End of Fashion frontman pays tribute to his music heroes on 30th anniversary of Nirvana Unplugged

In terms of live concert recordings, few are more iconic than MTV’s Nirvana Unplugged in New York.

“Good evening,” the band’s frontman Kurt Cobain growls into the microphone at the start of the show. “This is off our first record, not many people know it,” before launching into About A Girl.

It was November 1993, Cobain passed away in April the following year and the recording was released seven months later.

The cultural impact of that 66 minutes of music can barely be understated. Grunge was at its peak and Nirvana were the most influential band on the planet. Cobain’s premature passing meant the work he left acquired an almost mythical status.

It was also a time before instant downloads and streaming services. Australian fans might have read about the concert, but they had to wait until it was aired on Australian TV to see it. If they missed viewing it when it was aired, they would have to hope a friend recorded it on a VHS tape. All of which simply added to the show’s mystique. For a teenage Justin Burford, the ARIA award-winning musician and frontman of Perth rock group End of Fashion, it was a defining moment in his musical development.

“We just don’t live in the same landscape today. I grew up in a time pre-internet and you’d have to wait,” Burford says. “I was aware that they had recorded that broadcast, it had been broadcast already in the United States, I set up a timer and taped it off a Rage special on the ABC, it was on really late.”

Burford rushed home from school to watch the recording, soaking in every moment of the genre-defining concert.

“I’m getting goosebumps right now remembering it,” he says. “(Nirvana) completely defined a generation.”

Now, Burford is marking the 30-year anniversary of Nirvana Unplugged with a staging of his Nirvana tribute show, Come As You Are — Unplugged & Beyond, a concert paying tribute to that culture-defining night of music.

“I’ve tried to get the feeling across to the audience of what it might actually have been like to have been there in November 1993 at Sony Studios in New York,” Burford says of the concert which he has performed twice before, himself in the leading role of Kurt Cobain. He says audiences are more than willing to buy into the fantasy they have stepped back in time.

“There’s these moments, especially towards the end, where Kurt starts speaking to the audience ‘Any requests?’ and I wasn’t sure how engaged and how responsive the audience was going to be,” Burford says. “So I actually had it written in the script that the band members would throw out the same suggestions that the audience members did in the original broadcast. But I told the band beforehand, ‘if you start hearing shouts from the crowd, you don’t need to say your lines’. And, oh yeah, the audience knew what to do.”

Burford says Nirvana was so influential because they were in the “right place at the right time” but he also credits the punk ethos they brought to the mainstream for inspiring a generation of future musicians.

“(Cobain) came along at a time and in a place where society was ready for it,” Burford says. “It was so authentic, so real, but there was some depth and sophistication. The music itself was really heavy yet accessible. You could pick up a guitar and play Smells Like Teen Spirit at your first guitar lesson.

“Before that, if you wanted to sound like any of your rock icons at the time you’d need a studio and a producer and a record contact. But Nirvana comes along and it’s ‘No, no. You can just do this in your garage with a couple of mates and a few power chords and you can call yourself a musician’.”

Burford has pulled together something of a Perth supergroup for the show.

“We have Salv Di Criscito as Dave Grohl … we’re good friends now … a few people (said) that he would be perfect for the job and it turns out he fronts a Foo Fighters tribute band,” Burford says.

“I’ve got Hugh Jennings as my Krist, because he’s a multi-instumentalist, he’s tall, brunette, he can play the bass but he can also play the piano accordion which is very handy for this show.”

The core of the band are joined by Anna Sarcich on cello, Aiden Gordon on guitar and brothers Luke and Ryan Dux from Perth blues rock band The Floors. They are representing another pair of brothers, Cris and Curt Kirkwood from the Meat Puppets, who played at the original concert.

Burford says each time they have staged the show the audience is filled not only with people who grew up in the 90s listening to Nirvana, but their children who have discovered the band through their parents.

“I got a lot of feedback online after we did it last time that the kids loved it and they went back and watched the original broadcast again and listened to the album and it just brought back all of these memories. And that’s great. It’s perfect.”

Come As You Are - Unplugged and Beyond is at the Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley on April 4. Tickets from Ticketek.