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ODOUR ADOLESCENTE

It was my girlfriends 21st birthday. The clocks had gone back a week or two before. Outside my bedroom window, where I was lying on the bed, reading, the sun was starting to sink beneath the houses. Music was playing quietly through my cheap black stereo. The sun had turned light from a soothing warmth to a thin yellow streak penetrating the trees.

In the spring holidays, unemployed and underfunded, I learnt how to stretch time and money to near infinite levels of patience. So much so that time had become almost monotonous. Minor events took on a far greater import due to the sheer lack of information. This was my routine for the poverty weeks. A Buddhist meditation on stretching time : time is not only infinite. It felt infinite.

The darkness fell slowly. I forget what I was listening to. Or what I was reading. These things seem to have faded in time. With every passing event, each passing moment, the past blurs slightly as it gets further away. In enough time, the past will fall below the event horizon. There will be nothing left to see but memories of having memories. Each event is a layer covering the past.

My twin brother came through the bedroom door. The bedroom door opened outwards, unlike most rooms. But being in a room about sixty five square feet, every square inch counted.

Right about now, my life changed. Not majorly, but enough. Little did I know I was going to learn something, some piece of information that suddenly, unexpectedly changes your life. For a time you think you know what life is. You have your morals, your ideas, your heroes, and you�re at that age when you know everything.

It�s all figured out.

And then something comes and carcrashes your life. Something changes everything everything you�d ever known.

What I was about to learn was 18 wheel Juggernaut launching unseen from the side, and it was going to write off the way I thought life was. No garage can repair it. The only way to live is to start again. Where there was order, there is now chaos. Where there is understanding, now there is misunderstanding. The way life was had become history. Now, there is what life is. Not what it should be.

His lank, long hair was almost a separate personality in itself. It followed him like a shadow.

CHRIST COBAIN

The news. The bombshell. The bullet in the head. On Teletext, the poor mans internet, the unseen, hidden signal that lives on our television, late breaking news.

A body had been found at Kurt Cobain�s house. A white male, longish blond hair.

And for a second � the thought hit like a slap.

It couldn�t be. It wouldn�t be. Not him.

But of course, yes, it was. Who else could it be?

And in that same second two thoughts hit : it can�t be and it must be, and both seemed true and both seemed false. And despite all this, I knew it was true. I knew it was a fact in a way in which no amount of truth, no amount of fact, no amount of detail could prove. In the same way that we know that love is true, and not a fact or a statement or a scientifically verified experiment, I knew, we all knew, that the body of a twenty something millionaire in the (now demolished) outhouse of a building in Seattle could only be one person.

Kurt Cobain.

I never knew Kurt. Never even saw him in the flesh : despite having tickets for a concert he was due to give some two and a half years before his death. I held the little yellow stub in my pocket for Nirvana at Leicester Polytechnic (a date that I think is written on the back of the UK 7� single of �Smells Like Teen Spirit�), for some �5.

But life changes around you. Plans change and alter. Nirvana�s booking fee quadrupuled after their appearance on The Word. Officially, Kurt had a sore throat. Unofficially, promoters could no longer afford the band. That is why I never saw Nirvana.

HEAVEN AND HELL

Nirvana. The notion of a spiritual perfection : a state of heaven and peace. Something that the band themselves never seemed to reach. Nirvana�s music always seemed to be mining a dark path, tormented by something, anything, that was imperfect with life. One could call them whiny crybaby�s. Alternately, one could look at them more charitably. Attempting to find someway through their lives, living in the richest country in the world, and yet, always being denied their own Nirvana, riddled with artistic problems, money problems, health problems, unable to experience the simple things we all strive for : some degree of security.

And by the time it came, it came at a price. A phone that always rang. Reporters camped outside the door. Kids offering you drugs and needles in public. An eye that always watches you. That�s not a life : that�s a gameshow that�s hijacked the real world. At this stage you must decide : cash and happiness. Each has its own weight, its own gravitas. One does not always equal the other.

Having been both in and out of relationships, having been both relatively affluent and desperately poor, I know that problems are never solved. One set of problems merely becomes replaced by another set of issues. And whilst that may sound flippant (after all, one might think trading the problem of �How do I pay the telephone bill?� against �How do I spend all my money?� is a bit flippant) it isn�t anything like that. Of course, you could claim that this is Paradise Syndrome : caused by Dave Stewart having millions of pounds, everything and everyone he ever wanted, and still being unhappy : sometimes you chase things, sometimes you chase a state : affluence, or marriage, in the belief that it will strike out the parts of your life you are unhappy with, but sadly this does not happen that way. One set of problems fades with a change of status, another set arrives.

With Kurt he was faced with being scrutinised every second of the rest of his life. Someone was always thinking, talking, writing, watching him. There was no such thing as peace. No moment alone. And, with his wife (who apparently called him a �dickless loser� in public), and his child (who he patently adored) were there in the moments of solitude. There was nowhere Kurt could go where he would be, for the rest of his life, That Guy From Nirvana.

An impossible situation. And in that moment that I heard everything changed. Suddenly. In the blink of an eye what I believed I no longer believed. What I thought I knew I no longer knew. And all things had changed. Even simple things, the way things had always been. They no longer were.

Our poster boy for misery had become our Christ. Kurt died for you. And in the midst of all this mythologizing, all this rampant idolisation everyone seemed to forget one thing.

IN UTEREO, IN BLOOM, IN MEMORIAM

The music. Simple, almost childlike guitar, bass, and drums wrapped in some primal, animal scream. And in a second it washed away, near instantly, the now redundant Old Wave of bombast. Of empty, vast, sincere rock, and stewped, idiotic party metal. No longer were we to party all night and rock n roll every day, no longer were we to chase a slice of Cherry Pie to Paradise City, with love like Bad Medicine and someone talking dirty to me. All those things were washed away in the tide.

Sometimes it�s easy to forget all that in all the bullshit. If you ever need to remember why Kurt Cobain is still on the cover of the NME, still adorns bootleg T-Shirts, still gets scribbled on CDR cases, the you only need to go back to the source.

Stick on a CD called Nevermind�. Go for the first song � �Smells Like Teen Spirit� (or, �Odour Adolescente� as it is known in Spain). You will become a believer again. And worship at the altar of Rock.

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