I am not, for a moment, suggesting that Cobain took the right course, or that I concur with the bravura sloganeering of his suicide note, “its better to burn out than to fade away”. Personally, I’m all for long fade outs, in music as in life. Cobain’s suicide was a terrible waste, that left human wreckage in its wake. But I wonder where he would stand in the pantheon had he soldiered on? As a lyricist, Cobain was impressionistic at best, fond of apparently meaningless non sequiturs. Who really knows what Smells Like Teen Spirit was about, with its incantation “A mulatto / An albino / A mosquito / My libido” evoking emotion through delivery rather than poetry? Could he possibly have matured to articulate the complexities of ageing, or would he, like so many musicians, be forever trapped in the image created by his first success, spinning around the same point in ever diminishing circles? As a musician, he was clearly already struggling with the tensions between the simplicity verging on banality that punk represented and the broader, singalong qualities that made Nirvana radio-friendly exponents of anthemic, commercial rock.