As Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain found himself referred to in the media as the “spokeman of a generation”, with Nirvana the “flagship band” of “Generation X”.[1] Cobain declined the position, and placed his focus on the band’s music, challenging the band’s audience with their third album In Utero. While Nirvana’s mainstream popularity waned in the months following its release, their core audience cherished the band’s dark interior, particularly after the band’s 1993 performance on MTV Unplugged.

Nirvana’s brief run ended with the death of Cobain in 1994, but the band’s popularity expanded in the years that followed. Eight years after Cobain’s death, an unfinished demo that the band recorded two months prior to Cobain’s death topped radio playlists around the world. Since their debut, the band has sold more than fifty million albums worldwide (see also Best selling music artists), including more than ten million copies of Nevermind in the US alone. Nirvana remains a consistent presence on radio stations worldwide.

Cobain and Krist Novoselic met in 1985. Both were fans of The Melvins, and both were interested in forming a band. They worked with several drummers (including Aaron Burckhard and Dale Crover of The Melvins, who played on their first demos), before settling on Chad Channing. Nirvana’s first album, Bleach, was released by Sub Pop Records in 1989. Bleach was highly influenced by Cobain’s then-favorite band, The Melvins, by the heavy dirge-rock of Mudhoney, and by the 70s rock of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Novoselic noted in a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone that the band had played a tape in their van while on tour that had an album by The Smithereens on one side and an album by the black metal band Celtic Frost on the other, and noted that the combination probably played an influence as well.[2] Bleach became a favorite of college radio stations nationally, but gave few hints of where the band would find itself two years later.

Though he did not actually play on the album, Jason Everman was credited as playing guitar on Bleach because he put up the money for the recording sessions: $606.17. After the album was completed, Everman had a brief and contentious stay with the band as a second guitar player, but was sacked following their first US tour. Not long after, he briefly played bass with Soundgarden before joining the band Mind Funk.

In early 1990, the band began working with producer Butch Vig on recordings for the follow-up to Bleach. During the sessions, Kurt and Krist realized that Chad wasn’t the drummer the band needed, and he was let go after the sessions were complete. After a few weeks with Dale Crover of The Melvins filling in, they hired Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters, with whom they recorded the song “Sliver”. Later that year, Buzz Osbourne of The Melvins introduced them to Dave Grohl, who was looking for a new band following the sudden break-up of D.C. hardcore punks Scream.

Following repeated recommendation by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, David Geffen signed Nirvana to DGC Records in 1990 and the band began recording their first album for a major label. The result, Nevermind, is now widely regarded as a classic.

For the album, the band decided to continue working with Vig. Rather than recording at Vig’s Madison studio as they had in 1990, the band shifted to Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. For two months, the band worked through a variety of songs in their catalog. Some of the songs, including “In Bloom” and “Breed”, had been in the band’s repertoire for years, while others, including “On a Plain” and “Stay Away”, lacked finished lyrics until mid-way through the recording process. [4]

After the recording sessions were completed, Vig and the band set out to mix the album. However, after a few days, both Vig and the band realized that they didn’t like how the mixes were turning out. As a result, they decided to call in someone else to oversee the mixing, with DGC supplying a list of possible options. Cobain did not want to use mixers that had worked with other bands that he liked, given that he did not want to sound like them. He decided to call in the guy at the bottom of the list next to the name ‘Slayer’: Andy Wallace. (Wallace co-produced Slayer’s 1990 album Seasons in the Abyss.)

Months after the album’s release, Cobain complained in the press that Wallace made Nevermind sound too slick, even though Wallace had been his own choice and the band themselves had been involved in the mixing process.[5] Even if the band were disappointed at the glossy sound of the album, Wallace successfully tempered the band’s indie rock leanings and created a mainstream-ready rock sound that others would attempt to duplicate for the next decade.

Initially, Nevermind, wasn’t expected to sell more than 500,000 copies. Instead, the album was certified triple-platinum (three million copies) in the US less than six months after its release. The highly infectious single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” received heavy airplay on MTV, inspiring a slew of imitators and bringing the grunge sound into the mainstream. The popularity of “alternative” rock, as well as the sidelining of hair metal, is often credited to Nevermind. In January of 1992, the album reached the top of the Billboard album charts, replacing Michael Jackson’s album Dangerous, an act often considered the defining symbol of the rise of alternative music over pop. Citing exhaustion, the band decided not to undertake another US tour in support of Nevermind, instead opting to make a handful of performances later that year.

In February of 1992, following the band’s Australian tour, Cobain married Courtney Love in Hawaii. Love gave birth to a daughter, Frances Bean the following August. Just days after Frances Bean’s birth, Nirvana performed one of its best-known concerts, headlining at the Reading Festival. Cobain entered the stage in a wheelchair as a practical joke, then proceeded to get up and join the rest of the band in tearing through an assortment of old and new material. At one point in the show, Cobain related to the crowd the recent birth of his daughter, and succeeded in having the crowd chant “We love you, Courtney!” in unison. Dave Grohl related in 2005 on the radio program Loveline that the band were genuinely concerned beforehand that the show would be a complete disaster, given all that had happened during the year and that they hadn’t rehearsed in six months. Instead, the performance ended up being one of the greatest of their career.

Not quite two weeks later, Nirvana put on a memorable performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. MTV had wanted the band to play “Teen Spirit”, but the band wanted to play a new song called “Rape Me”. MTV was appalled at the idea of a song called “Rape Me”, and eventually agreed that the band could play “Lithium” instead, the band’s then-current single. When the band began their performance, Kurt strummed and sang the first few bars of “Rape Me”, giving the MTV execs a solid shock before jumping into “Lithium”. Near the end of the song, frustrated that his amp had stopped functioning, Novoselic decided to toss his bass into the air for dramatic effect. Unfortunately, he misjudged the landing, and the bass ended up bouncing off of his forehead, forcing him to stumble off the stage in a daze. As Cobain trashed their equipment, Grohl ran to the mic and began yelling “Hi, Axl!” repeatedly, referring to Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose, with whom the band and Courtney had had a bizarre encounter prior to the show.[6]

Nirvana released Incesticide, a collection of B-sides and rarities, in December of 1992. Many of Nirvana’s BBC radio sessions and unreleased early recordings were starting to circulate via trading circles and illegal bootlegs, so the album served to beat the bootleggers to the punch. The album contained such fan favorites as “Sliver”, “Dive”, “Been a Son”, and “Aneurysm” as well as covers of songs by The Vaselines, a band that became more popular as a result of Nirvana’s covers.

Finally, drummer Roger Taylor fell in with them at a party, Andy Taylor came south from Newcastle to audition after responding to a magazine advertisement, and Simon Le Bon was recommended to the band by an ex-girlfriend who worked at the Rum Runner nightclub, where the band rehearsed. The owners of the club, brothers Paul and Michael Berrow, became the band’s management, and paid them to work as doormen, DJs and glass collectors when they weren’t rehearsing.

The up-and-coming group were considered part of the New Romantic scene, along with other style-and-dance bands like Spandau Ballet and ABC. Over the course of 1980, they recorded two demo tapes and performed tirelessly in clubs around Birmingham and London. Touring in late 1980 with Hazel O’Connor, the band attracted critical attention that escalated into a bidding war between the major record labels. “A certain patriotism” toward the label of The Beatles led them to sign with EMI in December. Nick Rhodes has since said, in a 1998 interview with Deluxe magazine, that the band was “appallingly ripped off”.

Like Depeche Mode, Duran Duran were among the earliest bands to work on their own remixes. Before the days of digital synthesizers and easy audio sampling, they created complex, multilayered arrangements of their singles, sometimes recording entirely different extended performances of the songs in studio. These “night versions” were generally available only on vinyl, as b-sides to 45 rpm singles or on 12-inch club singles, until the release of the Night Versions: The Essential Duran Duran compilation in 1998.

From the very beginning, the band had a keen sense of style, and worked with stylist Perry Haines and fashion designers like Kahn & Bell and Antony Price to build a sharp and elegant image, soon growing beyond the ruffles and sashes of the pirate-flavoured New Romantic look.

They may have suffered from the typical hair spray and mullet excesses of the 1980s, but have maintained a focus on presenting fashion as part of the package throughout their career. In the 1990s, they worked with Vivienne Westwood, and in the 2000s with Giorgio Armani. (One of the band’s advertising taglines adopts journalist Linda Ellerbee’s phrase “Styles change, style doesn’t.”) In addition they retained creative control of the band’s visual presentation, and worked closely with graphic designer Malcolm Garrett and many others over the years to create album covers, tour programmes, and other materials.

Teen and music magazines in the UK latched onto their good looks quickly, and the US soon followed; it was a rare month in the early eighties when there was not at least one picture of the band members in teen magazines like Smash Hits or Tiger Beat, even if the sugary coverage was at odds with the band’s titillating videos and sometimes dark lyrics. It helped that each member had a distinctive look and personality. John Taylor once remarked that the band was “like a box of Quality Street [chocolates]; everyone is somebody’s favourite” – an effect that is now strategically planned in more recent boy bands. Duran Duran would later come to regret this early pin-up exposure, but at the time it helped gain them the national attention they sought.

The band became part of Daniel Miller’s Mute label by verbal contract, and released their first album, Speak and Spell, in 1981. Soon after, Vince Clarke left and went on to form several other bands including Yazoo (Yaz in the US) with Alison Moyet, The Assembly with Feargal Sharkey, Dave Clempson and Eric Radcliffe, and later Erasure with Andy Bell.

After Clarke’s departure, Martin Gore, who had written “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and “Big Muff” on their debut album, took over as the band’s primary songwriter and in 1982 the album A Broken Frame was released by the remaining trio. Shortly after, Alan Wilder who had auditioned for the band prior to the recording of A Broken Frame (although he did not contribute to that album) joined the band first as a live replacement for Clarke, then as a full-fledged member of Depeche Mode. He wrote “The Landscape is Changing” and “Two Minute Warning” for their 1983 album, Construction Time Again, as well as “Fools,” the B-side to the Love in Itself single, “In Your Memory,” the B-side to the People Are People single, and “If You Want” on the 1984 album Some Great Reward, but his main contribution to Depeche Mode was in technical and musical production.

In the early 1980s the band’s popularity was largely confined to Europe (particularly Germany). However, in 1984 Depeche Mode made inroads into the US, spawning the North American-only releases of the compilations People Are People and 1985’s Catching Up With Depeche Mode, the former featuring their first transatlantic hit “People Are People”.

This period is seen as the beginning of the band’s long association with Britains’s Gothic movement that was gaining popularity in America.

This may have owed more to its sound than to its image, due to the band’s late exposure to the American market and its unfortunate string of inconsistent, budget-driven music videos prior to this time. As heard with 1984’s “Blasphemous Rumours”, a bitter commentary on the unfairness of life, and the dour B-side to 1985’s “It’s Called a Heart”, called “Fly on the Windscreen” (thereafter remixed and released as “Fly on the Windscreen - Final” on the 1986 album Black Celebration), lead songwriter Martin began a decade-long descent into dark, brooding synthesized dance music. At the time, many associated this sound with that of the then-ascendent Goth movement - an association the band tried to later to downplay, with little effect.

After the video of their 1986 single A Question of Time garnered attention, its director Anton Corbijn began a long-lasting friendship and working relationship with the band, eventually directing 19 of their videos (the latest being 1997’s “Useless”). For his part, Corbijn — an internationally renowned photographer and newly emerging music video director (U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” (1984) and Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses” (1985)) — was catapulted into near stardom, eventually directing music videos for the likes of Joy Division (”Atmosphere” (1988)), Front 242 (”Headhunter” (1988), “Tragedy for You” (1991)), Bryan Adams, Nirvana, and U2 (”One” (1991), “Please” (1997), “Electrical Storm” (2002)). With a newly-coherent, striking image and a brooding sound, the band resonated with an emerging taste for all things Gothic in the US. On the heels of their ironically titled 1987 album Music for the Masses, Depeche Mode played a follow-up US tour in 1988, to sold-out venues.