L7.

As recounted in Mark Yarm’s excellent oral history of grunge history Everybody Loves Our Town, they took some serious beating. In the book, Sub Pop veteran Megan Jasper remembers the quartet visiting the record label’s offices in Seattle. “We would rate bands on how much they smelled,” Jasper said. “It wasn’t an official list but our accountant would make jokes and write it down. L7 were on the list, but Babes In Toyland were the smelliest. Geoff actually followed them around one time with an air-freshener, spraying them.”

“L7 were badasses,” agreed Danny Bland, guitarist in scuzzy Seattle rockers Cat Butt. “They were an all-female rock’n’roll band, they smelled as bad as we did.”

Bland should know – the tour in question saw his band head out on the road with L7. “Donita (Sparks, L7 vocalist and guitarist) named our big tour together Swapping Fluids Across America,” remembered Cat Butt guitarist James Burdyshaw. “Donita was with Dean (Gunderson, Cat Butt bassist), and Danny was with Jennifer (Finch, L7 bassist)... It was like the fuckin’ Partridge Family.”

“There was a lot of fluids being swapped,” agreed Finch. “There was a lot of alcohol. There was a lot of vomiting.”

Elsewhere, the tour took in brawls in bars, a face-off with a gang swinging machetes at them, a stabbing (for L7’s Donita Sparks), witnessing a gangland killing and some hardcore drug-taking. “I barely remember the tour,” admitted Finch. “I was on so much heroin.”

“I remember thinking, ‘I’ll probably never be on a tour that’s this fucking crazy ever again’,” Bland concluded. Thankfully, all members of both groups lived to tell the tale.

Since their debut EP Year of the Rat emerged in 2021, Softcult have been a captivating band to watch. The duo, made up of twin siblings Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn, have spent the years since honing what they call their “riotgaze” sound, an enchanting brew of grunge and shoegaze with the do-it-yourself attitude of '90s riot grrrl punk. On their fourth release, Heaven, the pair explore the issues that affect our day-to-day life, from toxic capitalism and anxiety to intersectional feminism, all while sharpening their ethereal craft.

The EP sees them introduce new elements to their trademark dream-pop sound. Spiralling Out is perhaps the most typical Softcult track on the album, with hypnotic, repeating guitar riffs that link well to the subject matter of anxiety and the vicious cycle of overthinking. Heaven sees them use a similarly dreamy shoegaze style, but the raw production makes it feel particularly intimate, crafting a simple but breathtakingly beautiful conclusion to the EP that devolves into blurry guitars before a slow fade out. 9 Circles is more ominous, like Spit It Out from Softcult’s Year of the Snake EP, and adds a moment of intrigue at the record’s midpoint.

With One of the Pack, they lean more heavily into their grunge and punk influences with their own otherworldly version of Bikini Kill’s 1993 feminist anthem Rebel Girl. This time around, they’re celebrating all women in a hymn for the intersectional feminist as they sing “How can they say you don’t belong? / But you’re so strong, you’re so strong.” In the chorus, they swap out their typically soft vocals for ecstatic screams of “But girl if you need me / You know I got your back / I hope when you see me / You know you’re one of the pack.” It’s not a new message for Softcult - inclusivity has always been front of mind for the duo - but One of the Pack is special for its celebratory outlook and is undoubtedly among their best songs.  

Another key moment on the EP is Shortest Fuse, which deals with toxic work culture. Softcult have always taken on broad issues in their music, but there’s something more personal and refined here. Shortest Fuse feels particularly authentic, that they’re basing their observations on their own lived experiences.

Heaven is an exciting progression in Softcult’s musicianship which sees the duo’s production and lyricism become sharper and more focused, without losing the dreamlike quality that drew listeners in from their very first release. As with every Softcult EP up to now, it leaves you wanting more, an issue which will hopefully one day be rectified soon with the arrival of a debut full-length album.

Few bands had such a rollercoaster career as Stone Temple Pilots, much of it due to the erractic behaviour of mercurial frontman Scott Weiland, who died in 2015. In 2013, following yet another split with Weiland, the band enlisted a surprise replacement: Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, who appeared on that year’s High Rise EP. On the eve of the EP’s release, Classic Rock talked to the band and Bennington – who passed away in 2017 - about rebooting one of alternative rock’s biggest bands.

The point of no return for Stone Temple Pilots came on 17 September, 2012. After three months of hit-and-miss performances with vocalist Scott Weiland, the band were scheduled to play in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Weiland arrived at the venue almost two hours late and stumbled his way through a shortened set. The group cancelled the next night’s gig in Lethbridge, Alberta without a proper explanation. By the time the group returned to the road for the last three dates the die had been cast. Guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo and drummer Eric Kretz decided to find a new singer.

“We were left in a position where we went: ‘Okay, what do we do?’ says Robert. “Those shows were the accumulation of everything that had come together for many years. it was a very, very difficult decision to make.”

Three months later, a DJ in Minneapolis asked Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash about Weiland’s recent comments about being “completely open” to rejoining that band. “That’s because he got fired from STP,” responded Slash. 

Reports of Weiland’s dismissal were all over the internet. In an interview with Rolling Stone in February, Weiland insisted he was still in the band. But the next day STP issued a short statement: “Stone Temple Pilots have announced they have officially terminated Scott Weiland.” On 18 May the band unveiled his replacement: Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington.

Today, with litigation pending about who owns the band’s name and whether the members of STP had a legal right to fire Weiland, Dean and Robert DeLeo are reluctant to reveal what specific incidents led them to “terminate” Weiland and bring in Bennington. They choose their words carefully when asked about their relationship with their ex-frontman, though they’re clearly still bitter about the endless frustration and trauma he allegedly caused during their 20-plus year career.

“Everybody only got a glimpse of what was really going on,” says Dean. “The inside was dark, man. And the last couple years it was impossible to get anything done. There was a 50/50 shot whether Scott was even gonna show. And then there was a 50/50 shot of who I was gonna get.”

Those unfamiliar with the band might ask why they didn’t replace him long ago. The answer is simple. In his prime, Weiland was as much STP’s hero as he was their Achilles heel. Despite a rampant heroin habit that raged from 1994 until 2002, they were one the most successful rock bands of the 90s, and even when their singer was out of his mind he was one of the most dynamic frontmen, with a voice to rival Eddie Vedder. 

But while Weiland was the band’s showman, the DeLeos were the men who ran the show, crafting songs that drew from Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Motown and grunge. Many critics dismissed STP as Pearl Jam wannabes, but the public didn’t agree; the band’s 1992 debut, Core, sold more than eight million copies, and before their first break-up in 2003 they’d sold 40 million records worldwide.

Despite the band’s success, their progress was hampered almost from the start by Weiland’s habits. In 1995 he was arrested for buying crack cocaine. Though he avoided jail, his addiction worsened, and in 1997 STP had to cut short a tour short because he was too far gone to perform. 

“I lived with this false hope that he was one day gonna get it together,” Dean admits. “I kick myself today because we let it go on so long.”

They gave Weiland another chance in 1998 and hung together for the next few years. But the Pilots fell from the sky once again during a 2002 tour. Fed up with Weiland’s missteps, the DeLeos vowed they were through, and even titled a 2003 greatest hits compilation Thank You as a final gesture to their fans.

“The story of my career is constantly wanting to take STP to new levels,” Robert laments, “but we constantly had to hold back.”

Despite everything, the band kept trying, and invited Weiland back one more time in 2007 at the request of his then-wife. Never one to leave bridges unburned, Weiland vacated Velvet Revolver under less than friendly circumstances and Stone Temple Pilots scheduled a 65-date tour of North America. 

The DeLeos were optimistic when they went into production for their self-titled sixth album, which came out in 2010. But the problems that reared their heads during recording became uglier on the road, even though Weiland was reportedly clean. When the singer slipped into full Axl Rose mode, the other members decided they needed a major change. 

“It wasn’t only a decision to terminate my lead singer, it was a quality of life decision,” Robert says. “I look at what STP has done – or hasn’t done – in the past 10 years. I don’t want the next 10 to be like that.”

The first time Chester Bennington saw Stone Temple Pilots live was in 1993 at the Arizona State Fair in his home town Phoenix. Core was one of Bennington’s favourite records. The night turned out to be a pivotal moment for the teenager.

“Scott came out wearing flannel,” he recalls today. “During the second song he tore the flannel off and said: ‘We’re not from fucking Seattle!’ And they rocked so hard. I looked at that and thought, ‘Fuck, I want to be able to do that.’”

It was the first of many times that Bennington saw them in the 90s. By 2001 he was even sharing a stage with them when Linkin Park and Stone Temple Pilots both appeared on the Family Values tour. When things crossed a line with Weiland, the DeLeos contacted Bennington via mutual friends and asked him if was interested in joining the band he’d grown up idolising.

“I said yes, immediately. And then I suddenly felt like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna puke a little bit,’” Bennington admits.” I was nervous, but also really excited.”

The group started tossing around ideas for new songs. “There were great riffs bouncing around and a lot of chemistry,” Bennington says. “We got each other’s personalities, and we were all having a blast.”

“There’s a certain magic that happens when Robert, Eric and I get in the room and start playing,” adds Dean. “Chester fit right into that formula. Even though we hadn’t seen him in a long time, it was like he had been playing with us for 30 years. He had great ideas, and when we finally took a break and played some of the old catalogue for fun, he knew the songs.” 

The first new song the band completed, the fist-raising anthem Out Of Time, came from a bass line Robert played on the spot while trying out some new equipment. In keeping with this spirit of spontaneity, they recorded the song and unveiled it on May18 at the annual LA radio festival, the KROQ Weenie Roast. Before Bennington took the stage, the audience was unaware he was STP’s new singer.

“During the first song, the band started playing the music for Vaseline,” Bennington recalls. “I was shaking my ass on the drum riser with my back to the crowd. I jumped and landed on the stage when the song started, and began to sing. People were screaming and they were super-stoked. I think I lot of them thought I was Scott. When they saw that I wasn’t, they were surprised, but I didn’t see or hear anything that indicated that maybe this was a bad idea.”

The next day STP released Out Of Time as a free download, and that night they played the Live 105 BFD festival near San Francisco. As exciting as it was to be back on stage, Stone Temple Pilots held off playing more shows so they could record an EP before August, when Bennington had to go into full-time rehearsals with Linkin Park.

“Dean, Eric and I felt like we could get more done with Chester in a few months than we could in a few years with STP before,” says Robert. “And we have.” 

There’s some irony in the fact that STP have swapped one notoriously wayward singer for another who has had his own struggles with substances in the past. Bennington battled drink and drugs throughout his early career before cleaning up in 2005. The DeLeos are aware of Bennington’s story, and they’re confident history won’t repeat itself. “I’ve spent a lot of time around him, and I could tell right away that won’t be an issue,” Robert says. “I see what kind of a person he is.”

But there are bigger considerations than just chemical ones. Bringing on board an established singer with his own successful band could bring its own set of problems, especially as this union looks like it will be semi-permanent. Bennington is aware of the pitfalls of juggling two bands at once – Linkin Park are working on the soundtrack to the upcoming movie Mall, as a well as their own new studio album. The singer has the cautious support of his Linkin Park bandmates, though their concerns seem more to do with workload than jealousy.

“This is the first time when one of us has said: ‘Hey, by the way, I’m going to do this thing on the side and it’s one of the biggest things out there,’” he says. “Understandably, they’re concerned that I’m stretching myself too thin. They were like: ‘Look, we support this, but we also know you’re not gonna just want this to be something that you do. You’re going to want this to be big.’ I just have to remember I’m only one person so I have to be smart.”

Given Bennington’s limited availability to STP, there’s a question that begs to be answered: once the legal issues are ironed out, what if a healthy, happy Weiland wants to return to Stone Temple Pilots? 

“No way, man,” says Robert. “That boat has sailed.”

Dean DeLeo agrees. “We’ve tried that again and again,” he says. “It’s about time we started enjoying our career and having a good time with it, as opposed to just worrying about everything all the time and trying to uphold another dude’s integrity. I want to enjoy this, man, and it hasn’t been enjoyable for a long, long time. When I go into a session now where I’m being affiliated with Chester, it’s a huge, huge beast off my back. I sleep much better at night.” 

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 189

Mega-selling post-grunge quartet Creed were one of rock music's biggest reunions this year, getting back together almost a decade after their last return to the scene. In a new interview with Metal Hammer, guitarist Mark Tremonti - who famously rebuilt his career following the end of the band in 2004 with anthemic arena rockers Alter Bridge - explains what he feels set Creed apart when they first blew up in the late 90s.

“When Creed first came out, all the bands of rock radio were kind of upbeat, more pop rock," he muses. "Bands like Third Eye Blind were really big at the time, and Marcy Playground and Semisonic, stuff like that. So, when we came out with [1997 debut album] My Own Prison, to me at the time, it was the only sombre song that was doing well on the rock charts. I think the seriousness of it grabbed people’s attention. The grunge scene had a lot of that moody stuff going on, but when we had come about, it had been years since the grunge thing really popped.”

Despite Creed's immense success, having sold tens of millions of albums and filled arenas the world over, Tremonti wasn't immune to the criticism that the band would often suffer online.

“You have to have thick skin," he admits. "Back when Creed were on the radio 24 hours a day, if a friend would call me and say,‘ Man, this person online said this or that about your band’, I’d be like, ‘Just let me enjoy myself.’ I’ve been able to live on both sides of that fence across my career; to have the very recognised commercial band that had a lot of success, but also had some backlash, and then to have Alter Bridge, who everybody’s always been very complimentary about, but we’ve never sold the millions and millions of records that Creed did.”

Creed released three albums in their original run together before breaking up as tensions within the band began to grow toxic. They reunited in 2009 and released a fourth album, Full Circle, later that year, though work on a follow-up stalled and the band went on another hiatus in 2013. It's unknown whether their latest comeback, which includes a huge US tour taking place next year, will include new music.

Read more from Mark Tremonti in the latest issue of Metal Hammer, out now.

It was a gamble and they knew it. In 1995, during the recording of Def Leppard’s sixth album, Slang, it had a bleakly humorous working title: Commercial Suicide. “We knew that people would wonder what the hell we were doing,” singer Joe Elliott says. “But we couldn’t make another album like Adrenalize. We had to do something else. So we did something that nobody expected. Slang was our grown-up album.”

A change in Def Leppard’s music had begun with the 1993 album Retro Active, the follow-up to Adrenalize. The sound of it was leaner, harder, less slick: partly in reaction to Adrenalize, which was, in guitarist Phil Collen’s words, “a little mechanical”; and partly in reaction to how music was developing in the early ’90s, as alternative rock had a seismic effect akin to the punk explosion of 1977, the year in which Def Leppard formed. 

According to bassist Rick Savage, the band’s approach to Slang was not clearly defined from the outset. “We weren’t totally sure exactly what the direction was,” he admits, “but we knew what the direction wasn’t. We didn’t want to try to recreate Hysteria again, and we could never be Nirvana, but we could make an album that was representative of the five of us that would fit in with the times without us looking like stupid old farts.”

Not everyone was quite on the same page. Former Dio guitarist Vivian Campbell had replaced the late Steve Clark in 1992. This would be the first full album he recorded with the band.

 “It was very confusing,” Vivian says. “I was making a record for the first time with the mighty Def Leppard, and it was almost as if Def Leppard was afraid to be Def Leppard. I tried not to rock the boat or ask too many questions – just go with the flow of it. But deep down I was thinking, what the fuck is going on here? As far as I could understand it, the only clear directive was that we couldn’t make a Def Leppard-sounding record.”

Vivian cites Soundgarden’s 1994 album Superunknown, and the song Black Hole Sun especially, as an influence on Def Leppard in the making of Slang. A deeper influence was in what the individual members of the group were experiencing in their personal lives.

“There was a lot of emotional turmoil going on,” Joe says. “Death and birth, marriage and divorce. None of this stuff existed when we were writing the other records. Those records were all about rocking out and having a good time. It was very different with Slang.” As Phil says: “The mood of the album was kind of dark, and it wasn’t something we did on purpose, it was just how it turned out.”

For all that, Joe recalls the recording of the album as a time of fun, as the band lived and worked together at a house in Spain that had been the setting for the second series of British comedy drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. “That was our home and our studio,” Joe says. “And we had a ball out there, enjoying the sunshine and creating these songs.” 

Co-produced by the band with Pete Woodroffe, the album was recorded in “an old-fashioned style”, as Rick Savage calls it. “We were playing as a band, basically,” he says. “The backing tracks were almost live – how we sounded in a rehearsal room – and then we enhanced it from there.” Central to this more organic approach was drummer Rick Allen’s reversion to a semi-acoustic kit. “It was another challenge,” he says, “but I loved the feel of it.”

In this environment, new ideas came into play. “It was great for us to flex our muscles in a different way,” Phil says. “We had an orchestra playing Indian instruments on Turn To Dust, which was really exciting. And in Breathe A Sigh, we had an R&B twist to the vocals.” Vivian Campbell, for all his misgivings, wrote in Work It Out a brilliant modern rock song for the post-grunge era. As Rick Allen says, “These were songs that for Def Leppard came out of leftfield.”

Equally, there were traces of the band’s past in Gift Of Flesh and the album’s title track. “Gift Of Flesh is good proper rock stuff,” Joe says, “like UFO did on Obsession. And the title track was just a regular pop song, with a complete theft of the rundown at the end of Fame by Bowie.”

The real depth in Slang was in the three songs that ended the album – Blood Runs Cold, Where Does Love Go When It Dies, and Pearl Of Euphoria. In an echo of the song White Lightning, from Adrenalize, Joe and Phil wrote Blood Runs Cold as another eulogy for Steve Clark, only darker. “This was a more heartfelt song,” Joe says. “White Lightning was a grandiose, big movie version of Steve Clark. Blood Runs Cold was the down-and-dirty, in-the-gutter version of Steve. And that’s where we wanted this album to go.”

Where Does Love Go When It Dies has a melancholy beauty and a hard-earned wisdom in the words Joe sings. “It’s one of my favourite songs,” Rick Allen says. “The lyrical content is pretty amazing.” And in Pearl of Euphoria, a heavy sound was matched by the lyrics. “It’s about abortion,” Phil says. “A really deep song. Across the album there are religious metaphors and social metaphors. It was all pretty deep for a Def Leppard record.”

In the end, Slang was not, as the band had predicted, only half-jokingly, an act of commercial suicide. The album reached No.14 in the US, and No.6 in the UK. It was not a multi-million seller, but the band never really expected it to be. In rock music, so much had changed since the heady days of Hysteria and Adrenalize, and Slang was a reflection of that change.

For Joe Elliott, it is an album defined by “raw emotion”. He speaks of Slang as one of the most important albums that Def Leppard ever made. “To move forward,” he says, “we had to break it all down and build again. And the satisfaction that we got from that album, I couldn’t put in into words.”

For all the darkness and emotional intensity in Slang, the album had a positive effect on the band. “It really refreshed us,” Rick Savage says, “and gave us an appetite to be natural and enjoy it again.” And what this led to was an album with a title that spoke volumes: Euphoria.

This title, already in place before the album was made, had echoes of Pyromania and Hysteria, the mega-hits that had transformed Def Leppard into the biggest British rock group since Led Zeppelin and Queen. And with this came a sense of a band re-embracing its own history and its true identity. As Joe says: “Music moves in cycles. Slang was ground zero, and with Euphoria it was a new start. We reinstalled the harmonies on that record. The songs were more melodic. It was about us feeling good about who we were.”

What also fed into Euphoria was the sense among the members of Def Leppard that the cyclical nature of music had, in the end stages of the 1990s, turned to their advantage. As Phil Collen says: “When we started on Euphoria, all of a sudden there was Britney Spears and Ricky Martin out there. Music was happy again, it wasn’t miserable.”

There was, as Vivian Campbell recalls, a mood of cautious optimism within the band. “With Euphoria, we were peeking our heads over the fence,” he laughs. “Is it safe to come out now? That’s how it felt. But we were starting to see signs that it was okay to be ourselves again. We were hearing slickly crafted, producer-driven pop songs on the radio. That was a strong indicator that we could make a proper Def Leppard record. So there was a strong and clear concept going into Euphoria, and it began with the title of the album. It was a return to the classic Def Leppard sound.” Rick Allen puts is simply. “If you leave it enough time, it will come back into fashion and people will like it again.”

Another significant development was the return of the band’s unofficial “sixth member” Mutt Lange, albeit in a more limited role than before. The last Def Leppard album with Lange as producer was Hysteria. On Euphoria, as on Slang, the band co-produced with Pete Woodroffe. But in this album’s key track, Promises – chosen as the flagship single for what Phil Collen describes as its “classic Def Leppard feel” – it was Lange who turned a good song into a great one.

The riff in Promises, written by Phil, had a tone and rhythm reminiscent of the band’s classic 1983 single Photograph. But as Vivian says, “We couldn’t find the chorus. And that was when that song was sent off to Mutt. He was living in Switzerland and we were recording in Dublin. We sent him the multi-track, he sliced it and diced it and sent it back to us a week or two later – and when we heard it we went, ‘Oh fuck – there’s the chorus!’”

Lange subsequently flew in to Dublin to work with the band over a long weekend, in which time they co-wrote two more songs: It’s Only Love and All Night. Of the latter, Joe says: “That song is bonkers, a little like Let’s Get Rocked was – a funky jam with mad sections that are atonal, melodically wrong, but it has a unique flavour.” During that weekend, they also recorded backing vocals with Lange, and the combination of his voice and theirs – so integral to the sound of the band’s classic hits of the ’80s – was heard again in Promises.

There was one other song from Euphoria in which Lange had an influence. The beautiful ballad Goodbye was written by Rick Savage alone. “At that stage,” he says, “I wasn’t schooled in writing a complete song, start to finish. But I wanted to do it on a personal level. I had a demo of the song while we were doing Slang, but it didn’t feel quite right. I changed the verses. The chorus was always the same. And in the end it all came together when Mutt was with us in Dublin. He didn’t write on that song, but he was influential in directing us.”

The finished album was broad in range. Demolition Man was placed as the opening track for its energy. “The chorus is pretty manic,” Joe says, “with all of throwing lines at each other.” Fittingly, for a song that he describes as “really hard-driving”, it features a guest appearance from ex-Formula One world champion Damon Hill. Another standout track, Back In Your Face, is a throwback to the glory days of British glam rock. ‘The guitar riff is very much based in that whole glam era of ’72, ’73,” Joe says. “It’s us doing The Glitter Band – to the point where we contacted the engineer who’d worked with Mike Leander, the producer on those records, and asked, what’s the exact millisecond delay on the handclaps and the snare drum? It was a guarded secret but we managed to get it off him.”

The album also has two epic pieces. Kings Of Oblivion was inspired by the heavy sounds of the ’70s. “It’s a great, classic rock song,” Joe says. “It harks right back to the days of Uriah Heep and Wishbone Ash and Lone Star.” And on Paper Sun, similar in scale to Gods Of War from Hysteria, they went even deeper, the lyrics in this song written in the aftermath of the 1998 terrorist bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland, which killed 29 people and left more than 200 injured. “It was such a tragedy,” Phil says. “We’re an apolitical band, but that really affected us.”

Euphoria was released on June 8, 1999. The album peaked at No.11 on the US and UK charts, while Promises made No.1 on Billboard’s Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks. For Phil Collen, Euphoria is one of Def Leppard’s best. “I’m very proud of that album,” he says. “We felt good making it, and I think you can hear it in those songs.”

Slang was a bold reinvention, Euphoria a triumphant return to the classic Def Leppard sound. It was when the band experimented again – on X, the follow-up to Euphoria – that they dropped the ball.

Joe admits there was some confusion within the band going into this album. “I think we were at a crossroads,” he says. “Internally, we were all not going in the right direction. We had some discussions about how we should go, and we had suggestions thrown at us that we should work with some outside writers, which I was completely not cool with because I knew that we were well capable of writing our own. So why would we want to do that?”

Despite his reservations, additional writers were used on five of the songs recorded for X. Now, Everyday and You’re So Beautiful were co-written by the band with Marti Frederiksen, the American songwriter who had worked with Aerosmith on the albums Nine Lives and Just Push Play. More contentiously, there was one song, Long, Long Way To Go, written by Wayne Hector, author of Westlife’s hit Flying Without Wings; and another, Unbelievable, by Swedish trio Per Aldenheim, Andreas Carlsson and Max Martin, the latter famous for writing Britney Spears’ … Baby One More Time.

As it turned out, Long, Long Way To Go, a beautiful ballad, was one of the best songs on the album. With hindsight, and damning with faint praise, Joe describes Unbelievable as “not that bad”. The songs written with Marti Frederiksen were more to Joe’s taste.

“They were kind of poppy,” he says. “Like if we’d sat down and said, ‘Let’s try and be Cheap Trick.’ And they’re one of my favourite bands of all time. So I was OK with that.” But he adds: “The stuff that we wrote on our own has the real flavour of what Def Leppard is.” Nowhere was this more evident than on Four Letter Word, a throwback to the simple, AC/DC-inspired kick-ass rock’n’roll of High ‘n’ Dry.

Joe is blunt in his assessment of X. “It’s a weird album,” he says. “And it’s obviously polarised people’s opinions. It’s certainly not Hysteria but there is some good stuff. So it’s not a standout album, but I don’t think it’s a complete duffer.”

X was not a flop. It made No.14 on the UK chart, No.11 in the US. But where one experimental album, Slang, had yielded some of the deepest music of the band’s career, X came up short. For Def Leppard, it was a mistake not to be repeated.  

By 1993, grunge had become big business. To the dismay of the rock genre’s biggest stars, grunge apparel could be found in the aisles at Wal-Mart and on the rails in Gap (although not in Chelmsford, Essex, where it was actually really, really hard to find a corduroy shirt). Seeing their scene be co-opted by the mainstream might have been very distressing to Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain but not as distressing, it seems, as it was to American mum Pam. Poor old Pam was so dismayed by her 18-year-old son Nick’s grunge-y style that she took to contacting The Oprah Winfrey Show in a bid to clean him up so she could send him off to college looking like the respectable young lad that she wanted him to be.

Quoted on Oprah’s website about the episode, Pam despairs about Nick’s new look and attitude. "A total change from the look of high school," Pam says. "Just to being sloppy and scruffy, not caring about shaving or his hair or anything.” In a clip from the show, Pam walks viewers around her house and talks through her concerns. We briefly see Nick’s bedroom, which is actually quite tidy by teenage standards; the bed is unmade but maybe Pam did that because she was upset at how tidy it was when the camera crew arrived. We then see Nick, who is obviously such a new convert to grunge that he thinks it’s OK to wear sandals with jeans - you’d be laughed out of Seattle Nick, get a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars on man! It’s also worth saying that Nick, “18”, looks about 30, but maybe that’s just an olden days thing. The further back you go, the more everyone looks older at the same age. 18-year-olds in 1973 looked 50.

Anyway, back to Pam: now she’s voicing her discontent at Nick listening to songs with titles such as Dead & Bloated and Sex Type Thing. Oops, Nick has been leaving his copy of Stone Temple Pilots’ debut lying around the house! The video ends on a melancholy note, as poor Nick munches his way through a bag of crisps obviously wondering why the hell his mum is making him go on the Oprah Winfrey Show when he could have just had a shower and a shave.

Unfortunately, the result, which the Oprah site says sees Nick “transformed back to the clean-shaven, khaki-wearing young men his mother remembered”, isn’t available to view in the UK but we imagine it makes the 18-year-old who looks 30 now look 40. You can see Pam wearily outline her worry about grunge-y Nick, though, and that’s the best bit:

Last month, Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready unexpectedly shared a live performance of an acoustic track titled Crying Moon that he says he wrote as a tribute to his late friend, and former Temple Of The Dog bandmate, Chris Cornell. 

Introducing the song, McCready references the fact that a number of his friends in the Seattle music scene passed away, and says that death in the city's artistic community became "a horrible cliché".

Alongside the clip, McCready posted: "This is a song I wrote as a goodbye to my friend Chris Cornell. Crying Moon is part of my process in dealing with his death. Chris opened up my world to new heights when he let me play on Temple Of The Dog. When he agreed to sing on Mad Season as part of the Sonic Evolution show with the Seattle Symphony, I literally jumped for joy! The Temple Of The Dog reunion at that show inspired us to tour, which was amazing. Playing War Pigs live with Chris was a dream. I love and miss him."

Now, in a new interview with Guitar World, McCready has revealed that Crying Moon will feature in a 'rock opera' that he's writing about the Seattle scene, which will make reference to the passing of Soundgarden's frontman.

"I look at him as one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time, aside from being a friend," McCready says of Cornell in the interview. "I love Chris and I'm working on a little project about the Seattle scene and a musical kind of rock opera thing. He's part of it."

McCready says that Crying Moon will appear in his rock opera, which he currently envisages as "a record and maybe some sort of stage/play thing."

"I'm just in the middle of it," he says. “I’m working on a script and I've got about 18 songs that I'm working on, and I'm singing on it. It's been a long journey."

The guitarist also reveals that Pearl Jam have almost completed their next studio album, which they've been recording with rock's hottest producer of the moment, Andrew Watt (The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne)

"It’s just about finished," McCready tells Guitar World of the follow-up to 2020's Gigaton. “I think there's a few tweaks here and there that have to happen, and we’re probably not going to have anything out this year. But Andrew Watt brought an energy and a youthfulness and a great ear to us that I think we needed.

"He kind of kicked us in our asses a little bit. Like, ‘Okay, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go go go!’ He's the most hyper guy I've ever met besides myself. But he's a giant fan of our band, and he's a really smoking guitar player in his own right."

Guitar World’s full Mike McCready interview will be published in the coming weeks.

Alice Cooper has no shortage of evergreen, classic rock anthems to his name - School's Out, Elected, I'm Eighteen and Under My Wheels to name but a handful - but every now and then he'll hear a song on the radio and wonder why he didn't think of it himself.

In a new interview with Vulture, the 75-year-old singer singles out an emo anthem and a grunge classic as songs that he wishes he had written. 

In the interview, Vulture writer Brady Gerber pays tribute to the impact Cooper had had, stating, 'You opened the doors for a lot of genres: hard rock, heavy metal, punk, pretty much anything with a guitar and a sense of dramatics. Even in emo, like My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade', which leads the singer to nominate a My Chemical Romance song that could have been an Alice original.

"Teenagers is a great song," Cooper responds. "I listened to that and said, How did I not write that? That and Smells Like Teen Spirit. When I heard that on the radio, I went, Dammit, I should have written that song."

Asked if there is anything about Kurt Cobain's Nirvana classic that he would have changed, Cooper replies, "No."

"That was perfect because he was speaking for his generation, which I didn’t quite understand, the attitude and the language of it," he adds. "But I heard it and went, I get it. Very hard to find bands that write good songs. It’s easy to write good parts. But it’s hard to find good songs. The last band I heard that I really flipped out over was the Strypes. Snapshot, that album. There’s not one clunker on it." 

Elsewhere in the interview, Cooper says that his original band were aiming to be "America’s Yardbirds."

"We wanted to be that band that could play with Led Zeppelin," he sayss. "If you don’t have those songs, you’re a puppet show up there — and we would have been gone a long time ago."

With his partner in crime, vocalist Danny Bowes, sidelined for the foreseeable future following a stroke suffered last August, Thunder guitarist Luke Morley is finally set to release Songs From The Blue Room, a solo album he has tinkered with for the past couple of years. 

We caught up with him to find out more about that record, and also about his optimism regarding Bowes returning to the live stage at some point.

Your debut solo album, El Gringo Retro, was released in 2001 during a hiatus from Thunder. Now, regrettably, the same seems true of its follow-up, Songs From The Blue Room. 

I hadn’t thought about that but, weirdly, you’re right. El Gringo was just a bunch of random songs I had hanging around, but this time there was much more structure. I wrote a lot during covid to keep sane. It was my wife that suggested putting out the songs under my own name. And why not? It’s been twenty years, I think the world is ready. 

What’s your mind set with these extracurricular activities – just a bit of fun, or do you still have something to prove? 

Probably a bit of both. I’m sixty-two years old, and I’ve learned that it can be healthy to step away and do other things. That was certainly true when I did The Union with Peter Shoulder. Returning to Thunder with lots of new ideas, I saw the band much more clearly. 

You’re a rather decent singer on the sly. 

I don’t know about that. 

Don’t be modest, it’s true. 

Somebody said to me: “You can carry a tune, but not far” [laughs]. The problem is that I’ve worked with such incredible vocalists in Danny [Bowes] and Peter Shoulder, and when I got involved with The Power Station they had Robert Palmer. Fucking hell, that was a bit intimidating. Having a home studio, The Blue Room, allowed me to spend some time on the process. 

It’s easy to imagine Danny singing See The Light, Errol Flynn or Cry Like Rain. 

That’s interesting, because Errol Flynn is quite a personal song. It’s about my father, perhaps about me too. But none were submitted to Thunder because they didn’t seem to fit. Danny does sing on this album, actually. He’s on Nobody Cares, along with Ricky Warwick [from Black Star Riders and Thin Lizzy]. I thought it would be funny to have a couple of proper singers doing backing vocals for me.

Who else appears on the album? 

My very old school friend Tony Myers plays the guitar solo on Cry Like Rain, Dave McCluskey, who was in The Union, handled the drums. I did everything else. 

Killed By Cobain is a whimsical reflection on the bad luck that scuppered Thunder’s attempts to break America. It’s great that you can laugh at something so important in your life. 

From one point of view, our timing was incredibly good in that we did so well in the UK, Europe and Japan. But America was different. Had we come along two years earlier, before grunge took over, things could have turned out better. I’m at peace with it all now. 

How did you hear the terrible news about Danny suffering a stroke? 

I was there when it happened, at a bit of a celebration for a few of us passing our sixtieth birthdays. Everyone was having a lovely evening until Danny fell down some stairs. All the evidence pointed towards him having a stroke which caused his imbalance. But he’s doing really, really well. I had dinner with him a few nights ago. Mentally speaking he’s still a hundred per cent, and his physicality is coming back but he’s having to work hard. Talk to him on the phone and you wouldn’t even know what had happened. 

Credit to Thunder’s fans, who in less than forty-eight hours smashed a target of thirty thousand pounds to pay for his treatment in a neuro-rehabilitation centre. 

Yeah, that was incredible. It was life-changing. With brain injuries you have to move fast. We were a bit uncertain about asking our punters for money, but it was important, and we’ve always had such a good relationship with them.

Is your gut feeling that Danny will make it back to being on stage again at some point? 

I think so. Danny’s motivation levels have always been very, very high. It’s just going to take some time. While the outcome is not one hundred per cent certain, knowing him as I do I’m quietly confident. What I will say is that we need to be patient. It will take as long as it takes, and brain injuries require lots of time to heal. 

Your good friend Andy Taylor, the former Duran Duran guitarist and producer of Thunder’s first album, has announced that he has prostate cancer. Have you spoken to him? 

Yeah. After he went public with the news, I went to see him at his place in Ibiza. He’s getting really good treatment and remaining extremely positive. 

While we keep our fingers crossed for Danny and Andy, will you be playing some dates of your own? 

We’ll have to see. With The Union it was back to smaller venues and staying in Travelodges. After that ended I promised myself to never stay in a Travelodge again [laughs]. Putting a band together involves a lot of work. I might do it, but at the moment I’m still undecided. 

How heavily were you involved in the recent reissues of the first three Thunder albums? 

Not particularly. They’ve been reissued god-knows how many times, so the vault is fairly empty. What we did was find some live stuff from the era that hasn’t been released before. 

You re-posted a video of the singer Terje Harøy covering Thunder’s Low Life In High Places on Norway’s version of The Voice. It must be gratifying to see new generations discovering your songs? 

Of course, it’s the biggest compliment that anyone can pay to a songwriter. But, fuck, it does make you feel old.

The grunge boom of the early 90s was a great thing: a thing that gave us endless amazing bands and classic albums. But, since the movement was so commercially successful, for every Nevermind by Nirvana or Dirt by Alice in Chains, there were a big ‘ol load of filler albums released to capitalise on the scene's popularity. Even within those stinkers, though, there was a gem or two to be found. Here, then, are ten truly crappy grunge albums with one all-time great song.

Bush – Chemical Between Us (The Science of Things, 1999)

So, listen: despite them being an almost constant punchline for grunge purists back in the day, there is actually loads to admire about UK 90s superstars Bush. Gavin Rossdale’s crew’s first two albums, Sixteen Stone and Razorblade Suitcase, still hold up today, and only those with the sniffiest of attitudes could deny it. Unfortunately, by the time 1999 came around, Bush were no longer part of the zeitgeist and were well out of ideas. Their third album The Science of Things is mostly forgettable, save for the brilliant dance rock of first single Chemicals Between Us.

Days Of The New - Touch, Peel And Stand (Days of the New, 1997)

Grunge was absolutely on its arse by 1997. Skate punk, Brit-pop and nu metal had all ganged up to make it look utterly redundant, although it did a fair bit of that itself when the best it could offer were bands like Days Of The New. The Indiana crew were tipped for big things, but their self-titled debut album was just some pretty dire Pearl Jam/Blind Melon karaoke. The one bright spark was first single Touch, Peel And Stand, which is highly derivative (SHOCK!) but at least had a decent riff and groove.

Live – Sun (The Distance To Here, 1999)

Let’s just say this now; Live’s fifth album is absolutely terrible. The band we all loved from 1994’s Throwing Copper had doubled down on their very worst eco-psychobabble by 1999 on The Distance to Here. Most of it is utterly forgettable, which is actually preferable to songs like The Dolphins Cry, which sound like Russell Brand’s character in Get Him to The Greek doing African Child. The sole bright spark is the Vs-era Pearl Jam swing of Sun, which reminds us of how good they used to be. 

Stiltskin – Inside (The Mind's Eye, 1994)

If rumours from the time are to be believed, then Stiltskin only formed because Levi’s jeans wanted to use Smashing Pumpkins' Today in one of their adverts and Billy Corgan said no, so they decided to put a band together to write a grungy song that sounded as similar to their original choice as possible. The result was Inside by Stiltskin, a massive number one hit after being used in the ad. It’s a great song. It’s also the only song on their debut album The Mind's Eye that you will ever need to listen to.

Candlebox – Far Behind (Candlebox, 1993)

You would have to be a very heartless individual to not feel a little for Candlebox. If you thought Bush had it bad, it was nothing in comparison to the ire Candlebox received; they were the ultimate punching bag for the majority of the grunge scene. While their treatment feels a little bit over the top these days, that doesn’t actually mean they were any good. Their debut album might have sold four million copies in the US, but it’s dull and has rightly been forgotten by most people all these years later. Saying that, its one really big hit, Far Behind, is a hell of a tune...and yes, it sounds like Pearl Jam.

The Presidents Of the United States of America – Volcano (II, 1996)

The success of The Presidents... was always one of the weirdest things to happen to Seattle in the 90s. Were they a grunge band? They didn’t really have the dour, serious demeanour of most of their peers, but they were a nice antidote to such weighty music for a moment. That moment was basically their self-titled 1995 debut album; when they came with another dose a year later the joke had run thin. The only song that really captures the joie de vivre of that first album is the jaunty new wave of Volcano.

Audioslave – Sound Of A Gun (Revelations, 2006)

Okay, grunge mostly by association they may be, but Audioslave were a great band for a while. After all, who could resist the idea of three quarters of Rage Against The Machine, with their huge arsenal of riffs, joining forces with a vocalist as talented as former Soundgarden man Chris Cornell? Their debut album was a classic and its follow up, Out of Exile, was well worth listening to, but the cracks in the band were blindingly evident on their final release, 2006’s Revelations. We don’t believe that anyone thinks of this material when they think of Audioslave, but the song Sound Of A Gun has gone on to be considered one of their best. And it is pretty great.

L7 – Stick To The Plan (Slap-Happy, 1999)

By the end of the 90s many of the grunge bands from the early days of the movement were struggling both creatively and commercially. L7’s star had drastically fallen, and they were on the verge of splitting up as the New Millennium dawned. They managed one last album, the remarkably patchy Slap-Happy in 1999, before the inevitable happened. It’s not vintage L7 at all, but the strutting, throbbing threat of Stick To The Plan sounds like them rolling back the years one last time.

Stone Temple Pilots - Take A Load Off (Stone Temple Pilots, 2010)

It’s so sad to think that Stone Temple Pilots' final album with iconic vocalist Scott Weiland was their distinctly average self-titled effort in 2010. Compared to the stellar back catalogue in the early part of their career, its messy, unfocussed and unmemorable songs are a world away from Purple or Core. It does feature one track that gives us a brief glimpse of the beauty of Weiland’s voice, though; Take A Load Off isn’t quite an all-time great Pilots song, but Weiland’s melodies make it something well worth listening to. 

The Vines – Braindead (Melodia, 2008)

OK, so not a pure grunge band in their own right, but when you so readily rip off Nirvana like The Vines did, we’re sticking ‘em in here regardless. There was an outrageous amount of hype surrounding the Australian garage-grunge rockers when they emerged at the start of the 2000s. Their debut album Highly Evolved reached number three on the UK album chart, powered by the hit single Get Free, in 2002. But six years down the line no one really cared about them - even themselves, judging by the notoriously patchy quality of their disastrously received fourth album, Melodia. It’s pretty rubbish, but The Vines were definitely at their best when they went for pure Nirvana karaoke, and they do that once on the album, on the excellent Braindead. Listen to that, swerve the rest.

Hard rock owned the 80s. From Back In Black onwards, the classic albums swung in one after the next, as unstoppable as wrecking balls, breaking records and birthing legends. But by the end of the decade the priorities had shifted. Rock had become bloated, garish and frivolous; a pot-bellied, slurring shadow, and an irresistible target for those behind the raw, primal, urgent music being fused in the sweaty basements of Seattle. 

In retrospect, the situation was not quite that black-and-white. Some ‘hair’ bands were still making great records in 1991, while others were already starting to change their sound. Many of the grunge musicians had been wearing hairspray five years before, and their talisman, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, was a fan of Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and Metallica. 

The simultaneous release in September that year of Nirvana’s back-to-basics Nevermind and Guns N’ Roses’ opulent, sprawling Use Your Illusion I and II laid out us-against-them battlelines that hadn’t been seen since John Lydon walked into Sex wearing a T-shirt that sneered: ‘I hate Pink Floyd’

Geoff Barton [editor of Kerrang! in 1991]: I was a huge fan of hair metal, but there comes a point where you think: “My God, that’s a bit silly” The whole party-hard, Mötley Crüe, Poison thing can only go on so long before you get a serious hangover. 

Nikki Sixx [bassist, Mötley Crüe]: It wasn’t like a glass of champagne and a little line of cocaine, it was half a pound of cocaine and the whole champagne truck. I remember being at [LA rock club] The Cathouse. Riki Rachtman and Taime Downe were running it at the time. I asked them if they had a beer bottle cap. I spat in it, poured some cocaine in it and shot up right in front of them. They flipped out. I was like: “What’s the problem?” I didn’t get it, because that’s who we were. Our music didn’t really suffer. But we started to suffer as human beings, which started to affect our music. 

Geoff Barton: If you say that 1987 was the height of hair metal, then by the end of the late 80s, the whole scene needed a massive shake-up. Grunge needed to happen, without a doubt – something was needed to turn the tide in rock. But I don’t think we anticipated the fallout. 

Everett True [former Melody Maker journalist]: Seattle 1988 is where it [grunge] all started. People ask me what the attraction was. It was the energy. The insane amount of energy rising up through the boards of that town’s clubs. 

Mike Tramp [ex-White Lion frontman]: To use surfing terminology, waves come in groups of 12. First come the big ones – Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard. The next two or three waves were bands like Poison, White Lion and Cinderella. By wave 10 or 11 you’d passed Trixter, Hericane Alice and another 10 other bands with a bleach-blond singer. 

CC DeVille [guitarist, Poison]: Everyone would look at the image of the band and think we were poseurs. They wouldn’t even listen to the shit, they’d just see the make-up. 

Seb Hunter [author, Hell Bent For Leather]: They were ripe for the picking, for a cull, for death. And that was exactly what happened next. I fell in love with Kurt Cobain straight away. I got it all, saw it all and knew that he was right – we had to die.

Everett True: Unlike metal, which by the late 80s had degenerated into a bad LA parody coupled with dullard sexism, grunge had an impassioned urgency.

Kurt Cobain [frontman, Nirvana]: We’re just musically and rhythmically retarded. We play so hard that we can’t tune our guitars fast enough. People can relate to that.

Kirk Hammett [guitarist, Metallica]: When we were recording the Black album, I was listening to this band that was on this independent record label, and I was really into their first album. I sat down with the singer. His name was Kurt, and he said that one of his favourite albums was Ride The Lightning and one of his favourite Metallica songs was Whiplash. I can remember when we played in Seattle, Kurt came to the show – he was in The Snakepit – and I remember the entire time we were playing he kept on waving his arms at me. I went over there to see what he had to say, and his one question was: “Are you guys gonna play Whiplash tonight?” We did, and he was just loving it.

Nikki Sixx: Grunge was just [existing music] repackaged. Soundgarden were the new Black Sabbath, Pearl Jam was like Doors-ish-type stuff. 

Jerry Cantrell [guitarist, Alice In Chains]: I don’t know if anyone feels comfortable with that title [grunge]. As far as I look at it, we’re all rock’n’roll bands to various degrees, drawing from all sorts of different influences: from pop to punk to metal to rock, you name it.

At midnight on September 17, 1991, 4.2 million copies of Use Your Illusion I and II went on sale in America. A week later, Nevermind landed. Suddenly, with albums bidding for the cold, hard cash of music fans, the sense of a changing of the guard wasn’t just a notion but a reality, with many of the hair bands fielding doomsday calls from their labels. You didn’t have to pick a side, but most bands, magazines and fans did.

Ed Rosenblatt [president, Geffen Records]: We didn’t do anything. Nevermind was just one of those ‘get out of the way and duck’ records. 

Jack Endino [producer of Nirvana’s Bleach]: We had major-label signings of Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains and Nirvana… Normally, with any record on a major label 98 per cent of them crash and burn and sell 1,000 copies. And all these records did well. There was a total shift in the attention of the public. 

Krist Novoselic [bassist, Nirvana]: It announced the new guard in rock music. The new regime. 

Steve Brown [guitar, Trixter]: Nevermind wiped out our whole genre and I didn’t even see it coming. We were living in a bubble. We realised there was a problem when MTV wouldn’t add the video for Road Of A Thousand Dreams, from our second album, Hear!. 

Guy Griffin [guitarist, The Quireboys]: The explosion they created definitely affected The Quireboys. Our second album, Bitter Sweet & Twisted, was delayed over and over again. Had the label released it sooner we might have ridden the storm. Although we never saw ourselves as part of any particular scene, we became musical lepers. 

Luke Morley [guitarist, Thunder]: Grunge made life very difficult for us in America. The first album [Back Street Symphony] sold 250,000 copies without us even going there. We were two days away from leaving for a package tour with David Lee Roth when the call came: stay home, it will be cancelled. And it was. Almost overnight, America’s mainstream rock radio stations had shifted format to grunge. When we did get over there we played a prophetic show for RIP magazine: ourselves, Spinal Tap, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, The Screaming Trees and Alice In Chains. As we played, half the audience hissed throughout… because we weren’t grunge.

Mike Tramp: I wasn’t smart enough to anticipate the cull. Towards the end, I had to pretend to be Sebastian Bach to get [label boss] Doug Morris to come out of his office and see me. 

Tom Keifer [frontman, Cinderella]: What I objected to was the way the industry adopted Nirvana as an image statement. The blanket, across-the-board dismissal of everything that went before appalled me. 

Dana Strum [bassist, Slaughter]: Music has always been cyclical, but what caught me off guard was the way the flock of sheep swung so quickly against bands like mine. It was almost like religious programming. I still don’t know how much of the grunge era was a natural development or was planned by a team of radio consultants. 

Geoff Barton: I don’t see that the whole Mötley Crüe-versus-Eddie Vedder thing as a media-created thing. It was much more basic and visceral. It came from the grassroots. Kerrang! was a real melting pot at that time. We were coming to grips with grunge, but we also couldn’t strip away our heritage, so we’d have Soundgarden on the cover one week, Mötley Crüe the next. We didn’t really see it as an immense clash, although a vast proportion of our readership did. There was a huge divide.

Vinnie Paul [drummer, Pantera]: Grunge had no effect on us. Pantera were not changing for shit. We liked a lot of the grunge bands, and it was time for the party-metal vibe to die. But to even suggest Pantera would jump on the bandwagon is laughable. 

Geoff Barton: I think your traditional bulletbelted metal fan was genuinely upset by these bands coming along and stealing the thunder of the traditional metal fanbase, and finding that a lot of their mates were defecting to another area of music. At Kerrang! we did our best to publicise grunge bands, but I don’t think we anticipated the backlash from the grass-roots level. We didn’t think of the dichotomy between grunge and the whole classic metal, hair-metal thing, we just chucked it all in the mix. We didn’t anticipate the great divide. 

Axl Rose [frontman, GN’R, speaking in 1992]: I had an advance copy of that record [Nevermind] and it became my favourite. I would put it on repeatedly. Nirvana has helped me do my job. I think that the world has gotten really bored, really fed up and really pent-up with frustration. And that comes through in Nirvana. I think a lot of people were aware of that feeling, and he happened to find the song that touched it and was able to let that feeling out in people. And I’d like to do anything I can to support it. That’s why we want them to play with us. 

Dave Grohl [frontman, Foo Fighters/ex-Nirvana drummer]: When Nevermind came out, Axl Rose was a big fan. Guns N’ Roses was about to do this massive stadium tour with Metallica, and they wanted us to open. So Axl had been calling Kurt non-stop. One day we’re walking through an airport and Kurt says: “Fuck, Axl Rose won’t stop calling me…” I think it represented something bigger. Nirvana didn’t want to turn into GN’R. So Kurt started talking shit in interviews, and then Axl started talking back. It went back and forth like tenth-grade bullshit.

Axl Rose [from the stage in 1992]: We’ve had our share of problems with so-called ‘alternative’ bands. What is this word? All that means to me is someone like Kurt Cobain in Nirvana who basically is a fucking junkie with a junkie wife. 

Kurt Loder [presenter, MTV]: The backstage thing [at the VMA Awards in September 1992] was the most interesting, because it was Courtney [Love] and it was Kurt and it was Axl. It was like two worlds colliding. That was sort of an important moment in the way fashions changed, and you saw the culture of music going in a slightly different way. 

Kurt Cobain: Axl walked by, and Courtney and I just jokingly said: “Axl, will you be the godfather of our child?” He turned around and started pointing his finger, aggressive and mean, threatening to beat me up. I couldn’t help but laugh, because I hadn’t been in that situation since I was in sixth grade.

First the explosion, then the fallout. Death or defiance had been the early options, but as the 90s gathered pace more bands chose to jump on the bandwagon. Although grunge had already peaked when Cobain took his own life on April 5, 1994, its ethos was still palpable by the post-millennium, in ‘nu metal’. But, with two decades of hindsight, did anyone actually win the grunge wars?

Kurt Cobain: Looking back on the production of Nevermind, I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Mötley Crüe record than it is a punk rock record. 

Everett True: The scene soon degenerated. Grunge started to die the moment it became exposed to the outside world, as all scenes do; as soon as the hangers-on and major-label A&R men in town started to outnumber the creative people, the artists, musicians and fanzine editors. 

Jack Endino: Musically, grunge became commercial heavy rock around ’94/’95. Creed are the new Whitesnake. Without the snake. 

Billy Corgan [frontman, Smashing Pumpkins]: It was shocking to see Nirvana play, because it was like, here’s this little guy with a monster guitar sound. Around the mid-90s it stopped being shocking, as every hair guy suddenly decided he was alternative. 

Mike Tramp: By the time of White Lion’s final show I’d already begun mentally assembling my next band, Freak Of Nature. The colourful outfits became a Pearl Jam T-shirt and camouflage pants. Sure, I was sometimes called a bandwagonjumper. But it felt like a natural progression. 

Phil Collen [guitarist, Def Leppard]: We’d felt a real sting from Adrenalize. The whole grunge thing had come out. And quite rightly, because there was such a load of old shit. Slang was refreshing, to do something different. It wasn’t just: ‘let’s get rocked!’ 

Jerry Dixon [bassist, Warrant]: Dog Eat Dog was a more grown-up record, with less of the sexual innuendo. It was darker and heavier and there were some tracks that could fit in with what Alice In Chains were doing. 

Scott Weiland [frontman, Stone Temple Pilots]: For a while there I felt uncomfortable being myself. I would go through a period of insecurity because of the whole grunge, anti-fashion, anti-star thing. I’d intentionally tone down what I wore. I didn’t feel happy about it. 

Stephen Lawson [Editor, Total Guitar]: Grunge’s effect on guitar music was felt most sharply at the end of the 90s, when producers more or less banned solos from the studio. You had players like Mick Thomson sitting on their hands. 

Mick Thomson [guitarist, Slipknot]: Anything less than perfect technique is a hindrance, but my solos got stripped off the first record. I spent my life playing guitar, and [producer] Ross Robinson took my solos from me. 

Stephen Lawson: But then the press and public got sick of nu metal and its lack of fret wanking. It was time for a change, we all felt that. 

Geoff Barton: Who won the grunge wars? There’s certainly an argument that grunge was more transient, and hair metal had more longevity. The rock scene bounced back. Grunge definitely sent them packing for a bit, underground to their hairmetal bunkers… but they re-emerged, blinking, Morlock-like, and teased up their hair once again. 

Jerry Dixon: Warrant is still around, which you can’t say about most of the Seattle bands. 

Steve Brown: We got back together in 2008, and there’s still a lot of work out there. We feel like a classic rock band. 

Dana Strum: The business people around us advised us to buy flannel shirts and grow facial hair. We told them to fuck off. By 1998 the music began to find its legs again. People still want to hear it. 

Andy Cairns [frontman, Therapy?]: People look back on the 90s as if they totally destroyed hair metal, but really it was just a different type of hair that came along.

Here’s a tale about a rabble of underground rock visionaries turning a thriving local music scene into a global phenomenon, putting the world’s spotlight onto the US’s Pacific Northwest and prompting teenage Herberts as far afield as Chelmsford, Essex to suddenly have the urge to own a corduroy shirt (yes, that was me). 

Along the way there were those who turned their back on it, those who lost their way, those who died and those who turned their back on it, but turned round again with a new set of rules and ended up staying really big anyway and everything was fine (okay, this bit pretty much just refers to Pearl Jam). 

What remains is the music, most of which still sounds vital today, artefacts from an era that dramatically reshaped what rock music could be. 

Green River - Rehab Doll (1988)

Rehab Doll is definitely not the first grunge record – it’s not even the first Green River record, preceded by the previous year’s mini-album Dry As A Bone and 1985’s Come On Down EP – but no band best sum up the different directions in which grunge would twist and turn than this Seattle five-piece. Stone Gossard’s gnarly riffs would be honed into anthemic classic-rock in Pearl Jam, as would the guitarist’s rhythmic interplay with bassist Jeff Ament, whilst frontman Mark Arm and lead guitarist Steve Turner would use the punkier moments as the template for the spikier, Stooges-y sound that underpinned Mudhoney. As a standalone record, this still thrills though, if only for all the possibilities you can hear that lay ahead.

Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

The record that needs the least amount of explaining, the story of grunge is right here in Nevermind’s 42 minutes and 36 seconds – where sweatbox venue attitude meets burgeoning ambition, where perfect pop melodies slide off crunching four-chord riffs. It was the sound of grunge going mainstream, to the point that you could split the genre into two distinct sections: before Nevermind, and after Nevermind. Two very different worlds.

Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1992)

Is it cheating to have this in here? Tough, I’ve already written it, it’s on the internet, the time to try and stop me has passed. But the truth is that, as the very excellent soundtrack to a pretty decent film, the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s Seattle-set rock-rom-com perfectly captured almost all of grunge’s key players at a point when they were about to go interstellar, containing non-album classics from Pearl Jam, Chris Cornell and Smashing Pumpkins, whilst Alice In Chains wrote their masterful Would? specifically for inclusion. I say almost because, obviously, there’s no Nirvana here, the planned inclusion of their song Breed nixed by Kurt Cobain.

Pearl Jam - Vs. (1993)

Pearl Jam were pulling in different directions when it came to making their second record. Eddie Vedder was trying to wrap the whole thing in barbed wire and avoid the band being pulled into MTV’s bosom, whilst his bandmates were thinking ‘what’s the problem? We’re huge, everything’s great!’. Nodding to this, Vedder wanted to call the record Five Against One, and it’s that tension that makes Vs. such a startling, exhilarating listen. But if he didn’t want it to be massive, maybe Vedder should’ve written some crapper choruses. As it was, he laid down a series of era-defining angsty singalongs for the masses to savour. It was so huge that Vedder saw no choice but to take them on a diversion for 1994’s Vitalogy. It would be almost a decade until they came back into the light.

Alice In Chains - MTV Unplugged (1996)

It wasn’t easy trying to decide which record to end this on. It could’ve been something that demonstrated the bandwagon jumpers who followed in grunge’s wake, terrible bands devoid of the risk-taking and adventure of the scene’s pioneers. Yes, I’m talking about Creed. Or it could’ve been Smashing Pumpkins’ epic Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, which triumphantly blew the whole thing wide open, or Hole’s 1998 album Celebrity Skin, a brilliant poppy rock record that hit at a time when everyone else had ran out of ideas. But really the story of grunge ends in tragedy and loss, and no record captures that better than this poignant, stripped-down live set, featuring one of Layne Staley’s final performances. The excitement of those early days was a long time ago. Here was when reality bit.  

For death metal fans, 1992's Milwaukee Metal Fest boasted an embarrassment of riches. Deicide were booked as headliners for the July 18 all-dayer, topping a bill which also featured Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, Cancer, Brutal Truth and Malevolent Creation among others.

Scanning down the event flyer, one could easily miss the promise of a 'special appearance' from King Diamond and - more randomly - LA grunge rockers Dogstar, featuring "Keanu Reeves of 'Bill and Ted'": it was a gig that the Hollywood superstar would come to look back on with great affection.

Dogstar were no Wyld Stallyns, and their popularity never threatened to derail Reeves' burgeoning Hollywood career, but the bassist took the band seriously... at least once they changed their name from Small Fecal Matter. The LA group - who also included Days Of Our Lives/Seinfeld actor Robert Mailhouse on drums - were labelmates of Tool on Zoo Entertainment records, recorded two albums - 1996's Our Little Visionary and 2000's Happy Ending - and played shows with David Bowie and Bon Jovi, as well as performing at the 1994 Glastonbury festival.

But the group's appearance at the Milwaukee Metal Fest is one that has lived long the memory of Keanu Reeves. The actor revisited the day in an interview with GQ magazine in 2019. 

"We played Milwaukee Metal Fest," he said, and quickly added, "Got killed."

"I think we played close to [NYC hardcore crew] Murphy's Law," he recalled. "Imagine. So we played a Grateful Dead cover, at Milwaukee Metal Fest. We were, like, 'They hate us. What are we doing here? What can we do? Let's do The Grateful Dead cover [later identified by Spin as New Minglewood Blues]… They were just like, Fuck you, you suck. I had the biggest grin on my face, man."

Happily, thanks to the wonders of The Internet, we can all share in this magical musical memory, as footage of Dogstar's set is on YouTube.

Watch it below:

But the story does not end here, for both Dogstar, who split in 2002, and the Milwaukee Metal Fest, which ceased operations two years later in 2004, are back!

Last week Dogstar shared an image from a brand new band photoshoot, and they are hoping to share new music with the world later this year.

"We will be rolling out some new music this summer, followed by some gigs," a social media post confirmed. "As soon as it's all figured out we will let everyone know immediately. So much to do, but rest assured, we are on it and have assembled a fantastic team that are helping us. We are also going to make a music video to support our first tune. That's all I can say now.

"Can't wait to share our new music with everyone. It's the most satisfying and meaningful batch of songs we've ever done. Thanks again for being so patient with us. We truly have the best, most loyal fans!"

The Milwaukee Metal Fest is also coming back later this month, as Hatebreed vocalist Jamey Jasta bought the rights to the festival last year: taking place from May 26-28, the event features Biohazard, Anthrax and Lamb Of God as headliners, with Machine Head, Napalm Death, Dying Fetus, Corrosion of Conformity, and - in a throwback to 1992 - Obituary, included a stacked line-up. Full details here.

"I am so grateful and thrilled that [Milwaukee Metalfest founder] Jack Koshick has passed the Milwaukee Metalfest torch off to me," Jamey Jasta stated last summer when announcing the news. "He is a visionary and we will carry on the MMF legacy for years to come. So many of us have great memories from Milwaukee Metalfest, and the time is right for it to return."

"Milwaukee Metal Fest has been a labor of love for me," added Koshick. "I started working on it when I was 29; I am now 66. I want to thank all those living and dead for making this dream come true. Most of all, I want to thank the bands, fans, and crews that made this happen. The time has come to move on. I feel Jamey Jasta and his partners will do a fine job representing the brand. Until we meet again, I love you all."

Paris Jackson, Michael Jackson's daughter, has released a grungy new single, Bandaid.

"This is the type of music I used to dream of making myself when I was 14 discovering Nirvana and Pixies for the first time," Jackson says. "Lyrically it’s the most raw and vulnerable I’ve ever been in any of my songs. It’s the first track I’ve truly let loose and yelled on in the studio, which you can hear in the third chorus, and I feel like that’s why it had to be the title track for my next record.

"I’m grateful to have also started producing, and Simon Oscroft has been the perfect partner to do that with."

“I’m also deeply honored by my good friend Anthony Salazar who, when I said, 'hit those drums harder than Tommy Lee on wild side,' did just that. I hope there are people out there that get from it what I got from albums like I’m wide awake, it’s morning by Bright Eyes, a record that truly made me feel heard and understood from the inside out.”

The lyrics for Bandaid's opening verse run:

"you know i’ve spent a good few years
just thinking, drinking about you
my head is filled with souvenirs i’m limping, beginning to undo
the pieces of me
strung together
free the new me"

Listen to Bandaid below:

Jackson is currently on tour in the US opening shows for Smashing Pumpkins soundalikes Silversun Pickups. Bandaid will be the title track of her forthcoming second album, the follow-up to 2020's Wilted.

Nevermind is 30 years old this week. That’s older than some of you. That’s older than South Park, Heelys and PlayStation, and arguably more influential than all three combined. So, as we roll out the birthday cake and gorge on grunge, here’s each song from Nirvana’s breakthrough record, ranked from worst to best.

12. Lounge Act

Nevermind is largely a flab-free album. But we must start somewhere. This is a confessional, angst-ridden missive about ex-girlfriend and Bikini Kill member Toni Vail. Krist Novoselic’s chilled-out, backseat bass perfectly complements Lounge Act’s jolly main riff and that yelled third verse/chorus couplet is a winner. 

It’s a great song. Whereas the burgeoning power and fragility of Nevermind’s tracks stands upright throughout, Lounge Act slouches; the band couldn’t be arsed to think of an ending for the track, so just slowed the tape machine down instead.

11. Territorial Pissings

Novoselic’s loudhailer homage to The Youngblood’s 1967 Get Together at the start of Territorial Pissings still terrifies you, right? Right. Then that filthy intro riff, a defiant statement on Cobain’s behalf, ignoring producer Butch Vig’s pleas and plugging his guitar straight into the mixing desk. Finally, Dave Grohl’s relentless, rigorous drum roll. 

And we’re off. This is Nirvana doing punk and we like it. The choppy mid-section remains a certified headbanger and while Cobain’s hoarse screams through the entire track are superb, the ridiculous mini-meltdown at the end is the song’s zenith. This dirty, dismal side to Nirvana would be perfected on their next record, In Utero.

10. On A Plain

That verse. That’s where Weezer got it from, right? The vocal harmonies, the scuzzed-up power chords, the nonsensical lyrics and general air of awkwardness. On A Plain serves as one of Nevermind’s poppiest moments; it’s the Beach Boys with ripped jeans and scuffed Converse.

9. Stay Away

Stay Away shines through Cobain’s dunderheaded delivery through the verses, attacking hipsters and wannabes who’d rather “be dead than cool”. Snarky, sarcastic and boasting a supercharged refrain without ever really being aggressive, Stay Away remains an anthem for the disenfranchised to this day. Listen for Grohl’s wonderful run on the snares.

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8. Something In The Way

Something In The Way was originally recorded by Cobain on his battered acoustic guitar, with Grohl and Novoselic recording their parts later. The simple, heartfelt chorus is a shining example of Cobain’s knowledge of the pop hook, while a haunting cello gives the track a mournful feel. The improvisational hidden track whacked onto the end, Endless Nameless, is a far cry from the rest of Nevermind, and opts for a noisy Melvins-esque attack on the senses. Which is fine by us.

7. Drain You

The B-side to Smells Like Teen Spirit does possess a riff achingly reminiscent of the A-side, but Drain You excels in other ways. Basically, it’s fun. It’s so fun. Nirvana were often tagged as miserable bastards and while In Utero had its morbid moments, Drain You is a few minutes of unbridled adrenaline. 

It slows down for like two bars and that’s it until the thundering, Grohl-induced climax. Listen out for the rubber duck toy, too.

6. In Bloom

Novoselic once said that In Bloom “originally sounded like Bad Brains, then Kurt turned it into a pop song.” There’s no reason why it couldn’t sound like Bad Brains, but the fact Cobain refuted any notion of hardcore and instead embraced those wonderful vocal harmonies with Grohl is a titanic statement. 

The idea that Cobain was coaxed into double-tracking his vocals because Vig said “John Lennon did it” is yet another handy conduit between Nirvana and The Beatles, showcasing Cobain’s command of pop and, well, you’ve got Grohl on top of that. What more could you want? The other five tracks, maybe.

5. Lithium

The grunge singalong that survives in clubs, pubs, bedrooms and anywhere else people have ears and lungs; Lithium is a fucked-up love song of the most vehemently infectious kind. The quiet/loud dichotomy is in full swing here and it’s another of Nevermind’s examples of perfection. 

Everyone works in tandem. Nobody is the star here; Novoselic’s bass underpins the entire thing and gets a good showing when the track breaks down, while Grohl’s powerhouse drumming is simply world class.

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4. Smells Like Teen Spirit

This song defined a generation 25 years ago and it’s still pretty much perfect. You can deny your love for Nevermind’s opener all you like, but when Smells Like Teen Spirit kicks in and you haven’t heard it in a while… you will get shivers down your spine. The hairs will stand up on the back of your neck. The works.

3. Breed

A throwback to Bleach but streets ahead. Grohl’s frantic drum roll at the start is the sort of shit we dream of seeing live, leading us into a three-minute masterpiece that rumbles along at an even more frightening velocity than Drain You. 

The happy-go-lucky, almost surf rock bassline is yet another example of Novoselic’s minimalistic, god-like craft; less is more and the bassist only swaps things round in the chorus. It’s such a tiny thing but, when we’re this close to the top, it’s nuances like this that give Breed the edge.

2. Polly

The ‘other’ acoustic one. As murky as Something In The Way may be, Polly is downright chilling. This Cobain track presents the story of the irredeemable Gerald Friend, a man who abducted, raped and tortured a 14-year-old girl. 

Despite its grim subject matter (which is handled excellently by Cobain, providing a perfect lack of empathy) it’s a classic, and the best defence to anyone claiming Nirvana relied solely on the quiet/loud dynamic; there’s a simple bassline and Channing, in his sole drumming performance on the record, ever-so-rarely brushing his ride cymbal. And that’s it. No frills. Polly is beautifully crushing.

1. Come As You Are

Come As You Are is Cobain’s Beatles moment. It’s that good. This song transcends Nirvana (and Killing Joke, whose song Eighties heavily inspired the main riff), clawing its way through the confines of rock music and essentially creating its own pocket of pop music. 

The chorus pedal achieves an aquatic guitar effect, doing nothing to stifle the track’s appeal: a testament to Nirvana’s warping of the weird to well-accessible at will. It’s laid-back but Grohl’s drumming suggests otherwise. It’s everything you’d want from Nirvana post-Bleach. Come As You Are is Nevermind’s victory lap and arguably the ultimate Nirvana song.

Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell is one of the architects of grunge. His band’s 1990 debut, Facelift, was the first album from that scene to break through, while 1992’s follow-up Dirt remains one of the landmark records of the decade. He’s led the reunited AIC since 2006, with new singer William DuVall taking over from late original frontman Layne Staley. Here, Cantrell opens up about Alice’s rollercoaster career, his biggest influences and the dreaded ‘g’ word.

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It was Elton John that got me into music

I wish I could remember which song it was. He was the first artist I started listening to and he’s one of the greatest of all time. Great song writing, a lot of feeling, amazing lyrics… even before I understood what it was about.

Red carpets are weird. It’s always uncomfortable

It’s cool that your peers or your fans or the industry recognise you. As far as numbers and winning awards, that’s nice, but it ain’t why I do this. We’ve had a lot of success and I guess those achievements speak better than a hunk of plastic or metal that sits on your mantel.

If you know us, you’ll get our sense of humour 

You’ve probably seen us making asses out of ourselves on Headbanger’s Ball, and I think any band can relate to that. We’re not the cornerstone on having a good time or being smart asses!  I guess everybody took the music very seriously, even though we didn’t take ourselves as seriously as we took the music! That certainly came across with all of the bands of our era and it wasn’t just in Seattle, it was all over the world.

I don’t even remember the first guitar I bought

It was maybe a Korean-made Strat from a swap meet. I bought my first real guitar on payments when I was working in a music store in Texas – I was about 18. I still have it. It’s the one most people recognise me playing – a 1984 G&L Rampage.

We started playing acoustic songs early on

That was a side of music we explored early on, and people accepted that. If you take away the amplification and the distortion, there’s some really strong, simple songs. Any band should ask if you take everything away, does it still work? And that tells you whether it’s a good song or not. Take away all the tricks and special effects, is it still a good song with just a voice and a guitar?

I used to jam with guys who were far better than me

Probably because I was always interested in learning and getting better, so I’d try to learn from them, and it seemed to work out pretty good! They were a couple of years older than me, maybe had a band and had done gigs, and I’d hang out with them until I was on their level or surpassed them, just absorbing as much as I could. Then when I felt it was time to move on, I’d do that, until I met the guys in Alice.

‘Grunge’ was never a popular word for anyone from Seattle

Before that word, it was referred to as the ‘Seattle Sound’, and I liked that because, although we were all unique, there was definitely a kind of ethos, a bunch of kids making noise and playing bars and parties. All the Seattle bands shared that, because it was such a small town and we all went to each other’s gigs and hung out with each other.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be Angus Young or Ace Frehley

Kiss get a lot of flak, it’s very fashionable to slag them off, but I think they were a very important band in rock history. They certainly were for me, when I was younger. They had good, basic rock songs, and nobody had that larger than life persona. For a young kid that was an important period. Those old records have some amazing songs.

Everybody’s got a little bit of a drive to beat mortality

Whether it’s having kids to live on after you or whatever. I don’t know if our music’ll be around forever, but it’ll probably be around for longer than me! A lot of achievements are based on that primal urge I guess. I’m glad people still dig it, and I’m aware of how rare that is, especially to get second chances. 

It’s funny to think the thing that you did to avoid having a job became your life’s work… the thing you created with your friends all those years ago took on a life of its own. You continue to give it life by recording and touring, but it’s kind of its own thing. A good example of that is when our band was very inactive when Layne passed. We weren’t around, but the music was still out there.

While 1991’s Badmotorfinger might have set the stage, Superunknown tipped it up and burnt it down in spectacular fashion. Spurred on by a series of imaginative videos that found the band peaking just as MTV did, it went on to sell millions of copies worldwide, cementing the band as one of the forces of 90s rock.

It was released exactly a week after Nirvana played their final ever show in Munich, Germany.

“We wanted to show that we stood alone and outside of what was becoming a convenient geographic group that we were inside,” Chris Cornell told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I never felt bad about being lumped in with other Seattle bands. I thought it was great. But I also felt like all of us were going to have to prove that we could also exist with autonomy, and we deserved to be playing on an international stage, and we deserved to have videos on TV and songs on the radio, and it wasn’t just a fad like the ‘British invasion’ or a ‘New York noise scene.’

”Superunknown was that for me. It was showing what we were not just a flavor of the month. We had the responsibility to seize the moment, and I think we really did.”

Listen to Superunknown:

• On Spotify
• On Apple Music

Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute. Join the group here.

Here’s what we learned about Superunknown…

Background

“Musically we were ready to try on a lot of new clothes, in a sense,” Chris Cornell told Classic Rock in 2014. “Although we had only been known internationally for a couple of years, we had been a band for quite a long time by that point. So we needed to express ourselves differently… And for me personally, I finally had the tools to take the music I heard in my head and express it in the way that I really wanted to.”

They succeeded. Across 16 sprawling tracks, Superunknown – even now, more than two decades later – is an album that stands spits with turmoil, trouble and spite. “I like that some people don’t like us,” said bassist Ben Shepherd. “I like that we’re smarter than them and that we’re darker than them.”

Other albums released in March 1994:

• Beck - Mellow Gold
• Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
• Cheap Trick - Woke Up With A Monster
• Insane Clown Posse - Ringmaster
• David Lee Roth - Your Filthy Little Mouth
• Motley Crue - Motley Crue
• Pantera - Far Beyond Driven
• Phish - Hoist
• Pink Floyd - The Division Bell

What they said

On the whole, though, Superunknown not only hits more often than it misses, but it demonstrates far greater range than many bands manage in an entire career. And while that probably won’t be enough to place Soundgarden at the forefront of the alternative-rock scene, it ought to at least lift the band out of the metal ghetto to which it had been so unfairly consigned (Rolling Stone)

With its fourth album, Soundgarden doesn’t mind sounding like a Led Zeppelin tribute sometimes. Cornell, the band’s singer and main songwriter, shouts and wails like Robert Plant with an expanded lower register. And Kim Thayil bends and stretches Jimmy Page-style guitar riffs, adding Soundgarden’s distinctive strategy: odd meters that make the songs heave with unexpected accents. (New York Times)

Superunknown is the place where American heavy metal meets Northwestern wild man grunt rock, which portends something even more tantalizing. It may be the first record to slam together two disparate fan groups — working-class metalheads and too-hip-to-be-happy alternative fans — and give them a stomping ground they can both call home. Personally, I’m crossing my fingers. (Entertainment Weekly)

Having mocked this group’s conceptual pretensions for years, I’d best point out that Chris Cornell still isn’t Robert Plant, Kim Thayill still isn’t Jimmy Page, and so forth, before cheerfully acknowledging that 1) they’re all closer than they used to be and 2) it no longer matters. This is easily the best–the most galvanizing, kinetic, sensational, catchy–Zep rip in history… At 70 minutes, it’s what used to be called a double album, not quite as long as Physical Graffiti but a lot more consistent. (Robert Christgau)

What you said

Brian Carr: I think maybe Soundgarden is one of those artists I respect more than I like. Maybe 15 songs of dark, sometimes sludgy riffs is too much at one time for me. Or maybe I got spoiled with albums that I actually liked all the way through and Superunknown is not one of those for me. To my ears, it’s probably 6.5 out of a 10 scale.

Marcio Reyero: One of the first CDs I ever bought, back when It was originally released. Alternative rock making It to the mainstream never sounded better. It was also my introduction to the magic of Cornell’s voice, amazing album.

Ben L. Connor: One of the greatest hard rock albums of all time, let alone the 90s. It has the minor-key doom of metal, the abstract lyrical heaviness of grunge, the energy of classic rock, and the sonic weirdness of post-punk.

Chris Mitakos: Definitely an era defining album and one of the best of that decade. It was the band’s breakthrough to the mainstream. Hats off to Chris, Kim, Ben and Matt. God bless Seattle!

Richard Cardenas: I don’t know that I could properly rate this record. Because of tinitis, grunge music does not resonate well with me. I’ve never really liked most of this music. Badmotorfinger is a different story all together.

Kaine Smith: Cornell’s vocals and lyrics bring some of my favourite songs such as The Day I Tried To Live and Fell On Black Days. Kim Thayil is just cool as, I guess that subconsciously it was his fault that the Gibson Firebird is my favourite guitar, and their bizarre choice of tunings and experimentation further pushes me to expand my musical boundaries. And the time signatures, well, oh wow.

Iain Macaulay: Oh yeah, here we go! Most definitely a classic. Big riffs, imaginative arrangements and odd time signatures. A musicians album for sure but with enough hit singles to satisfy both the boys ‘and’ girls of the MTV generation, and explode the band into mass popularity. Yes, it’s a tad long, (a drawback of 90’s bands thinking they had to fill up all the time available on a CD) a bit of quantity control could have been put in action, and some of the lyrics are indecipherable, but the playing and songwriting are undeniably phenomenal. There is enough within its fifteen tracks to satisfy a broad section of rock fans from Zeppelin to Sabbath to Siouxsie and the Banshees (trust me) and a myriad of points in-between. Superunknown and The Day I Tried To Live are particular favourites. Nice one.

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Stuart Magnus: I got this from one of those record clubs where u got 5 for a few £ but had to buy so many over the year. This was a record of the month that I forgot to cancel so they sent me it and I had to pay for it. I’d never heard them but knew the name. So glad I fucked up and had to buy it! The Day I Tried To Live is such an amazing track. RIP Chris Cornell. One of the truly great singers.

James Utvandraren: Oh, sweet nemesis, we meet again. You effectively killed off all the rest of the bands I liked, that Nirvana hadn’t already euthanized a couple of years earlier, and you replaced them with your dark muck. You made chicks uglier, and you stripped the neon colors off guitars everywhere. Before you, it was party central, night and day; after you, it was the musical apocalypse of dread.

Are you still my enemy, dearest Soundgarden, or have my taste buds matured? Is 25 years of water under the bridge enough? We will see. I will give you the full week and an honest shot. Don’t hold your scummy breath, though. I do hate you, you know.

[cut to a week later]

For such a bunch of extremely accomplished musicians, I just don’t get how they managed to conceive such a monotone, drab piece of music – unless that was, of course, what they were going for. As such, it is fantastically well executed, and I literally feel like fucking killing myself right now. I realize that I am in the minority about this, and that most of you guys are probably right, and I am just not getting it, but I have never been so depressed in my whole life. Three days of this has taken its toll. I need to cleanse.

I’m going to go squeeze into my PVC pants, don my ESP guitar and play Shotgun Messiah covers in front of the mirror until my wife yells at me to knock it the hell off.

Farewell, Old Enemy. We shall never meet again.

Kev Moore: There was a time somewhere in the 90’s when I though, “shit, I have no clue what’s happening with rock right now. Everything I love seems to be passe,” so I went out and bought an Alice in Chains album (Dirt) and this. It was a hard listen in the first instance to this classic rocker’s ears, but it drew me in. It showed me that some of these kids actually knew what they were doing. It’s a hugely important album, and today, I’m going to listen to it again

Chune Wan-Kenobi: As a 90s teen, I could never understand what glam was all about. I thought they all looked the same, sounded the same and offered nothing to identify with (those rejection feelings towards the scene are gone now). It wasn’t grunge that killed glam, glam killed itself with the help of bands like Jane’s Addiction, Queensryche, Faith No More, Living Colour, etc. I discovered Soundgarden on a magazine ad for Badmotorfinger. Been a huge fan since. I don’t have fancy album reviews or have “the best words” but the genre stuck a cord with my teen self, and maybe the vast range of sounds that came with the 90s kept it interesting, from Pantera to Weezer, each album a masterpiece.

Gary Claydon: Forget genres and endless sub-genres, Superunknown is, quite simply, a great rock album. This was Soundgarden’s high point. The band were always regarded as being the most ‘metal’ of the main grunge bands and the influence of such as Led Zeppelin and, in particular, Black Sabbath, are clear. This was a different beast to the excellent Badmotorfinger. More melodic, more experimental, the band displaying a broader palette.

Mike Knoop: Honestly, this week is the first time I have listened to Superunknown all the way through. By 1994, I had moved on from Soundgarden and grunge in general and into the wider Alternative Nation of Afghan Whigs, Smashing Pumpkins, Mazzy Star, Hole etc. After three listens from start to finish, I would say it’s a good but not great. For me, it’s missing the sonic punch of Louder Than Love or the audio insanity of Ultramega OK.

Olav Martin Bjørnsen: Superunknown comes across as a vital album even now, almost 25 years later. It is a dark album, to the point of creating an oppressive atmosphere, but few have managed to create dystopian atmospheres in music as compelling and as alluring as Soundgarden did here. If you like your hard rock, enjoy landscapes of a dark and depressive orientation, and don’t mind tripping a bit out while visiting dystopia central, then Superunknown is an album well worth revisiting. Grunge at its arguably most sophisticated peak, and for me at least an album reflecting the spirit of the time it was made very well indeed too.

Final Score: 7.⁸⁴⁄₁₀ (242 votes cast, with a total score of 1899)

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Album Of The Week Club: A Nod’s As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse – Faces

The dark lord of angst and alienation stares out of the restaurant window and watches huge black limousines crawl through the sun-battered Hollywood Hills like doped-up beetles. He runs his fingers through his coal black hair and allows himself a dry laugh.

We’re in LA, the domain of the shallow, the superficial and the super-wealthy with a man regarded as one of the most intense, deep and - dare we say it? - humourless musicians of his generation. Every sycophantic starfucker here thinks LA is aaawsome. You’d be surprised if the man in black shared such sentiments. Be surprised.

“California was amazing to me as a kid,” he smiles. “Everyone here had a swimming pool, it was always sunny, they had these huge theme parks and carnivals. I thought LA was paradise. I’d love to go to Disneyland again to relive old memories.

“I came down here first when I was nine years old and again when I was 11,” he continues. “I remember having more fun when I was nine, because I hadn’t started becoming depressed yet. At 11, you wake up one day and start feeling bad about everything. Don’t you?”

The sun is out, the sky is blue, and Chris Cornell is smiling like a Cheshire Cat who has just discovered it can lick its own testicles. Can this really be Frowngarden’s frontman, Seattle’s most sullen superstar, the petulant pin-up who fell on black days and made a career out of whingeing about it? Then again, is that Chris Cornell the same guy who recorded the viciously ironic shag anthem Big Dumb Sex, who used to encore with Spinal Tap’s loveflap-mungous Big Bottom, and who now performs mandolin duets on his latest multi-platinum album? Grumpy git or genial geezer, Mr Chuckles or Mr Contrary, will the real Chris Cornell please stand up?

Chris sips on his mineral water and shrugs noncommittally: “It would be too big a job for us to try to ensure that every Soundgarden fan knows exactly who we are and what we’re like. It’s impossible to do and I couldn’t take on that sort of responsibility.”

Mind if we have a go?

Cornell dips another slice of pitta bread into his humous and looks up with a twinkle in his eyes. “Okay,” he says quietly, “but I won’t be funny in this interview. And you can’t make me.”

The young Chris Cornell was, in his own words, a ‘difficult’ child. He was an independent chap, forever disappearing on his own into the woods around Seattle for hours at a time, making his parents sick with worry in the process. He knew he’d get into trouble for these AWOL moments, but he was a stubborn little bugger and simply didn’t care.

When grounded, he’d watch Popeye or cool futuristic Japanese cartoons like Gigantor and Speed Racer and dream of being a professional American footballer. Unfortunately, he knew that he was too small and, in reality, too crap to reach the top playing gridiron. But there had to be something better than this…

The first time he heard The Beatles, young Master Cornell knew he’d found his vocation in life. His parents were somewhat less convinced though.

“I annoyed the shit out of them by spending my whole childhood beating on things,” Chris recalls with a smile. “I drove them to distraction, and I never thought they’d give me a drumkit in a million years.

“By the time I was 15, my mom had just about given up on me. But she must have figured that at least I had an interest in something other than drugs or being a criminal, so she bought me a snare drum. After a couple of days whacking that, I bought the rest of the kit for $50 from a guy I knew. Two weeks later, I was in my first band.

“My mom was ecstatic because it was the first thing I’d done on my own which wasn’t illegal or troublesome.”

For the next few years, strange dark rumblings emanated from chez Cornell: The Ramones, AC/DC, the Sex Pistols, anything hard, fast and noisy that the enthusiastic young tub-thumper could lay his hands on.

“Those bands were great,” he enthuses, “because you could play their songs without really being able to play. My first band played those songs, and to our young ears we could play them as well as they could. That’s when it all started to go horribly wrong for me.”

Within a few months Chris knew that music was all he wanted to do. So he left school. He worked in wholesale distributors, in restaurants, in the docks - “jobs that people with no education do.” At night, he played with bar bands, any bunch of two-bit losers who’d give him a chance. He figured that some day a big band would roll into Seattle, take one look at his flamboyant style, and promptly whisk him off to indulge in all the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll his young body could handle.

Four years later he was still playing with the same shitty bands in the same shitty bars to the same shitty punters for the same shitty money. And getting more and more pissed off.

He was not alone. Young Seattle guitarist Kim Thayil felt the same way. So did his bassist mate Hiro Yamamoto. The three joined forces, wrote 15 songs in a month and decided on a name - Soundgarden.

“People hated us in the beginning,” Chris laughs. “I’d come on stage with no shirt on, whipping my hair around and generally being a sweaty young rock guy. I used to have about 50 ribbons in my hair, which didn’t exactly please the jocks in the audience. They were probably worried because they found me a little too attractive.”

What about now - have you lost that desire to fuck with people’s perceptions, to shock or provoke?

Chris sighs before responding.

“In the beginning it was fun and exciting to us, because at least the audience were reacting. But the 50th time that Kurt Cobain came out wearing a dress it was kinda, ‘Ho hum, here we go again…’. GG Allin kinda took the shock thing to its ultimate conclusion. Call me old fashioned, but I draw the line at eating my own shit for the sake of entertainment!”

We chat on, about early gigs in tiny Seattle venues like the Central Tavern and the Ditto Tavern, about comics and movies, about Cornell listening faves like Fugazi, the Beastie Boys and Jeff Buckley. Eventually, talk turns to Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil’s arrest on July 23 for allegedly assaulting an 18 year old girl. With Kim’s court appearance imminent, Chris is loathe to discuss the incident, but it’s clear that he’s utterly convinced of his friend’s innocence.

“Kim is a really sweet guy, the most polite and outgoing of any of us,“he insists. “But he’s also the most recognisable one, and no matter where he goes people approach him. He usually deals with it very well. We’re not extroverts who love the spotlight. We love music, but the fame we could do without. Punk had a huge influence on us, as much for the attitude as for the music. Most of the big bands at the moment have some history in punk rock and we are really self-conscious about the idea of being rock stars, because the words ‘rock star’ are swear words to us.”

But you appear on TV and get recognised in the streets. It must be apparent at times to you that, like it or not, you are a rock star?

“Of course”, Chris agrees, “but there are a lot of misconceptions as to what it is to be in a successful rock band. The reality is just a bunch of normal people playing music for a living. It’s not like you’re suddenly hanging out with a better or more interesting class of people. Guys like Freddie Mercury and Alice Cooper were proper rock stars; really cool, really entertaining, larger than life people. I could never do that though, because being larger than life in my punk grounding was really bad, the complete antithesis to all that punk stood for.”

But Chris Cornell is now an object of worship for a few million people. Does he find that weird?

“Yeah, it’s weird, especially the way people look at you sometimes,” he says. “They’ve got that crazy, wide-eyed glazed look, as if your head is about to spin around 360 degrees and start projectile vomiting. They think you’re somehow special because you’ve been on television. You just have to let them have their weird feelings.”

“We’re all a bit socially awkward in our band at the best of times, and while we’re more comfortable with the fan thing now, it’s still odd and slightly surreal. I have friends who are celebrities who’re a lot more extrovert and social than me, and they can’t lead a normal life because they’re so recognisable. It’s changed their lives a lot and they can’t change it back.”

“I’ve always been really anti-social, and being relatively famous has just given me an excuse to go out even less. If I didn’t play in Soundgarden I’d have no excuse for being the way I am. My friends and family would hate me, whereas now they probably feel sorry for me. Y’know, ‘Poor kid, he can’t come out because he gets hassled a lot.’”

Chris laughs quietly. He laughs a lot, actually. Hearing him talk amiably and happily about his beloved Seattle, about home life with his dogs, about the Sex Pistols’ reformation and more, he comes across as a down to earth, friendly guy with a wickedly dry sense of humour. So why does everyone think he’s such a moody bastard?

“Probably because I’ve spent several years being a moody bastard in front of millions of people,” he replies with a laugh. “It’s pretty accurate really, although we’re not as moody as people think. The moodiness really intensified on the Superunknown tour,” he considers. “We’d toured so much since our SST records that by the time Superunknown, our biggest album, came out we were really tired of touring. Which is not good.”

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Why tour so much if you hate it so much? Surely at this stage in your career, you can dictate when and where the band will go?

“I don’t hate touring at all,“he says. It’s just that I don’t hang around a lot of people at home, so when we go on tour it’s kinda like diving into a tub of iced water at first, because it’s such a different situation. After a while, I really enjoy it, and it’s good that I can have that experience to get me out of my skin for a while.

“I actually played most of the Superunknown tour out of my skin… Or rather, out of my head, drunk. We were so reluctant to be out there, and I just started drinking more so that I could actually have some fun, instead of having to be professional and worrying about keeping to a schedule all the time. That led to some funny gigs, because sometimes I’d start playing the wrong song or completely forget the words. But overall, it was less fun.”

And so is being in Soundgarden less fun generally now, Chris?

“It’s actually more fun now than when we started out,” he insists. “Because you learn what to worry about, or care about, or be angry about after you’ve done this for a while, been everywhere and done everything. Nothing can really blindside us any more.”

Away from the band, do you guys still hang out together?

“Not as much as we used to,” he concedes, “because we see each other all the time in the studio, or on tour. But we still go out together quite happily now and again. It’s not like we’re the Monkees, living in the same house and driving the same car… Actually Alice in Chains did that before they became really successful and I always thought that was really cool. But we’ve missed our chance now, I suppose.”

Chris Cornell may be older, wiser and richer now, but he appears relatively unaffected by Soundgarden’s rise to the peak of their profession. Essentially, he’s still a rebellious kid screaming louder than love.

But his fame has engendered curious side-effects. Where once the streets of LA were peopled by Axl Rose lookalikes, these days you can’t spit without hitting a Chris Cornell wannabe. The Soundgarden singer finds this a little unnerving.

Worse still is the knowledge that somewhere in Australia there lurks a Soundgarden tribute band, dedicated to exploring the superunknown without his help. Some people find this amusing, saying the only thing they regret about being in a band is that they never get the opportunity to see how good their own band looks and sounds on stage.

Would Chris Cornell like, just once, to have some sort of out of body experience enabling him to watch Soundgarden in full flow?

The man in black laughs long and hard.

“No way. That would scare the hell out of me. What if you saw yourself and realised you sucked? I’d rather eat my own shit!”

Watch Chris Cornell’s final performance with Soundgarden

There’s so much half-formed Nirvana material – live stuff, demos, bedroom recordings – that’s been made available since Kurt Cobain’s death that it would be a pointless exercise to include these often unfinished musical sketches in a rummage through the grunge leaders’ dirty laundry. So instead, let’s cast a critical eye over the band’s ‘proper’ recordings…

10. Rape Me

This has to be on the list, but not because it’s a terrible tune. It’s not. Rather, Rape Me sounds like a 1993 carbon-copy In Utero album re-tread of Nevermind’s 1991 winning formula. Soft/heavy guitar chugging, ‘almost pop’ melody, disturbing, antagonising lyrical provocation. It’s perfectly acceptable from a melodic point of view. But the tune sums up vocalist and guitarist Kurt Cobain’s ever-growing frustration with the corner Nirvana had painted themselves into by unwittingly becoming the most-loved losers in America.

9. Endless Nameless

A curious mix of out-and-out rage and introverted hurt, Endless Nameless was the hidden track on Nevermind that captures Cobain’s mood well enough over its six minutes and 43 seconds. But it feels like the musical equivalent of the sulky teenager. It’s a song that’s mad as hell, but it kinda revels in its own misery and actually doesn’t want you to help it by actually listening.

8. Downer

The only tune from Cobain’s 1985 Fecal Matter demo to make official album status when it was included on the CD version of 1989’s Bleach, it features a fast and furious hardcore-inspired rant about all sorts of barely intelligible stuff. “Slippery pessimist, hypocrite master, conservative communist apocalyptic bastard.” An adrenaline rush that fades away as fast as it first came along.

7. Hairspray Queen

A previously unreleased tune that was included on 1992’s Incesticide compilation album. Kurt said he regretted not putting it on Bleach. He shouldn’t. This is the sound of a band trying to be deliberately difficult as Cobain pulls out screechy vocals and nondescript funk licks, then crashes them into Krist Novoselic’s obtuse bass-walking. Fun to play maybe, but not fun to listen to.

6. Tourette’s

A one minute 35 second primal scream from In Utero, again designed to kick Nirvana’s status as mainstream ‘alternative’ into touch. It has an interesting, almost eastern-sounding riff going on, but its punk thrashing is designed to be dumb, to refute any labels people might have wanted to put on the band. The trouble is, this sounds like anger without any useful outlet.

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5. Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

A case of Nirvana biting the hands that feeds. After the phenomenal success of Nevermind, the band – and Cobain in particular – had a hard time processing their unplanned move from difficult outsiders to media darlings. This deeply unhappy lyric from ‘93’s In Utero feels uncomfortable, like you’re spying on someone’s private grief. The song is forgettable noise, but you can only assume that was entirely the point.

4. Scoff

Not an out-and-out awful song from Bleach, but probably something that would be summarily dismissed on first listening were it not attached to the Nirvana legacy. The tune operates on a weird axis between sludge rock riffing, post punk disharmony and the kind of simple chord changes that Cobain would have heard on early Kiss records. It’s odd and only gets odder as Cobain screams “gimme back my alcohol” time and again.

3. Aero Zeppelin

A song from Incesticide whose title promises more than it delivers. You can sort of see what Cobain is driving at here. The discordant guitar licks sound like Joe Perry, though simply not as good. The fast riffing has the feel of Jimmy Page wigging out, but without his innate sense of élan. An angry punk band that had grown up listening to these two rock giants would sound like this. Well, who knew?

2. Curmudgeon

Released as a B-side to Nevermind’s Lithium, this is a typical piece of a spittle and anger from Cobain. Despite a (cynical) laugh at the start of the song, there seems to be nothing funny about the singer’s mood here. But despite a few deliberately primitive-sounding effects designed to add an aural curveball, there’s no getting away from the plodding, uninspired riff that sits at the song’s core.

1. Beeswax

Beeswax appeared on 1991’s Kill Rock Stars compilation and to be fair, it’s no surprise Cobain wasn’t arsed about keeping this riff-tastic rant for himself. It’s just not very good. The lyrics are pretty disturbing, though, as Cobain seems to wrestle somewhere between outright libido and sexual self-disgust. “I got a dick, dick. Hear my fucking hate.” This is clearly not a happy boy.

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When grunge first kicked in back in the late 80s, it always felt like Tad were going to be its main players, with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain following meekly like Stan to Tad Doyle’s Ollie. It’s an understandable reaction given the power of their 1989 debut God’s Balls, whose opener Behemoth barrels and staggers raucously through the barroom doors like the disinterred, raging corpse of 70s metal with fresh electrodes attached.

As provocatively upfront tracks like Sex God Missy and Nipple Belt attest, Tad threw everything including the kitchen sink into the mix to get their sound – their use of devices like cello bows and empty gas tanks is Neubauten-esque.

Salt Lick (the Steve Albini-produced EP, filled out with tracks like Damaged, a split single with Pussy Galore) followed in 1990, its filthy riffing and siren screech typified by Axe To Grind, but when MTV banned their video for Wood Goblins on the grounds of “ugliness”, you suspected that, unlike Nirvana, there would be a ceiling to Tad’s commercial prospects.

They made an ill-fated signing to Giant records, failing to make any breakthrough, but before that, in 1991, they recorded 8-Way Santa, their final Sub Pop album with Butch Vig. He sought to polish their sound a little, as evidenced on Jinx, but there was no cleaning the Augean stables of Tad’s unruly metallurgy, and their demented spirit careered wildly on the likes of Wired God, crashing drunk into barns and kicking over haystacks. Others became successful, but in their time, Tad ruled.

“When I was growing up and getting into music, Nirvana were a huge influence on me.

“Their debut album Bleach was the first record of theirs I’d heard and I remember thinking it all sounded so unbelievably violent. It’s not really, though. They’re all sort of pop songs, in a way. That was the way Kurt Cobain wrote songs, they all had this real pop sensibility to them. His songwriting was incredibly special, but, because of the way the guitars and the drums were, it’s a hard listen. It’s a fucking tough pill to swallow, but it’s all there.

“Just look at their back catalogue and the amount of work they did in such a short period of time. Every record they made is a classic for a different reason.

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“I have a lot of favourite Nirvana songs. I think my favourite is probably Heart-Shaped Box, but then if you asked me tomorrow it would probably be different. Right now, that song’s jumping out at me. It’s a painful listen. But their record that really changed my life, truly, was their MTV Unplugged album. It introduced a lot of music to me at an age where I didn’t feel very open to listening to new music. But in that record he covered Meat Puppets, Lead Belly and David Bowie. They really went to town during that performance, and through that record, I discovered so many artists that eventually became incredibly important to me. I’d often sing the Nirvana cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Lead Belly – the original’s called Black Girl – to my daughter to help her go to sleep. That and Blackbird by The Beatles send her off real quick.

“Every time I go on stage I want to play Smells Like Teen Spirit, but I can’t. Gallows used to play Nirvana songs in practice quite a lot because I’d sort of insist on it. I never liked going to practice, so when I did go, I’d insist on playing songs I wanted to hear, rather than ones we needed to practice. Pure Love even played some Nirvana songs. When we get our new record Modern Ruin out next year, I think we’ll have a bit more room in the setlist to explore some stuff. I think that’s the time we’ll start to break out some more covers!

“I watched Montage Of Heck not long ago, and it really changed the way I thought about them and about him as a person. With Nirvana, there was something so magical, so violent, and narcissistic about them in a lot of ways. Kurt was pouring himself out in a way that he really wasn’t comfortable with, but it was the only way he knew how. They were a phenomenal band and all incredible musicians, but Kurt definitely left us way too soon.

“Nirvana made me want to pick up a microphone and scream my guts out for a living. I feel really lucky that I can do that and this is my job. But it doesn’t feel like a job; it feels like a fucking dream every day.”

Frank Carter and The Rattlesnakes are on tour now. Modern Ruin will be released in January through International Death Cult.

Frank Carter Goes Back To His Hardcore Roots

Nirvana Quiz

It all started with a quiet night in.

“I remember sitting in our apartment with Kurt one night,” former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl explains. “I think Krist was there too. There was this special on TV about giving birth underwater.

“We went to meet the artwork people and said: ‘We saw this thing last night with all these babies underwater, and it seemed sorta cool.”

Robert Fisher was the sleeve designer charged with finding a suitable image for Nirvana’s second album. “I went out searching books and stuff,” he recalls, “and every picture I found was just way too graphic and gnarly to be used on a cover. But I did find a stock image of a baby swimming underwater that I cut out and proposed to the band. Kurt really liked that, so we went from there.”

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Photographer Kirk Weddle, meanwhile, was responsible for organising the photoshoot. “My mom was good friends with this guy [Weddle],” says Spencer Elden, who had just been born in February, 1991. “He called up my mom and said: ‘We need someone to do this job.’ And I guess that was me. I was the baby that they needed. I am the Nirvana baby.”

With the basic image in the bag, the band and art team reconvened to discuss possible twists. “We started thinking of different ideas,” says Fisher, “and Kurt came up with the fish hook. Then we spent hours joking around with all the funny things you could put on the end of the hook. It ended up being a dollar bill.”

Nirvana’s label DGC label didn’t force any problems with the Nevermind cover. It was a satirical statement, but essentially an innocent one. Capitalism was the focal point – not the genitals of a new-born baby. That didn’t wash with the puritans of America, however, who upon the album’s release in 1991 flooded the airwaves with accusations of paedophilia. Several major US record chains refused to stock Nevermind and Cobain only agreed to the artwork being censored if the sticker read: ‘If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet paedophile’. The artwork remained untouched.

“Nobody paid any heed to the cover at our company,” recalls A&R man Gary Gersh. “But then the record blew up quickly and it was like: ‘Well, Wal-Mart won’t take this. ‘And we were like, ‘Who cares?’ We weren’t going to make a different cover. [It’s ludicrous that] you can take your driver’s licence and go into Wal-Mart and buy an AK47, but they wouldn’t take an album cover with a baby’s penis on it.”

Nirvana Quiz

Despite the public perception, in my mind, Kurt Cobain will always be just a guy, no different to anybody I’ve been in bands with before. And he was actually a pretty quiet guy compared to most friends I’ve ever known.

I think Kurt was a great songwriter, because it’s not easy to take something simple and make it sound interesting. If you can put together a song that has three or four chord changes in it and keep people interested, that’s a trick. It’s a trick to make things simple sound good. And one of his best qualities was his writing. And just musically, but vocally; he had great vocal melody ideas. And that to me is key, in any good songwriting. You can have a really cool-sounding song, but you also need a really good vocal melody. He was really good at coming up with that sort of stuff in Nirvana.

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Another thing I liked about his songwriting is he would say what he had to say, and if the song went on longer and he didn’t have any more lyrics to it, he wouldn’t push it and try to think of more stuff to sing, he’d just repeat what he’d written, which is exactly what I’ve always done.

I think Kurt was a lot of time just thinking about things that rhyme. There was one time we were on tour and he was writing some lyrics. I can’t remember what song he might have been writing lyrics to at the time. He just looked up and said, ‘Hey, what rhymes with monkey?’ Just looking for some rhyme to fit. It was like putting the little pieces of the puzzle together. I know he had an objective of what he was trying to say, but he had a very abstract way of saying it. And whether the lyrics actually made sense to anybody else or not, I don’t know if that really mattered to him.

Nirvana Quiz

These past few weeks have been strange and spiritually empty. We’ve not really heard much about Dave Grohl or the Foo Fighters, apart from that jam with Prophets Of Rage. Are they on holiday? We wish they’d said. Maybe they’re making a new album at Studio 606 in Los Angeles. To cheer ourselves up, we hunted down the finest Foo Fighters memes on the internet and caught them in our special net.*

*We just saved them to the desktop, but that doesn’t sound half as heroic.

The Foo Fighters’ 2007 single The Pretender birthed so many memes. Apparently these aren’t the correct lyrics. Now we feel stupid. We did wonder why he compared himself to a soaking mammal.

This we did know. So the joke’s on whoever made this one. Not sure why this drawing of Nicolas Cage is so aggressive about it, though.

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The Best Of You was a popular one for piss-takers everywhere. It makes you wonder if Ashleigh’s family deliberately got a Dave Grohl cake just so they could create this sweet meme. If so, good work.

Again, these aren’t the correct lyrics to the band’s 1998 single My Hero. But he’s bound to know some cool hirsute pensioners. So who’s the stupid one now, eh? Oh.

Here’s ‘Stoner Stanley’ or ‘Really High Guy’ getting things wrong. It doesn’t matter if he looks as high as balls, he’s trying his best. At least he got the band’s names right.

Here’s Willy Wonka, swooping in and being all righteous and stuff. If he paid less attention to other people’s mistakes and more to his chocolate factory, there might be less on-site fatalities involving suction tubes and the like.

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When people got bored of Rick Astley not giving people up or letting them down, people turned to this Dave Grohl clip of him yelling ‘the best’ over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. We managed one minute before kicking the desk in two.

As soon as one fan learned about the crack in Dave Grohl’s leg following a tumble in Sweden, they were on the internet with this These Days meme before the plaster cast had even set.

Imagine being a priest and having Dave bellow at you through the wall. This particular man of the cloth looks sad. He preferred his work in Scream.

Onto another religiously-themed meme. They do say Dave is one of the nicest people in rock, but we’ve never seen him heal the sick or do that thing with the wine. Would be handy on tour when the rider starts to run dry. There’s some fish too? Boom. You’ve got yourself a backstage picnic.

Foo Fighters Quiz

10. Territorial Pissings (Nevermind, 1991)

“I wouldn’t pick Smells Like Teen Spirit. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the real big Nirvana fans kind of dismiss Smells Like Teen Spirit. It’s that song – you see footage of Nirvana not wanting to perform it. So we’re not putting Smells Like Teen Spirit in here. We do Territorial Pissings because it’s just punk rock, isn’t it? It’s raw, animal punk rock. We end our set with that – Territorial Pissing breaking down into Suspicious Minds. Have you seen the footage of Elvis doing Suspicious Minds in Vegas? He does the ridiculous Kung Fu dancing to the drum fills, and we do quite a bit of that.”

Elvana have dubbed themselves ‘The World’s Finest Elvis-Fronted Tribute To Nirvana’. There’s not much in the way of competition, but that’s beside the point – they rock.

Elvana’s Elvis turns out to be a massive Nirvana nut, so we put him to task: we got him to pick his 10 favourite tracks from Seattle’s finest that The King would’ve crooned out of the park.

9. Milk It (In Utero, 1993)

“I love this song. It’s one of the hardest Nirvana tunes to learn and perform live. The intro, the way the vocals go along with the guitars and then the drums come in; there’s a real subtlety to it, the way it breaks into the chorus. It’s been really hard to learn but it’s great.”

8. Sliver (Incesticide, 1992)

“It’s just a great song, isn’t it?”

7. Heart-Shaped Box (In Utero, 1993)

“This is probably my favourite Nirvana video, too. It’s just a stunning video and there’s a fragility to the band in it; there’s something really nice about Kurt sitting there with the other two guys’ arms around him. We play Heart-Shaped Box and that always goes down a storm.”

6. Breed (Nevermind, 1991)

“We do a cover of Breed that bridges into Viva Las Vegas, and people go absolutely mental for that. But I’m gonna say Breed mainly for Dave Grohl’s drum roll at the start of it. It’s so impressive and you just can’t mention Nirvana without mentioning the drums, can you?”

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5. Where Did You Sleep Last Night (MTV Unplugged in New York, 1994)

“I could waffle off a load but I don’t want to do any disservice to the other songs! But we’ll go with something quieter. We can have a cover, right? We’ll have Where Did You Sleep Last Night, because it’s just so raw and beautiful. Kurt Cobain’s vocal is so broken but it sounds so beautiful at the same time.”

4. Lithium (Nevermind, 1991)

“There’s something special about that Reading Festival performance in the Lithium video… but Lithium is just the tune, isn’t it? It’s that kinda pub rock chorus that everyone can sing along to, like even our parents and their parents can sing along to that chorus! It’s so simple and so effective.”

3. Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter (In Utero, 1993)

“I love this song. It’s a really nice song to play as an intro and it’s all there in the name of the song, isn’t it? That contrast of what the record labels are telling Nirvana to do and what they’re actually doing – which is so much better than what the record labels could’ve imagined.”

2. School (Bleach, 1989)

“From an Elvana point of view, School is a really fun one to play – we break it down into In The Ghetto by Elvis and that goes down really well. School’s just so raw and so angsty; for me, it really represents that raw edge of Nirvana.”

1. Aneurysm (Insecticide, 1992)

“It’s probably one of the poppiest Nirvana tunes out there. They used to open with Aneurysm – even though it was a B-side, it was an A-list piece. It just works really well with Elvis, too. So that’s my list – that’s Elvis’ list.”

Elvana begin their UK tour on September 2.

Nirvana’s headlining performance at the Reading Festival in 1992 – their last ever UK show – has, in the years since, been acclaimed as one of their finest ever live concerts. The show, later released on DVD and album, regularly tops magazine and fan polls as one of the Seattle band’s finest ever moments and their best UK gig.

Great and memorable as the show was, it’s arguably not even their best performance at Reading – that came 12 months earlier when they performed as (relative) unknowns towards the bottom of the opening day bill and provided a UK crowd with their first taste of Smells Like Teen Spirit and other songs from Nevermind, the life-altering album they’d recorded earlier that summer and would release just a month later.

That often overlooked Reading show – which took place 25 years ago this week - would be their last in the UK before their second album catapulted them to major rock stardom. By the time they returned to the UK in November 1991 for the Nevermind tour they were already well on their way to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. Reading 1991 provided ardent UK fans with their last glimpse of the trio before everyone else caught on and caught up. Before the drugs, before ‘Kurt and Courtney’ and before all the fucking drama. When they were just a great band with massive, exciting potential. And brilliant songs.

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Looking back, it was a rather unlikely success. Performing on the largest stage they’d played in the UK, in the middle of a Friday afternoon when many festival goers were still arriving, Nirvana began on familiar ground with Bleach mainstays School and Floyd The Barber. Next up was a four-song showcase of new material from Nevermind: Drain You, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come As You Are and Breed. Eugene Kelly (from the Vaselines, later Captain America/Eugenius) joined in on Molly’s Lips and their mad dancer that looked like Jason from Friday the 13th movies made shapes throughout. Love Buzz, Negative Creep and Blew followed along with a loose take on The End by The Doors. Kurt Cobain crowd-surfed with his guitar and capped off the 45-minute set by launching himself into Dave Grohl’s drums at the conclusion of Endless, Nameless (as seen in the video for Lithium) and dislocating his shoulder. Drummer Grohl recalls the accident and the possible reason for the frontman’s recklessness at the end of the set – a bottle of cough mixture.

“He had some kind of incredibly potent cough syrup [Covonia Bronchial Balsam], and he was carrying that thing around like a flask,” Grohl later told the New York Times. “It led him to dive into my drum set, which put him in a sling for the rest of the night. That gig was definitely a triumph.”

It was. It was chaotic, it was loud and it was phenomenal. It was the highlight of that year’s festival and it was all over too soon.

Afterwards, the band mingled backstage with members of Dinosaur Jr., Babes In Toyland, and Sonic Youth who were all on the same day’s bill. (Footage of this can be seen in the movie The Year Punk Broke.) Cobain wandered around, his arm in a sling, grinning maniacally for photographers, and doing interviews. His future wife Courtney Love was also part of the raucous American posse but this was a few months before the soon to be notorious couple “bonded over pharmaceuticals” and he’d declare her “the best fuck in the world” on live TV.

By the time Nirvana returned to top the bill at Reading 12 months later, much had changed. The band had topped the charts around the world but become tabloid fodder thanks to the newly married couple’s tempestuous lifestyle. There were rumours the band might not even turn up due to the recent birth of the couple’s daughter, Frances Bean. Tensions and expectations were high – in stark contrast to the previous year when they’d had little to prove and a billing to match. This time they had a headliner’s reputation to live up to.

All fears were unfounded, of course, and Nirvana delivered one of the finest performances of their career to close the festival on the Sunday night in front of an estimated crowd of 60,000. Their UK festival swansong was a resounding success, surpassed, perhaps, only by their debut.

Reading and Leeds festivals take place from August 26 – 28.

The video for this 2002 Foo Fighters single features Dave Grohl and Jack Black as blue collar dudes killing time in a down-at-heel motel. The original video idea involved filming Black in drag for five minutes, but director Jesse Peretz had a different idea…

00:00

An establishing shot reveals two trucks pulling up at a shabby motel. There’s vacancies, too. Our protagonists are in luck. Unless they had the foresight to book in advance. There’s websites for that now.

00:10

Their driving suggests they’re agitated or just need the toilet.

00:15

It’s Dave Grohl, who’s wearing a mesh t-shirt which was last vaguely popular in the 80s. It was a different time then. People were consumed by the need to look like a sporty teabag.

00:17

A hefty wad of phlegm from the Foos frontman, there.

00:21

Enter Jack Black. Whatever they have planned, he’s ready to do this. So ready.

00:25

Their characters may be a little intoxicated.

00:33

They enter their motel room. Probably going to crack open a few cold beers, eat some snacks and watch the game – whatever game that is – before getting an early night. Right?

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00:38

Our perspective changes to that of an old video camera. Jack turns on the stereo. It’s Foo Fighters’ single Low. Handy, that.

00:50

Why, it’s two guys cutting loose after a long day. We’ve all been a bit boisterous in a motel room. Dressed in mesh shirts.

01:00

Jack shows off the moves that have won him numerous high profile acting roles – and broke the hearts of many.

01:12

Dave is going to break that bed if he’s not careful.

01:22

Look, it’s just two dudes having an arm wrestle. Hope they’ve got licenses for those guns. AMIRITE?

01:33

Dave seems agitated. On edge, like a monkey being cajoled into a drunken prank. He unleashes some sweet karate moves. Everyone turns into a martial arts expert after a couple of cold ones, don’t they?

01:38

No idea what Jack is up to, to be honest.

01:40

Shots of bourbon. Mmm. That’ll sit well on all that beer.

01:53

A consolation hug for Dave. Not sure why.

01:56

That’s enough, Jack. Dave doesn’t like it.

02:03

It’s turned into a slap fight.

02:13

Jack’s popped a video on the telly. It sure as fuck isn’t Top Gun.

02:18

Whatever it is, Dave is having a lovely time. On his own.

02:30

Cue scenes of abject misery and Jack Black’s arse crack.

02:31

#jackblacksarsecrack

02:33

He’s using a framed photo of flowers to waft the smell in his pal’s face. What a gent.

02:35

To be honest, Jack’s looked much better.

02:38

With a thumbs up, Dave swerves the fun bus right into Sexy Town, population 2.

02:40

A case is opened. There’s more wigs than you’d find in Steel Panther’s tour luggage.

02:41

The silly sausage. He’s only gone and packed his girlfriend’s massive shoes by mistake! She’ll be furious.

02:42

Right?

02:48

So has Jack. What were they thinking?

02:57

Just some guys messing about with wigs. We’ve all done it.

03:03

Oh dear God.

03:05

To Dave’s credit, he can still karate kick in heels.

03:11

If you’ve ever wanted to see the fella from King Kong and School Of Rock strut around like a frumpy cheerleader, look at the screen. Look at it.

03:25

A bit of lipstick, there. Don’t overdo it, Dave. You’ll look like a clown.

03:30

Is it us or is the heating on? We’re sweating buckets here.

03:50

The pair are just basically wrecking their motel room in THE SEXIEST MANNER POSSIBLE.

03:58

We can only see what’s happening in the dark thanks to the night vision option on the camcorder. How we wish that wasn’t an invention.

04:15

Lads.

04:24

Grohl posing next to a painting of a horse. In the dark.

04:27

Dave’s crying now and starts to suck his thumb like a baby.

04:40

Jack is now puking into a toilet. Maybe downing a bottle of vodka was a poor decision.

05:05

Maybe it’s time for bed. So that’s how you kill time in a shabby motel.

05:11

Our protagonists emerge in the harsh morning sun. With a fist bump and a nod, they return to their trucks and head off. Job done.

What did we learn from Low?

From re-watching this Foo Fighters video, we’ve discovered that two men can have an entertaining evening without being glued to their mobile phones or laptops. They are, however, appalling at holding a video camera steadily. The whole thing was like a grubby version of Cloverfield.