Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins’ Nirvana book Flower Sniffin’, Kitty Pettin’, Baby Kissin’ Corporate Rock Whores might well have been the last word on Kurt Cobain’s grunge game-changers, but we’ll never know: the book never made it to publication. Despite its lack of, you know, actually existing, the tome remains infamous for being at the centre of one of the most controversial events in Nirvana lore, a string of intensely threatening answerphone messages that Cobain, and his partner, Hole's Courtney Love, left for UK-based writers Clarke and Collins.
It didn’t all happen out of the blue. Originally, Clarke and Collins had courted the band and their management’s approval to write their take on the trio’s meteoric rise. On the face of it, they were welcomed into the fold: they were given a list of handy contacts by the band’s UK press office, went out for dinner with the group’s management supremo John Silva and Clarke even got the green light to go out on tour with the band as they made their way across Europe in 1992, just as things were blowing up big. They were waved on through to the inner sanctum, granted AAA passes and use of backstage production offices. So far, so no sign of any need to leave threatening messages on people’s answerphones.
