Steve Albini reveals Nirvana ‘In Utero’ sessions were booked in secret
Steve Albini has revealed that he booked the sessions for In Utero, the final studio album from grunge rockers Nirvana, in secret.
Albini, who produced the sessions but was credited solely as an engineer as per his usual request, told NME that he took it upon himself to keep the band shielded from their massive fame. “There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the sessions,” the producer claims. “I mean, apart from them being extremely famous. I had to do everything I could to keep it under wraps to make sure that we didn’t get overrun by fans and the added nonsense. That was the only thing that was weird about it.”
Albini chose to fly the band out to Minnesota and record the album at Pachyderm Recording Studio. “It was far enough away from anybody that the band knew socially, and we wouldn’t have a fucking TV crew out front every day or any drug dealers trying to do business,” Albini explained. “We had to make sure that word didn’t get out.”
“I didn’t really want to trust [the studio] with the secret, so I booked the studio on my account under the pseudonym the ‘Simon Ritchie Band,’ which was of course Sid Vicious’ real name,” Albini added. “Until the flight cases started arriving from the cartage company the day before we started, nobody knew… even the people who owned the studio didn’t know that Nirvana was going to be recording there.”
Albini also commented on whether he felt stifled by his association with In Utero.“It’s totally normal, it’s perfectly reasonable,” he said. “If you had never heard of me before and someone is trying to introduce me to you, they are going to name the famous records that I worked on – and In Utero is the most famous.”
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