Kurt Cobain’s cardigan worn on MTV Unplugged sells for record £260,000

'Unwashed' item is most expensive sweater ever sold at auction

Sunday 27 October 2019 13:58

(David Willems Photography/PA Wire/YouTube/Nirvana)

The cardigan worn by Kurt Cobain during Nirvana‘s 1993 performance on MTV Unplugged has sold for a record price at auction.

The olive green garment fetched $334,000 (£260,388) during a two-day sale of rock memorabilia run by Julien’s Auctions at Hard Rock Cafe in New York.

The Manhattan brand acrylic, mohair and Lycra cardigan, which has reportedly never been washed, was described by the auction house as “one of the most famous sweaters in music history”.

It had been predicted to sell for between $200,000 (£163,000) and $300,000 (£245,000.)

The cardigan's sale price makes it the most expensive sweater to go under the hammer.

Other items sold at the auction included Cobain’s custom Fender guitar, which the late musician played during Nirvana’s 1993 In Utero tour.

The turquoise-bodied, left-handed guitar, which had been on display for several years at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio, sold for $340,000 (£265,066).

The guitar came accompanied by a letter written by Courtney Love, who married the Nirvana frontman in 1992, stating it was one of Cobain's favourite instruments.

The auction featured more than 700 items owned and used by musicians including Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Jimi Hendrix.

Kurt Cobain’s cardigan from Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York City (Getty Images)

(Getty)

Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance was filmed in New York City in November 1993.

The recording aired a year later, seven months after Cobain’s death at the age of 27, and was also released as an album.

The cardigan the musician wore during the performance is a size medium and was described on the Julien’s Auctions as featuring “a burn hole and discolouration near left pocket and discolouration on right pocket”.

10 best Nirvana songs

Show all 10

1/1010 best Nirvana songs

That “You Know You’re Right”, recorded in January 1994 and not released until 2002, was Kurt Cobain’s final song gives the track a morbid curiosity, and certainly it slips easily into the top end of their canon thanks to a tone of desolation that fits the narrative of a tortured superstar reaching the bottom of their downward spiral. In fact, the song is open to interpretation: a musical suicide note (“I will crawl away for good”) or a man making peace with his demons (“It’s so warm and calm inside/I no longer have to hide”). An enigma, to the end.

Nirvana’s quiet/loud homage to the Pixies often verged on Weird Al pastiche, but Nevermind’s second single “Come As You Are” is evidence that Kurt cribbed even further afield. The riff is such a close homage to Killing Joke’s “Eighties” there were rumours of a lawsuit, but Nirvana’s wasted, nihilistic reworking helped it embed itself into the Nineties.

A Nevermind album track that became a fan favourite, the frantic and askew “Drain You” was written on the spot at Sound Studios, a minor masterpiece of impetuosity. Some have suggested it’s a love song to Courtney Love, whom Kurt had met by this point and, judging by the chorus, they presumably bonded over a bizarre, ritualistic form of meat snogging.

Just as Kurt always envisaged himself as a major creative force in rock music, he also predicted the jock invasion that would result. Hence the sardonic satire of “In Bloom”, mocking the brainless mainstream rock fan who “likes all our pretty songs… but he don’t know what it means”, even in a track designed to court them. “In Bloom” was Nevermind’s prettiest song – the jocks rightly flocked.

Concocted in a practice session between Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and Mudhoney’s Dan Peters, the febrile clash of grunge noise and indie-pop melody that is “Sliver” is as Pixies as Nirvana ever got, and thus worked as a blueprint for their new Nevermind incarnation (as well as Green Day’s entire career). Kurt decided to release it as a non-album warm-up single in 1990, a kind of ultra-pop warning shot for the more hardcore fans of debut album Bleach: “I wanted to write the most ridiculous pop song I had ever written to prepare people for the next album.” Job done.

Even before “Sliver”, Kurt had given fans glimpses of his inner pop fan, the kid that had liked The Beatles and ABBA just as much as Black Flag. He was worried about putting what he called “a jangly REM type of pop song” onto Bleach but actually presented one of Nirvana’s most enduring tunes, a song about Kurt’s fractured relationship with then-girlfriend Tracy Marander written after a night spent listening to Meet The Beatles on repeat.

Intended as a gateway into the gnarled undergrowth of third album In Utero for the Nevermind fans that needed their hands held, “All Apologies” actually acted as a reward. Survive the savagery and the final track unfolded like a comforting old-school treat of just the right flavour: melody and meat, wit (“everyone is gay”) and weariness (“married, buried”) and a shrug of semi-atonement for putting more sensitive listeners through the grunge grinder for 40 minutes: “what else could I write?”

A song about children suffering with cancer, being trapped in an emotionally stifling relationship or Courtney Love’s vagina, depending on who you believe, “Heart-Shaped Box” introduced In Utero with a brooding blast of surrealist rock therapy as vital as anything on Nevermind and, with all its imagery of internal organs, cancer-eating and umbilical nooses, a whole lot more visceral.

Hardcore Cobainistas consider “Lithium” his definitive song – a quiet/loud ricochet of fragility and fury that takes in themes of schizophrenia, loneliness, self-hatred, lethargy and mildly scary sex. It actually concerns a man who turns to God when his girlfriend dies, but in splicing manic-depressive imagery with unstable, spasmodic dynamics, “Lithium” is quintessential Nirvana.

You know those hipper-than-thou lists that try to make out it’s shallow, ignorant and predictable to rate a band’s culture-defining behemoth of a track as their best? This isn’t that list. Even removed from its impact and overplay as grunge’s “Paradise City”, “…Teen Spirit” remains an elemental force of rock nature, the sound of 15 years of pent-up basement punk anger bursting onto MTV with a riff like a battle cry. Not bad for a song named after a deodorant.

To read The Independent's ranking Nirvana's 10 greatest songs, from “In Bloom” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, click here.

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