LIVE NIRVANA INTERVIEW ARCHIVE October 24, 1990 - London, UK

Personnel

Interviewer(s)

Steve Richards

Interviewee(s)

Kurt Cobain

Krist Novoselic

Sources

Medium	Publisher	Date of Issue	Title	Transcript
Print	On the Pulse	??/XX/1991	NIRVANA	Yes

Transcript

After meeting Chris at Birmingham Goldwyns, on the first night of their largest UK tour to date, he kindly agreed to be interviewed before their Astoria gig on the following night. So here I am, backstage at the Astoria with Kurdt Kobain and Chris Novoselic from Nirvana, who give a very strange (or normal, in their case) interview.

OP: How do you find the audience react to you in the UK?

C: Well, last night we poured out this allergenic stuff and people started itching and scratching and their eyes were watering and they were coughing y'know.

K: We had a good reaction.

OP: Do you find American audiences are different to British audiences?

C: No because everyone is the same. We all came from the apeman type things from Africa and then these spread to the East and all across the World really and to America.

K: People who live among ice tend to be a little cold. (?!?!)

C: That was a good one.

K: Thanks a lot.

C: I live for moments like that.

OP: Have You adopted a new kind of “image,” for want of a better word, with Kurdt cutting his hair and starting to wear make-up and stuff?

C: Yeah we're totally in to image y'know. I mean I got this ring for the sake of image. What I want to do is shave my arm hairs and I have hairs around my nipples which is kind of gross.

K: I have 2 big hairs right on my shoulder.

C: Look, isn't that just weird. (Lifts up his top to display his nipples.) It's so gross, I mean talk about the missing link y'know.

OP: Is it true that you're leaving Sub Pop?

C: Yeah we are.

OP: Have you any ideas of where you might be going?

C: We don't know yet, we're just checking it out. We're going to a major and that's all that we know at this point.

OP: What's happening to Dan Peters, as he was supposed to have joined you?

C: Well, he played a show with us and he did really good, we thought he was going to be our drummer and then we tried this other drummer, called Dave, and we thought his style suited us better than Dan's, so that's pretty much what happened. Dan is like a really good drummer and like he's got the Dan Peters style; I mean if you listen to Mudhoney you can hear it but he would have had to change his style to accommodate our band and that wasn't like fair to him.

OP: So what bands do you like?

C: We like the Vaselines from Scotland.

K: Young Marble Giants, Pixies.

C: I like Soundgarden. I like a lot of old stuff. I've got a record with Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren which is really funny, it's kind of like Monty Python. It was put out in the early 1960s and they sing these corny songs.

OP: What happened to Chad?

C: Oh Chad, well it wasn't really working out.

OP: So he's definitely gone then?

C: Yeah, we think he's a lot happier being gone too. He had a lot of songs, I mean he writes songs, and his songs didn't really suit our band and they weren't songs that we wanted to do. He knew that too, so he kinda kept it to himself but now he's in a band and writing songs and he's a lot happier.

OP: Who writes the songs for Nirvana?

C: Kurdt. Yeah, I'm the technician not the artist.

At this point we hear that Godflesh have taken the stage, and Chris says that he's never and would like to see them, so we end the interview there. Later that night, Nirvana play one of their best gigs to date, playing their new stuff, including the marvellous Sliver, a Vaselines cover and of course all the old songs that made us love them in the first place. Grandma take me home...

© Steve Richards, 1991