With today’s US release of the much-hyped documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, it has emerged that for $150 a night you can stay in the Nirvana frontman’s early 90s home - “You’ll be soaked in rock history,” claims the rental site ad. Cobain lived in this two-bedroom apartment in LA’s Fairfax district with wife Courtney Love when he was at both his commercial and creative peak – Smells Like Teen Spirit was getting constant airplay and he was writing songs that would later appear on In Utero (the lead single Heart-Shaped Box was allegedly written in the apartment’s bath). Yet the Cobain residence has been considerably smartened up since the chaotic Kurt and Courtney moved out (thankfully) and there’s nothing of the individual or his life to see. What would draw fans to shell out a not inconsiderable sum on a stay here is unclear and raises questions about fandom, the difference between religious and secular devotion and the rock pilgrimage.

Apparently the Cobains' former residence isn't exactly swamped with bookings

Places associated with rock stars have an enduring fascination. Rare scheduled visits to Jimi Hendrix’s Mayfair flat, now the offices of the Handel House museum but soon to be a museum in its own right, are always oversubscribed, while there’s considerable news coverage every time a Liverpool house associated with the Beatles comes on the market. The National Trust itself owns and operates the childhood homes of both Lennon and McCartney – “Imagine walking through the back door into the kitchen where John’s Aunt Mimi would have cooked him his tea,” enthuses the website.

Internationally, the list of rock pilgrimage locations is endless, from New York’s Chelsea Hotel and Dakota Building, sites of the deaths of Nancy Spungen and John Lennon, to Graceland and the shotgun shack in Tupelo, Mississippi where Elvis was born. There are also pilgrimages closer to home, including Canvey Island and Basildon the Essex home towns of 70s pub rockers par excellence Dr Feelgood, and 80s synth-poppers turned stadium-goths Depeche Mode. Two recent documentaries, Julien Temple’s Oil City Confidental and Jeremy Deller’s The Posters Came from the Walls (AKA Our Hobby is Depeche Mode) highlighted these much-maligned towns as the unlikely focus of attention from fans from across the world. An annual memorial walk around Canvey for Dr Feelgood’s much-missed frontman Lee Brilleaux has taken place for the last 21 years, and a Depeche Mode-themed festival, including a bus tour of the childhood homes of the band members, is now in its fifth year in Basildon. But despite a famous graffito on the Canvey seawall proclaiming “Canvey is England’s Lourdes”, it’s not clear if a fan’s visit to this Essex outpost can truly be likened to a Catholic’s journey to the ultimate Marian shrine.

The boundaries between the star and the religious icon have been played on in the religious allusions of mega-stars such as Prince and Madonna for decades. Even a cursory look at fan pilgrimages shows that these can be an important part of individuals’ inner lives. Some clues on whether secular and religious pilgrimages are meaningfully different might be offered by anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, who characterised pilgrimage as somewhere where geographical and social boundaries are transcended as the pilgrim moves from their everyday life to different social and spiritual worlds. The Turners put a particular emphasis on the opportunities pilgrimage offers for a transient experience of togetherness, terming this communitas. Crucially, the pilgrimages of musical fandom can offer this sense of belonging, the camaraderie between Finnish, Dutch, French, American and native fans on the annual Lee Brilleaux memorial walk being one example. Apparently the former Cobain residence isn’t exactly swamped with bookings – there’s nothing to participate in with other fans here, and perhaps it is only the communal act of “worship” that really allows the fan to express their devotion.

Categorising pilgrimages as either sacred or secular begins to seem unimportant if they all ultimately deal with individuals’ sense of self and their relationship to others, and we are missing something significant if these rock pilgrimages are simply dismissed as frivolous fun. Perhaps one man’s Canvey Island really can be another’s Lourdes.