Four early Nirvana demo tapes have surfaced online.
They were posted on YouTube by a musician who stated he had received them by Kurt Cobain.
The raw audio track was uploaded by John Purkey, a musician from Washington and it also covers ‘Bleach’ demos that were presumably recorded during Nirvana’s first ever session at Seattle’s Reciprocal Studios back in 1988.
The recording dates back to before the arrival of Chad Channing, the first Nirvana drummer, and features The Melvins’ Dale Crover who eventually recorded the drums for Nirvana’s debut album.
The second tape features ‘Nevermind’ demos which were recorded in the 1990s with Chad Channing, before Dave Grohl joined in.
In a video, Purkey says that he developed a close relationship with Nirvana after watching them play in Washington.
He stated that he had stashed the cassettes away in a metal box, and then decided to sell two of them after a cassette was stolen from a friend’s car.
A previously unreleased recording of a Nirvana acoustic gig from 1991 was discovered and shared online in December 2017. The performance took place at Edinburgh’s Southern Bar, with Cobain and Grohl announced as Very Special Guests at a fundraising event together with local band Joyriders.
The gig raised money for the city’s Royal Hospital for Sick Children.
Article by Valentina Guidi.
He discovered the gem when he was 12 years old and still has it now, claiming it to be why he fell in love with music. He likes to play disc golf when he's not writing about music. He is a one-of-a-kind individual who is always the first to bust out his air guitar on the dance-floor.