FEATURE:
The Greatest Line-Up in Their History?
The Iconic 1992 Reading Festival at Thirty
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WHEN we think about…
IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey
the classic British festival line-ups, everyone will have their own opinions. Looking at the bill for Reading in 1992 makes for eye-watering reading! Whilst I am going to spend time looking at Nirvana’s headline appearance on 30th August, 1992, the festival started two days earlier. I wanted to mark thirty years of one of the best bills in festival history. The Friday found The Charlatans and PJ Harvey play. Saturday had Public Enemy and Manic Street Preachers on the bill whilst, on Sunday, Nick Cave and Pavement joined Nirvana. Although there was not a great deal of diversity when it came to gender and sound, the quality cannot be faulted. Some of the biggest artists of the 1990s were on that 1992 bill. Not that festivals like Reading and Leeds lack that clout now but, imagine having to choose between those three days?! Which would you go for? Nirvana’s set is especially memorable, but I think that three-day weekend is iconic. As we look to its thirtieth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time looking at Nirvana’s Sunday headline set, in addition to the other acts on that bill. I have put together a playlist at the end featuring many of the headline/main acts and songs from around the time of Reading 1992 (maybe a bit earlier in some cases; a tad later in others). I was a bit too young when Reading 1992 happened (I was nine). I would have loved to have been an adult then and gone and seen some tremendous artists.
I can only imagine the atmosphere in the crowd across those three days. Although some Glastonbury bills have thrown up some impossible-to-beat acts, I think Nirvana’s appearance at Reading on 30th August, 1992 lent something extra and historic to things. Louder Sound told the crazy and eventful story of Nirvana’s Reading set. Rumours they would be a no-show must have kept people tense up until the moment they showed up. As it turns out, the actual set itself was more chaotic and electric that any tension around an absentee band. I have chosen a few sections from an extensive and fascinating read from July:
“As punters gathered for the annual Reading festival on the August Bank Holiday in 1992, the loudest and most urgent whisper doing the rounds was that Sunday night headliners Nirvana were in fact not going to appear. And it kind of made sense. Evidence that all was not entirely rosy in the grunge giants’ garden had been gathering for the previous six months or so.
Music press stories alluding heavily to (if not explicitly revealing) Kurt Cobain’s heroin use and that of his pregnant new bride, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love provoked a steady stream of stories about collapses, emergency hospital visits (on both Kurt and Courtney’s parts) and fragile intra-band relations.
An NME cover story days before the show had revealed a major source of tension to be the new Mrs Cobain herself. Kurt was, one inside told journalist Keith Cameron “A nice guy BC (before Courtney)”, while among other members of the Nirvana camp, he wrote, “she seems almost universally disliked”.
Kurt felt bewildered by the negativity displayed towards the woman he loved, and that turned to blind rage when a profile on Courtney Love appeared in US Vanity Fair just two weeks before the Reading show. In an article by Lynn Herschberg whose intro asked if Kurt and Courtney were “the grunge John and Yoko or the next Sid and Nancy”, it quoted Courtney as casually mentioning that she used heroin at a time when she would have been several months pregnant with the couple’s daughter Frances Bean.
Meanwhile, tensions had risen further due to Kurt renegotiating the songwriting royalties for the band. According to band biographer Michael Azerrad, the previously even split was changed to a 75% share for the frontman and main songwriter, with the arrangement applied retrospectively to include royalties from Nevermind. Ouch.
So going into that Reading Show, the mood was tense. Drummer Dave Grohl later told The Scotsman, “I really thought, this will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure. Kurt had been in and out of rehab, communication in the band was beginning to be strained. 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 once, the night before, and it wasn't good.”
The weather did its worst to further dampen spirits with rain, flooded tents and mudbaths throughout the site.
But when the time came for the headline act, they took a leaf out of James Brown’s showbiz manual. But whereas the Godfather of Soul had a regular trick where he would collapse and be escorted from the spotlight, seemingly exhausted, then burst free to start the next number, Kurt had something else up his sleeve.
As the lights went down, a figure in a long blond wig was pushed onto the stage in a wheelchair, clad in a hospital gown. Krist Novoselic solemnly addressed the crowd. “I can’t… it’s too painful, it’s too painful… With the help of his friends and family, he's gonna make it."
The stricken Cobain (for it, obviously, was he) reached for the mic stand and tried to haul himself up. He began to croak out the opening lines of Bette Midler’s The Rose, a movie about a rock singer who died of a drug overdose. “Some say love, it is a river,” he crooned before he flopped theatrically onto his back the stage.
And sure enough, up he leapt and calmly picked up his guitar and launched into a splenetically brilliant Breed”.
Thirty years since one of the most amazing line-up in Reading’s history was announced and unfolded, I wanted to look back. Maybe it was Nirvana’s set that defined that year, but there were other great acts that helped add so much weight to a spectacular year. We have had some great line-ups at Reading since 1992, but I think the cast from thirty years ago is…
IMPOSSIBLE to top.