Frances Bean Cobain: 'I don't really like Nirvana that much. Sorry'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/09/frances-bean-cobain-i-dont-really-like-nirvana-that-much

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Frances Bean Cobain has admitted she isn’t a fan of her father’s music. Speaking to Rolling Stone ahead of the release of the documentary Cobain: Montage of Heck, she said: “I don’t really like Nirvana that much. Sorry, promotional people, Universal. I’m more into Mercury Rev, Oasis, Brian Jonestown Massacre. The grunge scene is not what I’m interested in.”

The documentary, directed by Brett Morgen, tells Kurt Cobain’s story largely through the use of archive material – notebooks, home movies, cassettes – kept in a storage locker and made available by Frances, who is credited as an executive producer.

At Q&A sessions hosted by the Guardian’s Michael Hann this week, Morgen said the key sequence in the film – in which we hear Cobain talking about his attempt to lose his virginity to a girl with special needs, then becoming disgusted with himself and being branded a “retard fucker” at school, causing him to attempt to take his own life – came from a tape no one had heard. He said none of Cobain’s family or close friends had known of the incident.

He also said the film had been made largely to give Frances a portrait of the father she never knew.

“It’s emotional journalism,” Frances told Rolling Stone. “It’s the closest thing to having Kurt tell his own story in his own words – by his own aesthetic, his own perception of the world. It paints a portrait of a man attempting to cope with being a human. When Brett and I first met, I was very specific about what I wanted to see, how I wanted Kurt to be represented. I told him, ‘I don’t want the mythology of Kurt or the romanticism.’”

Though the film portrays Cobain and his wife Courtney Love as doting parents – apart from one difficult sequence in which the young Frances gets her hair cut for the first time by Love while Cobain, holding his daughter, appears to be nodding out on heroin – Frances said the family dynamic was far from perfect. “I always knew that their relationship was toxic. And I don’t promote having a fix-it baby, which is what I was – to fix their problems.”