Cobain

During her three decades in Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon helped redefine the possibilities of rock & roll, from her unsettling voice and subway-rumble bass playing to the way she integrated her feminism and art-school background into the band’s lyrics and philosophy. Today, Gordon is pondering another road ahead as she prepares to tour behind her second post-Sonic Youth solo album, The Collective (out March 8 on Matador). “The band is really great,” she says, “but the hardest thing is all the decisions you have to make…

The official title of the opera making its U.S. premiere next week is Last Days. But Matt Copson, who co-directed it and also wrote its libretto, knows everyone will call it something else: the Kurt Cobain opera. “That’s fine,” Copson says, “I’m up for that. It’s not about that, of course. But that’s an interesting entryway into the whole thing.” In a somber reminder of how time flies, this April marks the 30th anniversary of Cobain’s death. It’s too soon to say how that day will be commemorated, although…

 Luke Morley releases his fantastic single ‘Killed by Cobain’ today along with a video. The single is  Luke’s first-person lived experience of how grunge scuppered Thunder’s original ambitions to break into the American market back in the early 1990s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCy-pDBw8t0“‘Killed by Cobain’ looks back at a strange time in my career when Thunder were on the brink of success in the USA,” Luke reflects, “We had a single in the Top 50; we’d sold 250,000 albums and we thought we were off to the races,…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeCourtney Love has claimed she was fired from Fight Club because she wouldn’t allow Brad Pitt to play her late husband, Kurt Cobain.Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter starred in David Fincher’s acclaimed cult thriller Fight Club (1999)During a recent episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast, Love alleged that she was originally cast to play Marla, a character eventually…

David Fincher’s Fight Club is a seminal film for movie lovers of a certain generation. If you were of a very impressionable age when Fincher’s adaptation came out in 1999, there’s a good chance you were influenced by Tyler Durden, the uber-cool anti-hero portrayed by Brad Pitt. As we pointed out in our rundown of behind-the-scenes Fight Club facts, several actresses were up for the unconventional love-interest role of Marla, who eventually was played by Helena Bonham Carter. Now Courtney Love explains that the role was…

The stage is dimly lit. Through the gloom, a figure emerges, muttering incomprehensibly. From a distance, the figure vaguely resembles Kurt Cobain – ragged clothes, dyed dirty-blond hair – a resemblance that increases when they climb a staircase into the stage’s representation of a battered-looking apartment, and put on what looks remarkably like a pair of the white-framed women’s sunglasses so associated with the late Nirvana frontman they’re now colloquially known as “Kurt shades”. A man enters stage right, noisily…