LIVE NIRVANA INTERVIEW ARCHIVE November 23, 1991 - Gent, BE
Personnel
- Interviewer(s)
- Niels Delvaux
- Interviewee(s)
- Kurt Cobain
Sources
| Publisher | Title | Transcript |
|---|---|---|
| Studio Brussel | "Attention. This Is Kurt From Nirvana" | Yes |
Transcript
[clears throat] Attention. This is Kurt from Nirvana. This is the "Update" on Studio Brussel.
Wow, I suppose I should say "Yeah, I'm surprised", but Poison sells 5 million records and, uh, they suck! [laughs] They don't deserve it, so I don't really care.
Yeah, we're music lovers. We're musicians, we like music. We appreciate all different kinds of music, as long as it's good! It doesn't matter if it's on a major label, it doesn't matter if it's a tape that someone made on their home boombox or a recorder like this, it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter, even if someone hasn't even recorded something to even have it distributed to anyone, if it''s good it's good, we just like it.
So, y'know, we'd be just as happy playing in a basement, y'know. Sometimes that's the most appreciative time we have with music, just being together because we're good friends and we play music.
Oh, we're definitely friends. If we weren't friends, I wouldn't want to be in this band. I wouldn't want to be in any band if they weren't my friends. We hang out together, even when we're not doing anything involving the band.
Krist and I have been playing together for about 4 and a half years now, with a few different drummers, and Dave has been in the band for a year. This is the first time we've ever felt like a very definite unit. The band is finally complete because all the other drummers we had pretty much sucked [laughs] as far as tempo, y'know. It's really hard to find a good drummer. I'm really not the type of person who likes to emphasise on musicianship, I really don't care how sloppy a band is, but it's really distressing to play in a band when the drummer can't keep time.
I've been writing songs since I was about 15, since I first bought my first guitar and Dave and Krist never thought of themselves as songwriters, they've never had the feeling to wanna do that, so I became the songwriter of the band, but we're collaborating a lot more. I usually come up with the basic idea for a song and then we go into a practice room and play the song over and over and over again until it's finally finished, so it is pretty collective.
Sometimes we just get drunk, y'know? We wanna have fun and it's really boring to be on tour for 3 months and be in these same kind of hotels and these same backstage areas, playing your show and then just going straight to the hotel afterwards to sleep and then start it all over again… and not eating regularly, and driving on a bus for 8 hours a day… It's really boring. So we do everything in our power to keep it exciting and sometimes that involves having a bit too much fun. 90%, I mean every time we've ever destroyed something, we've always been in a very happy and jokey mood, where we're drunk off our asses, and throwing things around, and wrestling, and having fun, y'know. I don't give a shit if it's cliché or not, or if it's been done by bands before. I think any rock'n'roll band has those tendencies, to do stuff like that, just to keep themselves sane.
But, obviously if you've ever read an English paper, you know they like to exaggerate things and make a big sensational story out of it. So, it's not as extreme as everyone thinks.
Yeah, when we feel like it. It's just fun to do, it's part of the act! [laughs] We did it a lot more a few years ago than we have now. We haven't been doing it very much lately because everyone expects it. We usually just play with really cheap equipment. A lot of times before I show we're scrambling for guitar parts and gluing things together, just to have a guitar for that night. I dunno, it's just… one day at a time, sweet Jesus.
We appreciate beauty just as much as we appreciate violence and… we don't even appreciate violence but obviously it's an emotion, it's just a part of emotion, negative energy… we like to divide those 2, mix them up, make a nice salad.
Half Japanese, Beat Happening, The Raincoats, Young Marble Giants, Shonen Knife, The Melvins, Jesus Lizard, I still think R.E.M. are good songwriters, I like The Pixies, I like the Breeders a lot.
© Studio Brussel, 1991