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CLASSIC ALBUM No.1

UNPLUGGED IN NEW YORK - NIRVANA

MTV has been blamed for a huge number of things in the past. The rise of the music video (still one of the most under used artistic media ever created), the blandness of mainstream music, identikit boy bands. In response, its defence would surely build its case around the successful and often illuminating Unplugged series of the 1990's, with Nirvana's now legendary show being exhibit A.   The performance delivered by the band in November 1993 represents a unique chapter in the history of one of the most famous musical acts ever. Sometimes it is the quiet moments that speak the loudest.

Recorded just five months before Cobain's suicide, the album will forever be shrouded in a tension, as if listening to it can give some sort of insight into the events that would follow. Let us leave this to one side. It is quite possible to read anything into a piece of music if you look hard enough, and it is time to consider this album in its own right.

Their choice of songs and musical guests were unpopular at the music channel's headquarters. The Meat Puppets joined the band to play three (get this) Meat Puppets songs, not Nirvana songs, and the band chose to cover an obscure David Bowie number, decisions designed to try and change the snobbier critics' view that Nirvana were merely nihilistic noise merchants. It worked - but only just. When Cobain announces that "he will screw this song up" before Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World it's because he had done exactly that every time they had tried it in rehearsal. Drummer Dave Grohl also had to adapt to playing incredibly quietly to make the whole thing work, but manages to provide an exemplary performance all the same. Just like their set at the Reading festival in 1992, where they blew the crowd away despite extreme touring fatigue, Unplugged is the sound of a band pulling something spectacular out of the bag.

What is possibly most striking about the album is how warm it often feels, with Nirvana's music revealed as markedly heartfelt when stripped of feedback and flange. The lyrics, though often desperate, feel more bearable in these surroundings. First album calling card About A Girl always was a pop tune really but the acoustic arrangement makes it all the more hum-able. The accordion flavoured Vaselines cover Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam is positively sunshiny and the three Meat Puppets songs reflect that band's psychedelic preoccupations. It is, however, the dark moments that punctuate the album's light that let us into Nirvana's musical soul. Cobain's solo performance of Pennyroyal Tea is so desperately sad that it is heart breaking, while his howling vocal on the Leadbelly cover Where Did You Sleep Last Night? that finishes the album is ferocious and primal but entirely genuine all at the same time. It is pure Nirvana, angry and troubled but drawing strength from the conviction of exclamation.

With that final compelling statement they are done, leaving behind an album rich in meaning. Like The Beatles' Abbey Road or Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Unplugged is a musical gift borne out of unlikely and disintegrating circumstances, an insightful and profound hour long performance that tells us everything about Nirvana's extraordinary music. Ladies and gentlemen, the defence rests.

martin cordiner