Yeah I will do Foo eventually, they have enough alone to make for a decent chat.

Assembling behind Face as a Pearl Jam man, do love me some anthemic rock.

For Nirvana it's All Apologies way out in front, with MTV Unplugged always worth a mention when discussing greatest live albums. It's so good.

Their Unplugged is quality too.

I could talk all night about my favourite Nirvana tunes. But I'll go with On a Plain, just because it's fucking awesome.

Loved Nirvana Unplugged rendition of The Man Who Sold The World.

I love so many of their tunes. Lithium, Come As You Are, Heart Shaped Box, About A Girl, All Apologies. What a band. But my vote goes to...

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Way too iconic to ignore.

Aneurysm.

What a band and what a voice. Frances Farmer, Territorial Pissings (Jonathan Ross show live version is immense), Heart Shaped Box, Lithium, Negative Creep, Dumb (I thought he sang out to 'African Doll' when I was young) All Apologies plus as Elf says one of the best covers ever in the Man Who Sold the World.
But all the right people are right with Aneurysm

Drain You for me, in terms of their own songs.



For covers, it has to be Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Don't like Nirvana, but I do like Come As You Are.

Even if it was done better by Ghost of the Robot.

Best Nirvana is a tough one for me. My favourites aren’t their ‘best’.

I want to say Negative Creep. I sort-of want to say Territorial Pissings. Maybe even Molly’s Lips. I suppose that shows I have some internalised anger, or something.

My favourites are all LOUD. Whereas Nirvana were all about the dynamic. The tension between loud and quiet. Rage and tenderness.

They made as much of All Apologies as they did the punk fury of my above favourites, after all.

Best Nirvana has to be a song with both sides of the coin, I think.

Polly, Lithium, Heart-shaped Box, etc. But it’s going to have to be Smells Like Teen Spirit. Feels like this is a one of those contests where picking anything but is just being a poseur.

I remember the first time I heard Teen Spirit. In the car with my Dad, listening to the top 40 on Radio One. Straight in at number one, it’s Nirvana. And it sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard. I couldn’t even parse it as music. It was just sound. Big sound, small sound, subtle then screaming. I didn’t understand it. But I wanted to hear it again, immediately. I was hooked.

Also, to sound even more like an old man, I think I like lithium because I can understand the fucking lyrics.

In hindsight, while not my favourite - it's hard to think beyond Teen Spirit. It has such a place in pop culture. I think everyone knew it when it broke big and not many songs genuinely can fall into that category. I thnk I read somewhere that it wasnt even meant to be the first single, imagine not just Nirvana or the world if it hadnt been the first single. 

We might have gotten Chinese Democracy with the original line-up.

I think I can say with some degree of accuracy, I'd be a very different person without it, even though it wasn't a favourtie (still a great track but never grabbed me) Without it, many of the bands I know and love from the grunge scene probably wouldnt have happened or at least been given the exposure to get to me at that point in my life.

When I started dabbling with expensive headphones/DACs/amps/lossless audio etc I found the heavy hit drums into grunge plunge at the start of Teen Spirit to be immensely satisfying in terms of justifying my latest fad.

I’ve lost my copy of Everett True’s (really bloody good) biography of Nirvana, which is doubly annoying because ET signed it for me. His scrawled comment was “Nirvana were a band from Olympia” which I think he meant as a truth that skewers the ‘grunge/Seattle’ hegemony. It wasn’t true though, really. They came from Aberdeen, WA – a dirt-track small town in the middle of nowhere – but they were forged in the spirit of Olympia and riot grrrl. “Nirvana were a band from Olympia” is a lie that feels true. Maybe even should be true.