![\"Dave](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Dave-Grohl-Kurt-Cobain-Split-Far-Out-Magazine1-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Roger Woolman \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n
Fri 17 October 2025 23:30, UK <\/p>\n
\u201cLook at a band like Nirvana<\/a>,\u201d Bruce Springsteen once said. \u201cThat\u2019s a band that reset the rules of the game. They changed everything, they opened a vein of freedom that didn\u2019t exist previously.\u201d<\/p>\n Spilling out from the rain-slicked streets of Seattle, the grunge group grabbed youth culture by the lapels and shook it like a flatpack wardrobe on the San Andreas faultline. Kurt Cobain had a voice that could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces. Dave Grohl had a rhythm that could start a party in an empty house. And together, with Krist Novoselic, they wrote tunes that rewired the circuitry of modern pop.<\/p>\n As Springsteen continued regarding their raucous influence in his remarks to Guitar World<\/a> in 1995, \u201cThe singer did something very similar to what Dylan did in the \u201960s, which was to sound different and get on the radio. Your guitarist could sound different and get heard. So there are a lot of very fundamental rules that they reset, and that type of band is very few and far between.\u201d<\/p>\n That sense of inspiration and seizing the zeitgeist is perhaps what crowned them as manna from heaven in a wayward age more than anything else, because musically, they\u2019d be the first to tell you that they were simply ripping off a great that had some slightly before them, and suffered from the artists\u2019s accountant\u2019s most dreaded adage: being too far ahead of their time.<\/p>\n As Sam Fogarino of Interpol once told Q Magazine in 2011, when declaring the Pixies the most influential band of the last 25 years: at first he \u201cfelt vile\u201d when he listened to their darkened sound, then he \u201cfelt violated\u201d, before arriving at the conclusion that they were \u201cthe most brilliant fucking thing since sliced bread\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n The guitarist, whose scything style is comparable to Joey Santiago\u2019s playing \u2013 if it\u2019s comparable to anyone\u2019s at all \u2013 proclaimed that the level of the Pixies\u2019 influence \u201chasn\u2019t changed because it\u2019s ageless music and that\u2019s a very rare thing to stumble upon.\u201d From the very get-go, before the rest of the world had recognised the magic of the Pixies, this same sentiment united Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain, and cemented the sound of Nirvana.<\/p>\n In both Grohl\u2019s ten favourite albums of all time list<\/a> and Cobain\u2019s hand-written list of the 11 records<\/a> he admired the most, Surfer Rosa sits pretty. It gave them a glimpse of the future, with Grohl commenting, \u201cIt was so necessary at that time for someone to incorporate elements of quirky, weird punk into sweet pop.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Pixies](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Pixies-Surfer-Rosa-1987-Far-Out-Magazine-1024x1024.jpg\")
<\/a>Pixies\u2019 debut album, Surfer Rosa, from 1988. (Credits: Album Cover)<\/p>\n