Yesterday was the 10th Anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide... 10 years… wow... been thinking about that a lot. I was listening to the radio last night and it was full of dedications and people talking about what he meant to them. Made me think quite a bit about the passage of time ... not that I'm the hugest Nirvana fan … but because they have become such a major thing in our generation.

Nirvana are so important to me. I was kind of too young for the whole grunge thing but as a 10 years old all of the teenagers at church were really into it (ripped cardigans and Dr Martin boots) and I thought they were cool and really wanted to be like them. Craig Thompson and me used to go and steal his brothers 'Nevermind' when he was out and head bang to it in his lounge. Didn’t have the money to buy CD’s then but knew all the songs (though didn’t understand them).

They were the soundtrack to so much of my growing up especially as a younger teenager, hanging out at Ewan's and throwing ourselves around to 'Smells like'... That was 1995-6 - only a year or so after he died but it seemed like something that was already waaay in the past. 1999 was only fours years after that but the distance between then and 94 seemed like forever, yet now 99 feels only a few months removed from today... will that keep happening? Funny how time passes quicker as you get older... will it slow down?

I still really love Nirvana. There is just something so pure going on in the anger and violence of their sound – something really beautiful too – the cry for integrity and honesty. But I do shock myself thinking about the core of what was going on in all that, a core I tap into and occasionally revel in for a while. The hopelessness and the cynical and sardonic flavour that floods the whole thing- and the knowing where that led, and leads.

Seeing what a massive influence they still are – the fact that there are still thousands of teenagers are still wearing Nirvana tops (some with portions of his suicide note on them) – it is both amazing and scary – amazing that someone actually managed to get to the heart of so much of what our generation feels like no one had before and that so many still find empathy there - and I'm amazed at someone who wouldn’t settle for pretending everything was ok. Scary though that someone who ended up destroying himself is the leading icon for our generation. There is a romanticism that agrees with the claim ‘it’s better to burn out than fade away’ but both go nowhere and offer no answers. It’s a tragedy that this guy never got to shine but then it’s a tragedy that is repeated everyday with thousands of less famous people – all of whom could have shone brightly.

Just some thoughts… I don’t really have anything to say – just that this is marked a point of distance from something that really impinged on my life and I felt I shouldn’t let it go by with out writing something up here.