The artist Noel Gallagher called the “perfect cross between Lennon and McCartney”
Any great rock band thrives off having a perfect balance between members. No matter how much one person could claim to be the leader, they are only as good as the people who surround them, and half the time, they have to lean on the backing band to help flesh out any of the arrangements they had in their head. While The Beatles had John Lennon and Paul McCartney bouncing ideas off each other 24/7, Noel Gallagher thought that everything great about the songwriting duo could be summed up in two words: Kurt Cobain.
But at the height of grunge, many of Seattle’s biggest acts were far too busy rebelling against classic rock to claim to be Beatles fans. Those kinds of acts were reserved for their parents’ generation, and once punk swooped in, it was much more interesting trying to make something sound deliberately uncommercial so you wouldn’t come off like a poser or, at worst, a hair-metal wannabe.
That didn’t really apply to Cobain. Outside of his average diet of underground acts like Flipper, Cobain was interested in all kinds of pop melodies, shouting his praise to everyone from REM to the more twee 1970s pop like ‘Seasons in the Sun’. Even by his snobby metric, though, The Beatles stood alone in their greatness.
If anything, the reason why Nevermind sounds the way it does today is because of Cobain’s admiration for John Lennon. He had already been heard playing the tune ‘Julia’ in between takes, and when he pushed back on double-tracking his vocals, producer Butch Vig twisted his arm by saying that doing so was Lennon’s signature sound.
Cobain had melodies that sounded slightly Beatle-esque, but when Noel hit the big time after the grunge icon’s demise, he wasn’t shy about it in the slightest. Nearly every tune could have qualified for a Beatles lawsuit, and even if it wasn’t particularly close, it was hard to get around his brother Liam doing a spot-on interpretation of Lennon’s signature whine whenever he got onstage.
Despite sounding like they came directly out of 1967, Noel still had a lot of respect for Cobain’s style of writing, saying, “The only person I have any respect for as a songwriter over the last ten years is Kurt Cobain. He was the perfect cross between Lennon and McCartney. He belted it out like Lennon, but his melodies were so Paul McCartney. They were dead bouncy up and down-jolly melodies-but he was a miserable fuck at the same time.”
That influence might have been hidden behind walls of fuzzy guitars, but if you were to play any of Nirvana’s tunes on acoustic instruments, the Beatles comparisons are as clear as day. Cobain certainly knew how to scream like Lennon could on tracks like ‘Territorial Pissings’, but putting together a melody as infectious as ‘All Apologies’ is clearly the work of someone who has listened to ‘And I Love Her’ and ‘Hey Jude’ more than a few times.
While Cobain wasn’t long for this world once Nirvana hit it big, the inspiration he gave Noel and countless others reminded everyone about the importance of songwriting. Any band can have a great look or massive walls of guitars, but if the song isn’t there, it’s better to go back to square one and try again.
