An indie awards evening, a stabbing in the back, and Kurt Cobain’s hair: The wild story of The Cribs in the 2000s
The 2000s might just be the last hedonistic era of rock and roll, a time retrospectively dubbed indie sleaze that had all the recklessness of the mythologised times gone by and a string of bands who were worshipped along with it. Quietly at the forefront of that movement, and still making music today, when others are not, was The Cribs.
In those days, the three brothers from Wakefield found themselves in the eye of the indie storm, rubbing shoulders with a string of bands who had all congregated in the capital, bouncing between the independent venues and pubs that played host to them. But more than any other band of those times, The Cribs engaged with the heroes who came before them and paved the way.
While they collaborated with Johnny Marr musically for three years between 2008 and 2011, it was the friendship they struck up with Courtney Love that made them realise this fever dream of stardom was actually true.
They bonded with the American icon through trauma. It came in 2005, when Ryan Jarman threw himself onto a packed table at the NME awards, a moment of unexplained madness that was fitting of the indie sleaze chaos. What was meant to make his industry friends laugh turned into a serious injury, with a shard of glass stabbing Jarman in the back, forcing him to be rushed to the hospital and very nearly ending his life.
The danger was sobering, but really, there was no one in the scene with a sound enough mind to comfort him through what was clearly a dangerous period. No one in London, at least, was willing to stop the party, and so, he headed west, to the bizarrely safe realms of Love.
“At that time, we were in LA all the time because we had just signed to Warner, so they wanted us there because we signed out of the LA office,” Jarman told Far Out during The Cribs’ episode of The Existential Boozer. Through industry meets, Jarman had met Love a handful of times and in the Wakefield musician, she saw something of a kindred spirit. Naturally, Jarman couldn’t believe it.
“Whenever I was in LA, I would be living with Courtney Love at her house. When I was a kid, the idea that that’s where I would stay in LA? I wouldn’t have really believed it. So I used to stay with her a lot”. But in a bid to heal him from his self-inflicted stab wounds, Love offered to give Jarman more than just a cup of tea and a warm blanket, instead offering him a token that was supposed to remind him what happened when you flew too close to the sun.
He explained, “After that NME awards incident, she gave me a lock of Kurt Cobain’s hair. So I have a lock of Kurt Cobain’s hair in a little drug baggie, because I had this incident, and she said, ‘This is what happens when you die young’. I mean, that’s what she said to me when she gave it to me, which I thought was a cool gesture.”
The gift must have worked, because Jarman and The Cribs cut a much calmer figure when we met with them in ‘25. More reflective, the band were entirely unfazed about the glamour of those halcyon days and even recoiled at some of it, because now they were a band focused on the purity of music. A feeling that all started with a very famous lock of hair.
