About a Ticket

Twenty years ago this week I received this letter. It was from the box office manager of Manchester's G-MEX Centre, politely informing me that a gig I was going to on the 27th of March had been rescheduled to the 15th of April. Fair enough, you might say. Nothing strange about that. These days you'd get an email or tweet about that sort of thing.

This wasn't any old gig though. This was Nirvana.

It wasn't as if I wasn't expecting it to be postponed. Even in the pre-internet days, news travelled pretty fast, and the world was quickly aware that the band's iconic lead singer Kurt Cobain had overdosed in Italy on March 3rd. The rest of the tour actually had been cancelled a few days earlier as Cobain's voice had given out, but he was also suffering from severe depression at the time. After his wife, Courtney Love joined him in Rome, unbeknownst to her, he took 50 pills of Rohypnol, mixed with food and alcohol. Hospital and a stomach pump beckoned. Press reports at the time say it was accidental, but Love's own statements since show that this was far from being an accident.

There was doubt about whether the UK leg of the tour would ever happen. This would have been Nirvana's biggest tour here. They'd graduated on the back of the worldwide success of 1991's "Nevermind" album to playing bigger venues, and G-MEX was at that time one of the UK's largest and most successful venues, despite being basically a big shed. Their 1993 follow up album, "In Utero", whilst less immediate and commercially successful than it's predecessor, wasn't an artistic disappointment in any way, with it's increasingly bleak lyrical outlook and subject matter. In some ways it was a true reflection of Cobain's state of mind at the time. The trappings and pressures of success didn't sit easy with him.His mental health had been a concern for a while, and the nearer it got to the European dates of the tour, the less likely it sounded we would get to see the band, bearing in mind the many rumours that were flying around.

And so in Italy he accidentally/deliberately overdosed. Now this is not the sort of thing you'd expect someone to get over within a month. I mean, it's not as if it was just flu he was recovering from. But despite the reassurance of press releases from the likes of his record company that the band would be playing the rescheduled dates, something told me that I wouldn't be seeing Nirvana on the 15th of April. I was proven right, unfortunately. Cobain, as we all know, took his own life on the 5th of April 1994.

I never did get a refund on the ticket. I couldn't find it in myself to return it to the G-Mex for my money back, it didn't seem right somehow. It was the right decision.

Nirvana's legacy lives on. Unfortunately it partly lives on in the form of band t-shirts sold in Primark to people who haven't a clue who Kurt Cobain was. Still, I suppose if just one person goes onto iTunes and checks out their music after buying the shirt, that's something.

Isn't it? I'm trying to convince myself.