CRP's Blog

Londoner Nick Soulsby, editor of Cobain on Cobain: Interviews and Encounters is the author of I Found My Friends: The Oral History of Nirvana and Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide. He blogs about the band on his website, Nirvana Legacy. Here Nick shares his thoughts on Nirvana, compiling and editing an interview collection, and (of course) his literary leanings.

Cobain on Cobain contains nearly 70 interviews with the members of Nirvana. As a fan, were you surprised by anything you discovered or learned in the process of putting the book together?

Discovering that the full cassette of one of the band’s earliest interviews still existed was a real thrill—then seeing what a fun, goofy and ambitious young band it revealed. What I’ve enjoyed most is humanizing the band, seeing them as a bunch of young guys excited to be making music and interested in being seen, being heard, being talked about. It’s such a contrast to the tales that turn Nirvana, and the lives of the band members, into a soap opera of gloom, tragedy and sainthood. Seeing the band reacting to events in the actual moment, rather than just reminiscing, really brought the sense of place and time alive. Very early on I decided that I wanted to have each interviewer introduce their own interview—it really struck me how, without that context, without a living, breathing person explaining the occasion, the mood, the venue, the words just floated in blank space. There’s one interview in Australia where the band tease the interviewer—she says she cried when they left the room. That did alter my reading of the interview itself—one person’s gentle fun is another person’s bad day at the office sometimes.

You probably read a lot of music-related books. Is there a specific memoir or biography that sticks out?

England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage is, in my opinion, the perfect balance of the raw and the intellectual. There’s sometimes an unwillingness to discuss music intelligently—it’s as if people feel that tying it more deeply to philosophical, political or academic currents or theories they remove the energy and spontaneity. Savage manages to position the Sex Pistols and the wider punk movement in a wider context which only serves to make it seem a more exceptional moment in time, explores the Situationist theory underpinning much of the band’s image and approach which makes them seem even more scarily out-of-control, risk-taking and dangerous. There’s a real sense of conflict between what people wanted them to be, what they wanted to be and what they were. It’s a blast. David Tibet’s Sing Omega gathers together all is lyrics from the past 30 years and they’re truly breathtaking in their depth and complexity. Most songs, when written down, read like schoolyard nonsense; it’s very rare to be stunned by an artist’s lyrics on a page. Tibet’s words possess a majesty that startled me—the man is a genius, a complete original, possibly insane but luxuriantly so.

Did you listen to Nirvana while working on your Nirvana books? What did you listen to if you needed to take a break?

I’ve been listening to Nirvana since I was 13 years old—the music’s in my head anytime I wish so barring fresh rarities and bootlegs there wasn’t much urge for me to immerse myself in the songs. A standout for me, however, was when a guy called Adam Harding from the band Dumb Numbers shared his cover of the Nirvana song “Do Re Mi”—the only time I’ve ever been able to say the cover beats the original. Gorgeous. When it’s possible to get any music, anytime, anywhere, I admit it removes a lot of my anticipation—it’s just another product, audio junk food to be consumed and instantly forgotten. What’s meant something to me while working on the books was buying direct from artists in the knowledge that it’ll help them keep on creating, people being kind enough to send me their work, handing my money direct to labels whose ethos and approach I admire. As favourites, my best song of the last three years is “Dharma” by a band called Sleeper Cell from Tacoma, WA who I met when visiting the region; and I’ll buy anything the Trunk Records label put out. Around that I might indulge in Waka Flocka Flame, Sunn O))), William Basinski, Burial…

What’s the last book you canceled your plans to keep reading?

I’ve never cancelled but I’m regularly late. My worst incident recently was when I was invited for breakfast at a friend’s house, was reading on the train and was so engrossed that I stepped off the train at completely the wrong station. I walked all the way along the platform, up the stairs and out the exit—and only then stopped reading and looked around me. At this point it still needed me to walk all the way round the entire block before I realized I was in completely the wrong place and this wasn’t the right station. Which is particularly tragic given I’ve been visiting my friend there for about ten years. I turned up an hour and a half late for breakfast. The book was by Gruff Rhys of the band Super Furry Animals and has the phenomenal title American Interior: The Quixotic Journey of John Evans, His Search for a Lost Tribe and How, Fuelled by Fantasy and (Possibly) Booze, He Accidentally Annexed a Third of North America.

Literary confession time: What’s a book you’ve faked reading?

OK, between you and I, I’ve got all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time on my shelf, I made it as far as volume three 15 years ago and haven’t QUITE managed to find time to keep going…but I will…sometime. Soon. For sure. Yep. *Cough* I only made it through two pages of Pride and Prejudice before quitting. I compromised though and did read the zombie version and I’ll admit the best bits were clearly those cribbed from the original. Most British Victorian classics bore me witless. If it was a choice between doing all your housework for a month or attempting Thomas bloody Hardy again then I promise you that your house would sparkle and I’d hand-pick the lint from the carpets.

What’s your guilty pleasure/I-can’t-believe-I-read-that book?

On a winter weekend away—a comrade of mine bought his girlfriend a book and I borrowed it just intended to flip through it while we sat around the fire. Several hours—and many drinks—later, as people headed to bed,The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers had totally captured me. I didn’t return the book until we were all splitting up to head home. The next day at work I dashed out at lunchtime having already phoned the local bookstore to check they had a copy in. It’s the tale of a small blue bear born floating in a nut on the ocean. He’s found and raised by a ship of mini-pirates but they have to abandon him when he gets too big. The desert island turns out to be a bear-eating plant that’s just been fattening him on good food and, and…And…Well that would be telling. It’s madness—but well written and charming madness. I would never have picked it up in a million years so three cheers for accidental discoveries!

What five people—living, dead, fiction, nonfiction—would you have over for your dream dinner party?

To be honest, having lost my father, grandfather and godfather in the last two years if I had the power to raise the dead I’d see if they fancied popping over from the afterlife to catch up—I miss each of them for their wits, their wisdom and their story-telling. But if we’re talking well-known guests, then it’d be John Lydon of Public Image Limited and the Sex Pistols; British comedy character Rab C. Nesbitt; Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now; former British Prime Minister Robert Peel who repealed the corn laws in the 1830s to the benefit of the people of Britain but at the cost of destroying his own party for a generation and sacrificing his career; plus Muhammad Ali. Why? An iconoclast with a wicked wit, a Glaswegian alcoholic of both tenderness and vicious humour, a morose madman of poetic bent to keep things varied, a 19th Century aristocrat who invented the first British police force, then the greatest sportsman of the last century. Now THAT is a night worth catering for! Port all round gentlemen…

What are you reading now, and what’s next on your to-be-read pile?

It’s my favourite day of the month; the new episode of the satirical British comic VIZ came out today—it was first printed in a man’s shed in Northern England. On the train tomorrow morning I’ll delve into Music as Adventure: The Collected Writings of Wally Shoup—kindly sent to me by the saxophonist himself. Over the weekend it’s back to KL: A History of the Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann (it’s a read of depth, nuance, class, and quality, but the hardback is too big to ship to and from work every day). The next thing on the list is the new book by Adam Nevill, Lost Girl—he’s a master of the chiller genre. His Last Days was one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years.

Cobain on Cobain: Interviews and Encounters publishes on February 1, 2016. It will be available wherever books (and e-books) are sold.

To request a review copy, click here.