One time Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl has revealed that he wasn’t even sure the group would make it to Reading for their epochal festival show.
Nirvana’s performance at Reading in 1992 has gone down in music lore. The last time the trio would play on British soil singer Kurt Cobain was wheeled onstage by a journalist amid mounting rumours about his health.
Blasting through virtually every song in their locker to date, Nirvana gave one of the finest shows of their career. Ending with Kurt Cobain throwing himself into the drumkit it was one occasion when auto-destruction seemed like the only way to end the show.
Finally released on DVD, fans can now indulge in the entire performance. Re-mastered and sounding better than ever Nirvana seem to be in the prime of life. However in a recent interview Dave Grohl revealed that he didn’t believe the trio would even make it onstage.
“Kurt had been in and out of rehab, communication in the band was beginning to be strained,” Grohl told The Scotsman. “Kurt was living in LA, Krist (Novoselic) and I were in Seattle. People weren’t even sure if we were going to show up.”
“We rehearsed (for Reading) once, the night before, and it wasn’t good,” he said. “I really thought, ‘This will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure.’ And then it turned out to be a wonderful show, and it healed us for a little while.”
Reminiscing about his time in the band, Dave Grohl insisted that Nirvana was actually far from the gloomy trio many portray them as. “It’s easy to imagine that we were followed by a black cloud,” he explained. “But it wasn’t all misery and doom. People know the biography, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
‘Nirvana – Live At Reading’ is out now.