’90s grunge rockers Nirvana played a rather famous show at the Reading Festival in the U.K. on August 30, 1992. The band played Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” in cheeky response to many claims that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a rip-off of the ’70s rock classic and the concert is widely considered to be one of their best.
The show was recorded and meant for release, but, for whatever reason –chief one likely being Kurt Cobain’s death — the DVD never officially came out, but has been widely bootlegged over the years.
If you feel like purchasing what is presumably (hopefully) a better quality copy, Universal is releasing the official “Live At Reading” DVD which features restored video footage, and will be remastered in 5:1 surround sound. It will also feature as-yet unrevealed bonus features, according to NME, and arrive in November. No U.S. release date is set yet, but apparently a sort of official bootleg is also coming out around the same time which probably doesn’t please Universal.
Nirvana played Reading at the height of their notoriety and Kurt Cobain infamously took the stage in a wheelchair and dressed in a white hospital gown to self-deprecatingly jab at/fuel the rumors about his health, his heroin issues and that he was near death (not-so ironically he would commit suicide seven months later).
Much of the Reading performance is already on YouTube. Nirvana played Reading 12 days after Francis Bean Cobain was born and Cobain addressed this to the audience, which is in in the beginning preamble to the “All Apologies” clip below. “There’s been a lot of extreme things written about us and especially my wife, and she thinks everyone hates her now, and this is being recorded so why don’t you give her a message and say, ‘Courtney, we love you.’ ” Inexplicably (or because they want the song to start already), the British audience is kind enough to indulge him.
New Yorker’s should note, the excellent Sonic Youth-led documentary, “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” which is no longer readily available on DVD (if it ever was), (and which prominently features candid and happy halcyon-days footage of Nirvana and related bands like Dinosaur Jr., Ramones, Gumball, and Babes in Toyland) is playing at the Walter Reade theater on Monday, May 4. If this music was remotely important to you at the time and you never saw it, we highly encourage you to go. It was definitely one of the better “Grunge” documentaries of the time, if not the best one.