"We spend a lot of time stabbing babies, fornicating with dogs, bombing churches." The dark, twisted, brilliant but largely forgotten grunge band who could have been bigger than Nirvana

Tad, 1991.

Sub Pop's 37-show Heavier Than Heaven tour, which launched on October 23, 1989 at the Riverside club in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, was designed to introduce European audiences to two of the label's most promising new artists, Seattle quartet Tad, and Aberdeen, Washington trio Nirvana.

Though the nine-country tour was set up as a co-headline venture, with the two bands alternating for the opportunity to close the show each night, when UK music music magazine Sounds publicised its British dates with a double-page spread on the two acts on the road in America in its October 21, 1989 issue, the editors opted to put Tad vocalist/guitarist Thomas Andrew 'Tad' Doyle as the main image on the front cover, with a smaller photo of Nirvana (then touring as a four-piece, with Jason Everman on second guitar) inset.

"Tad were much the bigger band," Sub Pop's UK publicist Anton Brookes explained simply to the BBC.

(Image credit: Sounds magazine)