But the greatest irony of all was that were inadvertently correct – something in their midst was breaking out. Just a month later, Nevermind hit the airwaves and the snotty support band Nirvana were very suddenly the Next Big Thing. Geffen hadn’t even had time to put a marketing plan in place before Nevermind eclipsed Sonic Youth-level sales and sold its first million. As the weeks rolled into 1992 it knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts. The big rock brands – Guns’n’Roses, Def Leppard and all their carefully manicured and managed cousins – were left standing with hairspray dripping down their faces as grunge rose up from the gutters and swamped them all. Nirvana seemed fresh out of the basement, not a record company’s focus group. Songwriter Cobain rejected the macho, sexist posturing of rock’s mainstream, offering catchy hooks, obtuse lyrics of disaffection, and a made-for-the-times cynical media game, not seen since, well, Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols. Punk or not, the bollocks dropped off, and what was left was Nevermind.

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Where the hell did this come from? It was as if Nirvana had screamed in out of nowhere – which was a pretty good description of Aberdeen, Washington, from whence Nirvana hailed. You can read about Aberdeen online in the Encyclopedia of Forlorn Places, and in the 1990s it was in even worse shape. It was so insignificant, the music industry couldn’t even see it, so they just said Nirvana came from Seattle.

And into this world came Kurt and his buddy Krist, and the traditional changing roster of drummers that is the very soul of rock. Kurt, from a difficult upbringing, was an arty weirdo in a redneck backwater. He later described his hometown Aberdeen as being “like Twin Peaks without the excitement”. As a teen, he graffitied his town with slogans like “Abort Christ!” and made art from collages of diseases depicted in medical journals, mixing in his own blood or semen for those just-so highlights. And he was a serious music nerd, spiking his love of old and new punk rock with great pop music like The Beatles and, um, The Knack. He decided early that music would be it for him and he practised like hell to make it happen. Nirvana’s early live shows were primal, with band and audiences alike throwing themselves around. Krist, the bass-playing beserker, would inevitably get drunk, smear things on himself and trash the joint. They were dirt-poor. Their first record, Bleach, cost $600 and the band’s short-lived second guitarist had to stump up the cash. Kurt had bought a 2nd-hand car, a 1963 Plymouth Valiant, for about the same money, and when he returned from playing festivals to 70,000 people in Europe with Sonic Youth, he had to sleep in the car as he’d been evicted from his apartment. Yet Nirvana would often end gigs by smashing instruments they could barely afford, only to have to patch them together again for another night. It was catharsis but also showmanship – they pre-broke some of their amps so they could be smashed apart and repaired more easily, like velcroed strippers’ costumes.