Kurt Cobain. 52 today. If only.

Kurt Cobain would have been 52 today. What could have been eh?

I remember the day the news broke vividly. The 8th of April 1994. The first day of our Junior cert mock exams. We turned up at school and noticed people were crying in the social area. My first thought was "Jesus lads, it's only the mocks" but soon enough it became obvious something was wrong. I noticed a friend of mine, Gerard Carey, had tears in his eyes. Then the news came, Kurt Cobain had taken his own life at the age of 27. It was a stunner, the first time someone who's art had had an influence on me and my friends had died.

I was a johnny come lately fan with Nirvana. The first song I'd heard and loved was Serve The Servants from In Utero. I'd only gotten Nevermind the year before and I was devouring their music. It was the first time I'd ever loved a band. You never care more about music than when you're 14 years old. Every new song you hear feels like discovering buried treasure. Then all of a sudden it was over. Kurt Cobain was gone. Nirvana were no more. And none of us ever got to see them play. It wasn't fair.

None of us had MTV at home so we piled into Supermacs after school for the next few days to watch the news footage, back in the time when MTV was actually about music. Kurt Loder must have worked 24 hr shifts that week. News reports poured in from Seattle. Fans holding vigils all across America. Fans going haywire to the sounds of Nirvana while dancing around in massive fountains. Courtney Love reading his suicide note out to them all, the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away." (No, it isn't) 25 years ago and it's all still imprinted on my brain.

I always wondered what could have been if depression and substance abuse hadn't taken him. What kind of fantastic music could we have gotten? There were rumours of collaborations with REM's Michael Stipe. Imagine how well they would have worked together. Two kindred spirits pumping out the tunes. Or maybe he might have just packed it all in and retired happy and became a mystical recluse you'd hear rumours about everynow and then. Anything would have been better than the truth of it. The brutal truth.

We miss ya brother.