It was one of those chill spring London nights, the sort that slaps your brain back into action when it’s been dulled by a few hours of booze and food in a cozy, hazy restaurant. It’s late but not quiet, and a small group of blokes are walking through Soho, laughing, bumping shoulders, just good mates on a night out. They don’t seem to have too much that’s bothering them, they’d been on top form all evening. Yet two of them - Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament - had just foreclosed on passages of their lives that they would never forget, and - although none of us walking through the streets knew it then - something even more remarkable, and less painful - was about to begin.
It was another record company beano, of course, a grip-and-grin for Stone and Jeff, a chance for a group of journos to meet them and maybe give some support to the first record with their new band. Nobody knew too much about them then. Mother Love Bone had been a fun and funky side street, part-Queen, part-something else entirely. The Seattle scene was gaining an ascendency over the death-throes of cock rock, but the streets weren’t yet full of plaid shirts and goatees, and Kurt and Courtney’s names were still to be irrevocably linked. He’d written and recorded the bruised and brilliant songs for Nevermind, but they’d yet to find their destructive public appeal.
