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Actor and comedian Steve Coogan has shared his thoughts on the impact of alternative rock icons Nirvana and The Smiths.

During a recent interview with Absolute Radio, Coogan was asked what music from the ’90s he cherished most, and immediately responded by referencing Kurt Cobain’s band.

“When Nirvana first released Nevermind, that just redefined everything,” he says. “My musical taste tends to tap out like mid ’90s. I remember the impact that had, it sort of shook everything up, because things had become a little bit tired and sterile at that time.

“The last time something had shaken things up was like The Smiths, in the early ’80s,” Coogan continues. “And I was there for that. I was like 17, I went to see them in Manchester Free Trade Hall, and it was an exciting time to be around, because music is always interesting when no one knows where the hell it came from, and it just bursts onto the scene almost too soon to be co-opted by commerce.

“That happened with punk, and it happened with The Smiths, and happened with anything that’s unfiltered that hasn’t been created by marketing people,” he added. “But as soon as it gets established, the marketing people leap on it, as happened with the Oasis revival.”

In a development which took the world by surprise, Coogan and Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain’s wife, had a brief but passionate two week affair in 2005.

The pair apparently met when both were staying at a West Hollywood hotel. According to a report by UK tabloid newspaper News Of The World, Love later jokingly claimed that she was pregnant with Coogan’s baby, a suggestion that Coogan’s ‘people’ dismissed as “nonsense”.

Love and Coogan later fell out when Love implied that the comedian was partially responsible for fuelling their mutual friend’ Owen Wilson’s drug addiction.

“Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t comment but I care too much about Owen,” Courtney told celeb magazine US Weekly. “I went through it with Steve. I was just out of rehab and he was right there with the drugs. I tried to warn Owen. I tried to warn his friends. I hope from the bottom of my heart that Owen stays the hell away from that guy.”

A spokesman for Coogan responded saying, “These accusations are unfounded, unhelpful and hurtful.”

“Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had, multiply by 1000, and you’re still nowhere near it.”

These are the words which Ewan McGregor’s character Renton uses to explain the allure of heroin in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s acclaimed debut novel Trainspotting. Three years later, this writer asked former heroin addict Steven Tyler, Aerosmith‘s frontman, whether he could relate to this.

“Oh no, it’s much better than that,” Tyler answered sincerely, before delivering a crucially important addendum. “At first…”

Speaking to People magazine in 1988, Tyler confessed that his own past drug use involved taking “heroin, coke, Valium, anything that anyone came near with.”

“I have an addictive personality so I found certain drugs I loved and didn’t stop to the point of hurting my children, hurting my life, hurting my family, hurting my band,” he admitted on Fox News programme OBJECTified in 2018. “There was a point where I didn’t have a band and I didn’t care.”

As he watched Nirvana‘s meteoric rise in the early ’90s, Steven Tyler says he recognised the “pain” in Kurt Cobain’s eyes and later discovered that Nirvana’s frontman was using heroin. In a bid to try to help the younger musician avoid pitfalls of which he had personal experience, Aeromith’s frontman went as far as contacting Nirvana’s management in 1992 to enquire about getting Cobain’s phone number to set up a heart-to-heart chat with the vocalist/guitarist.

In Everybody Loves Our Town, the definitive oral history of grunge, Gold Mountain Entertainment’s Janet Billig, recalled, “Right when It started coming out that Kurt was doing drugs, I remember Steven Tyler called and wanted to help. I told Kurt, Holy shit, Steven Tyler called my office and he wants to help you. Can I give him your number?’ And he was like, ‘Steven Tyler got to be a junkie for 18 fuckin’ years. I’ve only been doing drugs for an hour’.”

Like many drug users, Cobain was somewhat in denial about the extent of his drug use.

“It’s not my fucking fault that anyone knows that I did heroin,” he told Details magazine writer Gavin Edwards in July 1993. “I’ve never talked about it. When I’m high, it’s really obvious. That’s why I’ve never gone out in public on it. I tried as hard as I could to keep it from everyone.

“I just hope to God nobody is influenced to do drugs because of me,” Cobain continued. “I definitely have a responsibility to talk negatively about heroin. It’s a really really evil drug—I think opiates are directly linked to Satan.”

The singer then told Edwards that he was no longer capable of using heroin, stating, “now if I take heroin it makes me vomit right away.” The very next week, on July 23, while in New York to play the Roseland Ballroom, the singer overdosed on ‘Bodybag’ heroin, and could have died but for the quick thinking of Nirvana’s UK press officer Anton Brookes, and Kurt and Courtney’s nanny, Michael ‘Cali’ DeWitt.

This near-death experience may have been on Cobain’s mind when he finally met Steven Tyler face-to-face the following month, backstage at Aerosmith’s August 12 show at Portland Memorial Coliseum, in the company of Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. Tyler took Cobain aside and spoke about 12-Step recovery groups

“He wasn’t preaching,” Novoselic remembered to writer Charles Cross, as related in definitive Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, “just talking about similar experiences he’d been through. He tried to give him encouragement.”

Within nine months, after discharging himself from a Los Angeles rehab facility, Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle. Interviewed on US TV show Turning Point ( see below) the week after Cobain’s body was found, Steven Tyler admitted, “I’m angry about Kurt. This guy didn’t have to die.”

With their fourth album, Destroyer, Kiss reached for the stars and created their masterpiece. Their first three studio records were simplistic rock’n’roll, banged out fast. For Destroyer, they hired Bob Ezrin, producer of Alice Cooper and Lou Reed.

As a result, Kiss sounded bigger, better and smarter. And they never sounded, bigger or smarter than on the juggernaut of an opening track that is Detroit Rock City. The song was partly inspired by the true story of a fan who was killed on the way to a Kiss gig, hence sound of a car radio and noise of smashing vehicles that bookended the song.

“On a previous tour, somebody had gotten hit by a car and killed outside the arena,” said Paul Stanley. “I remember thinking how weird it is that people can be on their way to something that’s really a party and a celebration of being alive, and die in the process of doing it. So that became the basis of the lyric.”

Ezrin set about encouraging Stanley to complete a lyric, and the end result was the story of a kid who hears about his own demise. And, no, despite what you may have read on the internet, Gene doesn’t take the part of the radio reporter at the start. That was Ezrin.

“We put his voice through a little radio and recorded it off the radio,” said engineer Corky Stasiak. “If you listen to this opening through headphones, you get this eerie feeling that this is all happening to you.”

Beyond the tragedy told in the lyrics, Detroit Rock City was also a salute to the city namechecked in the title. It was in Detroit, not their home town of New York, that Kiss found their biggest audience in their early days. In return, the band gave the Motor City its own rock anthem. “The first town that opened its arms and legs to us,” as Stanley quipped.

Urged on by Bob Ezrin, this was a fitting tribute – a 150mph rocket of a song, propelled by a bassline lifted from Curtis Mayfield’s blaxploitation classic Freddie’s Dead and featuring Stanley and Frehley’s iconic push-me-pull-you twin guitar solo. With its Spanish flamenco flavour and flair, the solo was an idea that came from Ezrin.

“I wrote the guitar solo on Detroit Rock City,” he said. “We got to the point that we had seen the introduction and met the characters, and it was time to set up a little tension with a moment of high drama. I felt like this was the sequence where he was driving and this would be the music that would go underneath it.

“I wrote that in my head; I don’t think I actually picked up an instrument. It’s not exactly original. It is pretty well an old-fashioned flamenco theme adapted to hard rock music. And it’s not because I’m some kind of musicology major. It was my take on Gladiator music.”

“Bob sang that solo section note for note, then asked Ace to learn it, including the harmony,” confirmed Paul, happy to give credit where it’s due. “The drumbeat, the bassline, it was really all Bob.”

Detroit Rock City opened both Destroyer and 1977’s Alive II with an almighty bang, and right until the end, no Kiss show was complete without it.

“This was a calling card of sorts for Kiss,” Stanley told Classic Rock. “I always believe that albums, particularly ours, should start with a song that captures the spirit of what you’re going to get on the rest of the album, and Detroit Rock City was very much that for Destroyer.”

The surprise for the band was that when radio stations got the single in July 1976, they flipped it over to play Peter Criss’s ballad Beth [the single’s B-side] and lo and behold, Kiss got an unexpected hit with a different song, one that climbed all the way to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became Kiss’s biggest commercial hit in the US.

More than two decades later, Detroit Rock City gave its name to a Gene Simmons-produced comedy film, which followed a group of 1970s teenagers attempting to crash a Kiss show. Described by the New York Times as a “weary promotional comedy”, it bombed at the box office but didn’t dampen Simmons’ rightful enthusiasm for the original song.

“It’s kind of a national anthem of rock if you will,” said Gene. “Sure, Rock ‘N’ Roll All Night is a celebration [it’s also the only song Kiss have performed more], but there’s something about Detroit Rock City that just says ‘Heartland.'”

A record collection belonging to English music executive Tony Calder is going under the hammer.

Calder, who promoted the first Beatles single, also co-managed the Rolling Stones with Andrew Loog Oldham, with whom he co-founded the UK’s first independent record label, Immediate, in 1965. He died in 2018.

Now his record collection is being auctioned off, and it includes plenty of rare and collectable pieces, including releases by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and The Who.

Pride of place goes to an original copy of Would You Believe, a 1968 album by songwriter Billy Nicholls. The album was commissioned by Immediate as a British response to the Beach Boys’ classic Pet Sounds, and featured all the members of the Small Faces alongside a coterie of familiar session men including Nicky Hopkins, John Paul Jones, Big Jim Sullivan, Jerry Shirley and Dave Greenslade.

Only 100 promotional-only copies of the album were ever pressed, and the album never made it to retail after Immediate went bust.

“People often cite records such as the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen on A&M Records among the rarest records in the world, and rightly so,” says Martin Hughes, vinyl specialist at Wessex Auction Rooms. “Yet in the last six years, I have personally handled and sold five copies of that record, including a world record example.

“I have never handled another copy of Billy Nicholls’ Would You Believe, and I know I never will again. For serious record collectors, opportunities to acquire a copy simply do not exist. This is one of those records that most collectors will only ever read about.

“There are certainly rarer one-off artefacts, acetates and unique recordings. But when collectors discuss records that were actually pressed and distributed, Billy Nicholls’ Would You Believe is always part of that conversation.”

Calder’s copy of Would You Believe is estimated to sell for between £6000-£8000. Another original copy of the album, which has been rereleased several times, was sold via Discogs for €5000 in 2023.

Other records in Calder’s collection include an acetate of the first side of the Rolling Stones’ 1966 live album Have You Seen Your Mother Live!, a previously undocumented press pack for the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album, and a 1970 “Spiral Vertigo” copy of the debut album by hard rock power trio May Blitz.

For those with regular-sized wallets, some bargains may be had, including a single lot containing 70 vinyl albums from artists including Buffalo Springfield, The Allman Brothers Band, Stephen Stills, Freddie Mercury, Eric Clapton, David Crosby, The Band, Mountain, Jefferson Starship, It’s A Beautiful Day, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Eagles, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Walker Brothers, Argent, Cat Stevens and more. The guide price? Just £100-£150.

Calder’s collection can be viewed at the EasyAuction website.