30 Years After His Death, BBC to Air Kurt Cobain Documentary

Thirty years after the death of Kurt Cobain, the BBC will air a documentary that it says will “demystify” the Generation X icon and grunge music legend. Moments That Shook the Music: Kurt Cobain, a feature-length documentary directed by John Osborne and produced by Touchdown Films, airs Saturday, April 13, on BBC iPlayer and BBC 2, as part of programming entirely dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Cobain’s death. The Nirvana frontman died on April 5, 1994, in what was ruled a suicide.

“This documentary aims to demystify that moment and tell the story in a direct and accurate way with footage shot by the people who were there,” said Osborne in an interview with the BBC. “Kurt Cobain was the reluctant voice of a generation and his death has left a huge void. The only way to make sense of what happened is to make a testimony that audiences won’t be able to stop watching.”

Moments That Shook Music: Kurt Cobain reconstructs in just under an hour the last days of the grunge icon and leader of Nirvana through never-before-seen footage, including some shot by fans who were in Seattle at the time and from news crews who were on site when Kurt Cobain’s body was found.

On the morning of April 8, 1994, after the electrician Gary Smith called 911, reporting he’d found a lifeless body at Cobain’s lavish Seattle mansion, a police officer arrived at the artist’s residence on Lake Washington Boulevard. He found the body in a room above the garage. The officer, Von Levandowsky, finds a wallet on the body and IDs him. In short order, the news goes wide: Kurt Cobain has died by suicide. It was a shocking end to one of the biggest names in music.

The BBC documentary features Smith’s reaction in accidentally discovering Cobain’s body while installing a security system in a nearby mansion. It outlines the police reports, the objects found at the scene — including the shotgun that Cobain apparently used to shoot himself, as well as the spent shell case, the ashtray full of cigarette butts and the cigar box filled with his kit for doing heroin. The images capture the chaos and confusion of the time, much of it shown via homemade videos shot by fans at the time. The most iconic footage is of an emotional Courtney Love reading her late husband’s last letter in front of a crowd of thousands at a vigil in Seattle and a moving interview with Cobain himself, made just months before he died.

“How much do you enjoy being a family man?” the journalist asks in the last interview. The artist replies: “It’s more important than anything else in the world. My music is what I do; my family is who I am. When everyone has forgotten Nirvana, and I’m on a nostalgia tour opening for the Temptations and the Four Tops, Frances will still be my daughter and Courtney will still be my wife. That matters more to me than anything else.”