Skin the sun

Nirvana | Rotting Out | Grant Hart

Some albums are bound up with such particular memories that, even decades later, you can recall exactly where and when you bought them.

Nirvana’s In Utero, which last week marked its 30th anniversary, is not one of them for me.

Full of personal weight, yes; but an album with a particular sense of time and place? Not so much.

I know I bought In Utero when it came out, possibly from the WH Smiths in my home town of Henley-on-Thames, though going up to the loft to check my CD collection offers no confirmation about that.

Instead, it’s the purchase of Nevermind that I recall clearly.

I’d seen Nirvana on Top of the Pops, been a little bemused by their rendition of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but also had the song stuck in my head.

So, Saturday 7th December 1991, I took the train to Reading for a shopping trip to HMV. The day also saw me pick up my first pair of DMs - a momentous moment in the life of any budding indie kid - and a green waistcoat (the latter a slightly regrettable and thankfully short-lived sartorial direction).

The trip made 16-year-old me the first of my friends to own Nevermind and the CD was duly passed around my group and copied to cassette - just as my Out of Time had, just as a friend’s Bandwagonesque would be.

In Utero was not like that. It was not passed around. It was not raved about by my Guns N Roses and Dire Straits loving friend, in the way that he had about Nevermind.

And that makes sense.

It was an abrasive album then and still is now - opener ‘Serve the Servants’ remains an aural cattle prod to be wielded against the band’s mainstream fans.

So just half the sales of Nevermind then, though they’re still numbers to be counted in the millions.

But it’s an album I’ve always bracketed with Pixies’ Bossanova and even Hüsker Dü’s Candy Apple Grey - all discs with some great, great songs on them, but which lack an element of cohesion that the best albums have.

Nevermind was all about being a focused, workshopped collection of songs, sleekly tuned-up and polished*.

In Utero was the snarling hot-rod, defiantly showing off its patches of rust.

Last week’s three-decade anniversary, and accompanying reissue campaign, provided much further recollection on the album

Alongside Kerrang’s original 1993 review of an album that “hollers defiantly”, there was an up-to-date re-telling of the making of In Utero at Pachyderm Studio* from Mojo, a rare interview with Nirvana cellist Kera Schaley and an inevitable AI headline about tech someday finishing unreleased Nirvana songs.

And, as the Christmas book season splutters into action, the band’s original biographer Michael Azerrad is set to release an expanded edition of his classic 1993 book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, more than double its length to become The Amplified Come As You Are, which adds new information, corrections and reflects on the original and is out in October.

Bonus writing: Rotting Out Cover Nirvana’s ‘Even In His Youth’

*Not that it seemed like that to 16-year-old me, who would briefly think ‘In Bloom’ was the heaviest thing ever

**Pachyderm Studio would also play host to Grant Hart some four years later when the Hüsker Dü singer and drummer came to start recording his 1999 solo album Good News For Modern Man