Some of the most iconic live moments in Nirvana’s career were those shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. No-one, for instance, really knew if Kurt Cobain & co. were going to show for their Reading headline slot in 1992, rumours flying around that it was never going to happen because the band had already split up and that Cobain was too ill, a theory mocked when the frontman had himself pushed onstage in a wheelchair come Sunday evening.
Similarly, there was much fretting about the grunge superstars’ MTV Unplugged performance, an all-time classic set that turned 30 this week. This one, though, was less about whether Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl would actually show and more about if they had the chops to pull it off. Bar some of the more restrained moments on their records, no-one had ever really heard Nirvana raw and stripped-down. Nirvana acoustic was just not a thing: Nirvana were the loudest and most aggressively chaotic live band on the planet, Cobain’s howl rendering PAs useless, Dave Grohl’s powerhouse drumming style the sort that could register on the Richter scale. Nothing about them screamed: “MTV Unplugged material”.
