Death and glory

'Thank you all from the pit of my burning nauseous stomach' '

Extract from Kurt Cobain's suicide note

For most of his short adult life, Kurt Cobain suffered from acute stomach pains. In his journal, he detailed them obsessively, described his various failed treatments and mocked the condition that baffled doctors and specialists alike. 'Fuck hit records,' he once wrote, 'just let me have my own unexplainable rare stomach disease named after me.'

His gut problems were exacerbated by his tour diet which, as stipulated in his band Nirvana's rider, consisted of 'only Kraft macaroni and cheese'. He refused outright to 'eat anything green' and, before he turned to heroin, used painkillers washed down with something called Strawberry Quik to ease the pain. The stomach pains persisted, becoming more debilitating as his fame grew. 'They're good for my anger,' he once quipped, though it seems more likely that, like his bilious songs, they were simply another symptom of that same anger.

One specialist he saw concluded that Cobain's physical ill health was a reflection of his psychological state that he seemed to be suffering from a 'post-traumatic stress condition'. Cobain, as his voice attests, was the angriest of rock singers. Unlike the countless self-pitying plagiarists who have followed in his wake, his was not simply another all-American whine. It was something rawer and purer an anguished howl that seemed dredged up from the pit of his tormented stomach. At times, most notably on Nirvana's last studio album, In Utero , his music sounded wilfully oppressive, as if it could not contain, nor articulate, the extent of his pain. In this way, it echoed, and amplified his lyrics and, indeed, his blighted life. Kurt Cobain carried that weight, and then some.

A decade after his death , his howl of rage remains the template for most of the rock music that has followed in his wake. He may yet turn out to be the last of the great rock icons much as I admire Thom Yorke, and can't help but like Liam Gallagher, I can't imagine the same outbreak of collective mourning should either, God forbid, suddenly shuffle off this mortal coil. But the nature of Cobain's death - that messy suicide on 5 April 1994 - and the way in which it has helped shape his legacy provoke the most complex questions about what it takes to be an icon.

There are some who believe that rock music is the last repository of the Romantic ideal with its notion, best illustrated by Keats, who died at 25, that early death will enshrine a talent otherwise tarnished by age and decline. Others, including the shrill American academic Camille Paglia, also see, in rock's embrace of excess and transgression, the last gasp of Dionysian self-determination. This might all have been true in rock's early years, although even then, the deaths of Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix were as sordid and inevitable as their lives were extravagant and iconoclastic. It is most definitely not true of punk, the most energetic and yet the most nihilistic form of rock a subculture where the loser assumes the heroic role, and disaffection is not so much an excuse as an ideal.

IN THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN Slang, the word punk is defined as, among other things, 'a lackey, a worthless or inferior person, an outsider'. (It is also defined, interestingly, as 'a petty hoodlum one who thinks he wants to be a hoodlum but lacks real toughness and experience'.) Kurt Cobain's childhood in Aberdeen, Washington, was troubled going on traumatic: he was prescribed Ritalin for hyperactivity at the age of four his parents divorced when he was eight. As he was moved constantly between his father, his grandparents and various aunts and uncles, his hyperactivity was replaced by depression and withdrawal. 'I remember feeling ashamed all the time,' he said later. 'I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family.'

In 1979, aged 12, Cobain saw some photographs of the Sex Pistols in Creem maga zine. His empathy was instant. 'I wanted to be in a punk band,' he told an interviewer years later, 'before I had even heard any punk music.' By his early teens, that ambition had already congealed into something darker. At 14, he made a short Super 8 film, entitled Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide , in which he pretended to cut his wrists with the jagged edge of a soft drinks can, and writhed around in a pool of fake blood.

'I'm going to be a super star musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory ,' he once bragged to a school friend. It was typical teen braggadocio - the kind of thing any messed up adolescent in thrall to Iggy Pop or Sid Vicious might say. Except that, with hindsight, it signals a sense of inexorability that attended Cobain's short life and made his violent suicide all the more disturbing the feeling that he knew it was somehow inevitable.

The first part of his teenage boast came to pass just over a decade after the Sex Pistols' demise, when his group became the biggest rock band in America, and the most potent manifestation of the Pistols' punk legacy. In 1991, Nirvana released 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', a single that captured the tenor of disaffected teenage America as effortlessly as 'Pretty Vacant' had voiced the alienation of the British punk generation in the late Seventies. From that moment on, Kurt Cobain was not so much caught in the spotlight as freeze-framed as the clown prince of slackerdom.

Inevitably, Cobain's sudden - and unprecedented in punk terms - crossover success only accentuated his own anxieties, and the oppressiveness that had once been latent in his music suddenly became manifest. By the time the group had released their follow-up album to the globally successful Nevermind , 1993's In Utero , his anger and frustration had been turned inward once again. I cannot have been the only one who found the album too much to take in its entirety. But then his music was really meant for that supposedly lost younger generation of likeminded souls who, unlike Cobain, did not possess the energy, nor the inclination to express how or what they felt.

Cobain's voice, now more than ever, came from the gut the same gut that was now causing him to cough up blood in some breezeblock toilet in yet another Godforsaken middle-American arena. The same gut that, he claimed later, was only stilled and anaesthetised by heroin. Neither heroin, though, nor his marriage to Courtney Love, nor the birth of his beloved baby daughter, Frances Bean, could assuage his anger and self-hatred, his sense of worthlessness.

Even before his death , Nirvana fans were pointing the finger at Love, his partner in crime where heroin was concerned, and someone whose naked need for stardom seemed the antithesis of his neurotic resistance to the same. But Love was, whether the fans like it or not, the love of his life, and he was doing heroin, the other love of his life, before she happened on the scene. When their relationship faltered in a litany of petty violence, accidental overdoses, the whole sordid survival course that attends addiction, his use became reckless and determinedly self-destructive. He shot up the aptly named 'black tar' street heroin, increasingly in wilfully concentrated doses, and often sharing needles with other users.

Punk defined him to the extent that it never seems to have entered his admittedly drug-addled head, as Love said later, that he could simply have walked away retired or withdrawn from the music business. He had the wealth and support to do what Bob Dylan had done in 1966: retreat from the scene in order to heal himself physically and psychologically in order to reinvent himself without all that awful baggage. But strung out on another batch of the bad street heroin that all his friends thought would kill him, Cobain barricaded himself into the greenhouse of his Lake Washington house, put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

'Grown-ups have just got no intelligence at all. As long as you're a kid, you're aware and you know what's happening. I've got absolutely no interest in pleasing the gen eral public at all. I don't want to because I think that largely they're scum and they make me physically sick.'

Those are the words of John Simon Ritchie aka Sid Vicious, spoken in 1977, 18 months before his untimely, but just as predictable, death from a heroin overdose. It is grossly unfair, of course to compare Vicious to Cobain on any creative level the former was of spectacularly limited talent and, 25 years after his death , remains little more than a ghoulish footnote in rock history the latter was a supremely gifted catalyst whose guiding presence is still palpable in every strain of American rock today. But Vicious undoubtedly meant something to Cobain, both as a symbol and a kind of blighted role model.

The first time time Kurt Cobain set eyes on Courtney Love, he thought she 'looked like Nancy Spungen', Sid's girlfriend and, many would argue, nemesis. At the height of his fame, Kurt and Courtney would often check into hotels as 'Sid and Nancy' or sometimes 'Mr and Mrs Beverley', the surname of the Sex Pistol's mother. In the image of poor hapless Sid, first glimpsed at a formative age in those magazine photos, Cobain may have seen something of himself: his lack of self-worth, his alienation. Perhaps, too, in his short and tawdry life, Vicious also represented to Cobain some kind of punk ideal: sickness as an aesthetic, nihilism as a guiding principle.

'Sid was a guy who was always going to take it all the way,' says Jon Savage, author of the definitive book on punk, England's Dreaming , who met both Vicious and Cobain. 'That's why the American punks loved him. He fronted out that awful last Sex Pistols tour when Rotten went all weird and withdrawn. Whether he had talent or not, we will never know because he was operating most of the time under a hail of hard drugs, but he certainly had balls. He had attitude to burn, and that was all-important in punk.'

IN JULIEN TEMPLE'S DOCUMENTARY, The Filth and the Fury , that dogged slog through the American heartlands is captured in all its brutal detail, and it is clear that Vicious, rather than Rotten, has become the focus of the audience's acclaim and antagonism. Lost in an opiate haze, Vicious stands unflinching, sneer intact, before all the bile - and missiles - that the audience throw his way, more than once lacerating his naked torso with the bottles that smashed around him on the stage. As metaphors go, it is stark and unsettling: you could never hate me, he seems to be saying, as much as I hate myself.

That tour was Vicious's valedictory statement, the beginning of what would be, even by the standards of rock excess, a sad, sordid and sorry coda to the original punk era. It marked the final disintegration of the Sex Pistols, and with them, the formative ideals of the original punk movement. In the space of two years, idealism and empowerment had turned to cynicism and distrust. Rotten, the artful dodger, was sidelined, and Sid, the artless loser, was briefly thrust centre stage: a 21-year-old junkie who had turned nihilism into a mainstream attraction.

As with Cobain, no one could have predicted the endgame that began to be played out in the dingy confines of the Chelsea Hotel in New York on 12 October 1978, a night that would culminate in the death of Nancy Spungen - which may have been an accident or manslaughter or murder, but even Sid, in his opiate fog, wasn't sure which. He told the police the following day, 'I did it because I'm a dirty dog.' (Echoes here of James Cagney, the original celluloid punk, hard core to the point of nihilist in all those old Hollywood gangster flicks.) Vicious was subsequently charged with second-degree murder, and did time in Riker's Island, before being released on bail wrested from the coffers of a reluctant Virgin Records by his manager, Malcolm McLaren. Once free, Vicious immediately tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. In footage from the time, he looks utterly vacant, already dead inside. 'Where would you like to be?' asks an American TV interviewer. 'Under the ground,' he answers softly.

Following his suicide attempt, Vicious underwent a further psychiatric assessment, and a second detox programme. Four months later, though, having played a series of New York shows with a group who for a brief time were called, presumably with no irony intended, the Junkies, he attended a court hearing in which his bail was extended. In the company of various New York lowlifes, and his mother Anne Beverley, who had bought him a bag of heroin supposedly to deter him from trying to score on the street, Vicious celebrated in predictable style. He died later in his sleep, on 2 February 1979, from a massive overdose.

ROCK'S HISTORY IS LITTERED WITH stupid and unnecessary, and mostly drug-fuelled, deaths : Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons alongside Morrison and Hendrix. There is something different, and altogether more depressing, though, about the deaths that occured in, and around, and after, punk. Johnny Thunders, an original New York punk with the New York Dolls in the early Seventies, killed himself with a heroin overdose. Ian Curtis was inspired to form Joy Division after seeing the Sex Pistols, and later hanged himself to the soundtrack of a record by Iggy Pop in his house in Macclesfield.

With Cobain, as with Vicious, punk, which had initially given voice to their disaffection, ultimately became a medium in which that disaffection could be indulged, then, when that was no longer enough, a means through which that disaffection could be played out, with only one result.

There is one element in Cobain's suicide note that has always intrigued me. 'I'm too sensitive,' he writes early on. 'I need to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasm I had as a child.' Then, later, 'Since the age of 7, I've become hateful towards all humans in general.' There is something chilling in that equating of childhood enthusiasm with numbness, and, by extension, with heroin use. And something even more chilling in his voicing of the outright misanthropy his songs always suggested.

This is punk nihilism laid bare all that self-loathing turned outwards into a general loathing of humanity. By accident or design it is an echo, too, of those earlier words of Sid Vicious expressing his visceral disgust with the 'grown-up' world.

Separated by 15 years in death , both men were products of single-parent households, various stepdads, a low sense of self-worth that celebrity magnified. 'All that baggage was there before the fame, though, before the heroin habits,' says Jon Savage. 'It was all there, and in place: bad aesthetics and disastrous backgrounds. Fame just exacerbated the inadequacy. It does not make any one feel better about themselves. It's not a cure for anything.'

This much we know, despite our celebrity-obsessed culture. Fame of the kind experienced by Cobain is disorientating and for a self-styled punk contradictory to the point of impossibility. 'The fact is I can't fool you,' wrote Cobain in that suidice note. 'The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it.'

This is punk credibility writ large, but that note is also melodramatic, self-pitying and enthused with that now familiar sense of worthlessness that heroin addiction has turned into terminal victimhood. It is easy to say that everyone failed Kurt Cobain - his friends, his family, his fellow musicians - that even punk rock, which gave every outsider a voice, eventually failed him. Ultimately though, Kurt Cobain failed himself. In mythologising his pitiful and horrific leave-taking, we fail him too we elevate the legend and look away from the young man dogged by clinical depression, unable to function in any responsible adult way, on the run from life itself.

Two decades after his friend and fellow Sex Pistol's death , John Lydon, the ultimate punk survivor, finally let his mask of disdain and disgust slip for a brief, telling moment in the most surprising and moving scene in The Filth & the Fury

'He died, for fuck sake,' a tearful Lydon says of Sid Vicious, though he could just as easily be referring to Kurt Cobain. 'I just wish I had talked to him more, told him what it was going to be like. The poor sod had no idea. He had no fucking idea.'

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