(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 16 January 2026 20:30, UK
Everybody has got to start somewhere, and there is an entire wasteland of doomed bands who have tried everything to get a foothold in the industry; even Nirvana, the harbingers of the grunge revolution and devoted critics of the mainstream music industry, had to grit their teeth and bear it when Sub Pop demanded that their first release be a cover version.
Cover songs have always been a rather divisive topic within the realm of punk rock, viewed by many spikey-haired elitists as being akin to ‘selling out’. After all, the attitude of punk has always been concerned with authenticity, and having some important message to spread, and how can you achieve such a feat while singing words somebody else has written? At the same time, though, everybody from The Clash to Dead Kennedys has recorded a cover song at some point in their existence, so perhaps it’s not such a big deal after all.
It was a big deal, however, in the mind of Kurt Cobain. Even in the days pre-Nirvana, the young musical obsessive was always a gifted songwriter, with an extensive arsenal of original compositions which perfectly captured the punk-infused spirit of the blossoming grunge scene.
Cobain’s songwriting, in fact, was the driving force behind the band’s rise to mainstream success during the early 1990s. Yet, despite all of that, the band’s first single back in 1988 was a cover of Shocking Blue’s hippie anthem, ‘Love Buzz’.
A staple of their early live shows, thanks to Krist Novoselic stumbling upon a battered LP from the Dutch outfit, Nirvana could quite easily have gotten away with presenting ‘Love Buzz’ as an original, as there can’t have been many others in the grunge scene who had ever heard it before. Nevertheless, when Jack Edino and Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop Records suggested it be the band’s first single, the band weren’t overly keen.
“Kurt wasn’t thrilled about doing a cover for Nirvana’s first release,” Edino confirmed, per Kerrang. Regardless of how much the band liked the track, a first single is make or break for a group like Nirvana, and to have that single revolve around somebody else’s work was understandably uncomfortable for Cobain, as a songwriter.
Nevertheless, Sub Pop eventually convinced them to go along and record ‘Love Buzz’, with Poneman recalling that the cover was “a great vehicle for the Nirvana sound, allowing them to demonstrate everything they did so well: melody, hooks.” Thankfully, for both parties, the risk seemed to pay off.
“The response was ecstatic,” Poneman shared. “Nirvana were such a powerful, out-of-nowhere phenomenon, and it started there.”
‘Love Buzz’ might not have been the song that Nirvana wanted to release as their debut, but it certainly worked out in their favour. Not only did they rise to the forefront of the Sub Pop-supported grunge scene in its wake, but it introduced the airwaves to their distinctive, infectious sound.
What’s more, it appears as though the song endeared Cobain and the group towards cover versions, and they went on to record versions of songs by everybody from David Bowie to The Vaselines. In the end, then, ‘Love Buzz’ was a pretty solid debut.
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