Every Album I Love — 1. Nirvana — Nevermind

Not content with trying to write a blog about every song I love, I thought I would make the task doubly impossible by also trying to write about every album I love. And I’ll start with the album which, more than any other, changed my life. The album that transformed music from a hobby I enjoyed into the most important thing in my life, the album that I have listened to probably more times than any other, Nevermind by Nirvana.

Nevermind came into my life in 1992, a year or so after it had been released, exploded, and made Nirvana the biggest band in the world. It had passed me by at first, as an 11/12 year old boy whose musical diet consisted of Radio 1, Top of the Pops and a small handful of cassette tapes gifted, copied from friends or taped off the radio. I feel I must have heard Nirvana at some point, as I listened to the Top 40 almost every week, and they had hit the charts a handful of times by then, but they had made no impression.

The first time I had paid attention was seeing a 30 second clip of the final single from Nevermind, ‘In Bloom’ on The Chart Show, an ITV show which showed music videos on a Saturday lunchtime. It’s not like it blew me away or anything, but I noticed it enough to make a mental note that, here was a band I might like to listen to more at some point.

A little later I decided to get into buying music for myself for the first time. I has a cheap cassette player/radio in my room, but the only tapes I actually owned were random albums I had been gifted, copied from friends or taped from the radio. But, newly flush from an allowance and a paper round, I decided to start building my own collection. I was still concerned with value for money though (it was no surprise I became an accountant in later life), so I decided to join the Britannia Music Club.

For those of you too young to remember this particular way of discovering music, or not British, this was one of those mail-order deals where you would buy five albums on cassette for just one pound, with the downside that they would then send you a catalogue every month from which you would have to buy at least one overpriced album from a sadly limited selection. I just saw the five albums for a pound part of the deal though, and couldn’t resist.

Which five albums to choose though? My first four were easy to choose, Annie Lennox, Shakespeare’s Sister, Now Dance ’92, and some other random dance compilation. I think I liked these dance compilations because you got a lot of tracks for your money (accountant — see), and it’s also very apparent that my music tastes were quite random, not yet well formed, somewhere between child and middle aged Q reader.

The fifth album was trickier to choose. There was nothing I especially wanted on their list, but then I noticed Nevermind by Nirvana, remembered that bit of that one song I had liked, wrote it down and the rest was history.

I would be lying to say it changed my life immediately. I listened to the album and liked it, probably more than the other four I had ordered, but I has also at that time been listening to a lot of stadium rock albums, copied from my best friend at the time, by the likes of Bon Jovi, Guns N Roses, and even Alice Cooper, and I didn’t see Nevermind as being fundamentally different from any of them. It was just one of several ‘rock’ albums that I liked.

Then something changed, and in retrospect, that something must have been adolescence. Nirvana’s music went from being something I enjoyed to something I felt deep in my soul, something I loved, something I needed. The difference between Nirvana and those other bands was suddenly very apparent to me, they felt authentic and real and Kurt’s pain and anguish spoke to the adolescent me (ridiculous as it seems to compare my teenage angst to the very real suffering that Kurt went through).

I listened to the album constantly, and grew to know and love every track, from the obvious hits like Teen Spirit to the minimal, bleak closers of each side, Polly and Something In The Way, to the thrashy Territorial Pissings. I sought out other bands who I thought might be a bit like Nirvana, with mixed success. I bought Bleach and Incesticide and waited patiently for the new album to come out, then went to buy it the week it came out (actually I tried to by it the week before it came out due to a misprint of the release date in a newspaper), the first time I had ever anticipated a record so much. Nevermind remained the album I loved the most though.

Then came in that day in April 1994 when we lost Kurt Cobain. I remember hearing the news on the Friday evening on the radio, then going out to do my paper round the next morning with the news splashed all over the front pages. My family knew how much I cared and treated me as if I had been personally bereaved, which is honestly how it felt at the time, not having known true loss in my life. My friends also knew how much I cared and mainly took the piss (some of my best friends at school were kind of assholes in retrospect).

Over time the pain subsided, and I found other bands I loved as much or more, but nothing ever quite hits the same as first love. Nirvana remained a band I loved and listened to, a lot for a while, then from time to time thereafter. My relationship with Nevermind changed too, as my tastes in music changed. I started to think of it as a little overproduced and glossy, but perhaps it just became overfamiliar. Unplugged in New York became my favourite Nirvana record as I my tastes trended towards the raw, the tender, the quiet.

But listening back to Nevermind in recent years, I have started to appreciate it anew. I have sometimes felt like Kurt was a great vocalist, but a merely good songwriter, but listening to Nevermind now, I appreciate the craft, and the way with a melody. If anything it reminds me of the Beatles more than anyone, the way that the songs have melodies in the verses that are better than most bands choruses (On A Plain is a great example of this). I’ve found little moments in the record that I appreciate more, like the bit in Lounge Act where Kurt’s voices just shifts, and turns what could easily be a bit of album filler into something truly wonderful.

Nevermind may no longer be my favourite album, it may not even be in my top 50, but it will always remain my first love. It’s the album that changed my life, that spoke to me when no-one else could. And judging by its enduring popularity, it will continue always to do the same for many others.

Originally published at http://markjwray.com on March 3, 2024.