Celebrating the life and legacy of Kurt Cobain, End of Fashion’s Justin Burford will bring the late Nirvana frontman’s music to life on stage when Come As You Are: Unplugged and Beyond hits Astor Theatre this Friday, September 2. BOB GORDON spoke with Justin Burford to find out about emulating one of his inspirations and how it feels to be bringing the trio’s famous 1993 MTV Unplugged performance to life on stage.
Justin Burford’s performance history with the memory and legacy of Kurt Cobain goes back over a decade.
As things wrapped up for the Australian production of Rock Of Ages in 2011 he made a passing comment to one of the producers about a poster he saw for John Waters’ evocation of John Lennon in his Imagine shows. Remarking that he thought that a similar treatment would work for Kurt Cobain, Burford thought nothing more of it until a few months later when the producer called asking him if he was interested in doing a one-man-show at that year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
“I agreed and started deep-diving into the character and it quickly became apparent that I probably couldn’t do it quite as much justice as I would like, as a one-man-show. So I wrote what might have ended up being one of the loudest cabaret shows of all time, brought a full rock band over to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
The line-up included one-time End Of Fashion bandmate Hugh Jennings, “he’s still playing my Kris Novoselic to this day,” Burford notes. “We did that show a couple of times at different cabaret festivals and it always got a fairly positive response. In fact, I think we might have gotten five-star-reviews for that for that performance. I’ll have to go digging and find out.”
Burford kept the Kurt fire burning with album performances of Nevermind and In Utero at the Newport Record Club, before upping the ante and joining with the Perth Symphony Orchestra for two shows in 2017-18 reimagining Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance.
Since then Burford has focussed on his other musical passions, an ongoing celebration of Jim Morrison and The Doors and most notably recharging End Of Fashion, the band he led to the top of the Australian music charts in the 2000s. The pandemic, of course, has affected all his musical pursuits – as it has with many – but Burford has remained resolute with his creativity, and the connection to his Kurt Cobain MTV Unplugged portrayal never left.
“I’ve always wanted to do something that was a lot more faithful to the original,” he says. “The very original performance. I got to taste the theatrical setting with the symphony, but I thought it could work just as well, if not more effectively, for true fans and for nostalgia heads by putting something close to the original performance in a theatre setting. I thought it would do it an enormous justice.”
Recorded in November 1993, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance was ethereal on its own terms, but by the time it was released a year later the music world was still rocked by Cobain’s April 1994 suicide. The funereal presentation of stripped back songs and a stargazer-lilies-and-black-candle stage setting to suit imbued it with a rare solemnity. Burford has done a great deal of research into the performance, from initiation to completion, aftermath to influence.
“I think one of the details that is most eerie, I suppose, and important is when Kurt was making it first of all, he was really reluctant to do it. It was pretty sort of exposing… I think he felt pretty vulnerable and didn’t feel necessarily they were the right kind of band to be placed in that setting. But when he finally relented, it was with a list of demands for want of a slightly less, harsh word.
“It was absolutely his suggestion to have the lilies, the black candles and a chandelier. When he was talking to the production manager about it on the phone famously they responded with, ‘oh so you mean like a funeral?’ and he said, ‘yeah, like a funeral.’ So later on there’s a conspiracy. People like to look a little bit more into it than is necessarily there but really, I don’t. Some people have gone as far as to say that he knew he was going to kill himself and this was his suicide note. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think other members of the band have retrospectively agreed with that either.
“He was never known, necessarily, for his flamboyance, he liked and found a lot of beauty in the sombre. So I think, once he kind of made peace with the practicalities of putting one of the loudest grunge bands in the world in an Unplugged setting, he sort of had to figure out a way of making it comfortable and getting across the character that he felt was appropriate.”
Also featured delicately in Come As You Are is the dialogue between Cobain and the other band members. His now iconic comments (“This is from our first record, most people don’t own it” / “I only have three cups of tea already, but thank you”) will be referenced, as well as remarks that didn’t make the final edit of the official release.
“One was a moment when Krist comes over and informs Kurt that they got the set order wrong. They played two songs back to back that they initially weren’t going to play back to back because as Kurt then goes on to explain – they’re exactly the same song. Little moments like that didn’t make it on the original release are special and I think fans that know it will appreciate it and people that are only sort of aware of the original recording will probably be like, ‘What the heck’s going on here?’ but I think we’ll kind of add to the experience, maybe heighten it.”
Burford recalls clearly the first time he saw the Smells Like Teen Spirit video, his teen jaw dropping at the breakfast table as he eyed off the TV in the lounge room. He was fascinated by the journey of the band, of Courtney Love and Frances Bean, and of course by Cobain, his music and his tragedy. From being a teenage fan, to becoming a professional musician encountering the demands of fronting a popular band, to performing shows in commemoration of Cobain himself, it’s been a long and winding relationship with an iconic stranger.
“Maybe I was being too harsh on him when I performed those first cabaret shows,” Burford considers, “it was a very, very dour sort of version of him. I sort of just took that and amplified that and that was all I took away from it. Whereas, since then, I’ve gone back and continued to watch stuff, continued to read more stuff about him and realising that, you know, the dude was extremely complex.
“He had a great sense of humour, loved goofing around. He was actually a big goof, if you got him in the right mood. These days, he probably would have been diagnosed with something along the lines of bipolar or ADHD. Who knows, borderline personality disorder? There’s definitely some mental health issues going on there. My relationship with Kurt has, I guess, become more sophisticated and it’s become more complex, which is, I think, a reflection of who he is because he was a really complex and sophisticated human being.”
Featured in the band along with Burford is bassist Jennings, guitarist Aidan Gordon and Sal Di Criscito on drums. Anna Sarcich guests on cello, with Luke and Ryan Dux (The Floors/Kill Devil Hills) adding the musical contributions of The Meat Puppets.
In a wonderful serendipity, the fact that Di Criscito fronts a Perth Foo Fighters tribute called Stacked Actors well-and-truly adds to his Dave Grohl credentials. Then consider that show promoter Jeff Halley worked at Altered State, the booking agency that was presenting Nirvana’s ill-fated 1992 gig at Metropolis Fremantle, and there are some pretty cosmic notions at play.
“I kind of wish someone else was doing it,” Buford jokes. “So I could come along and check it out. But I just think that we’re going to do it best. So we should.”
“This is really about recreation. I always felt like doing something that would give a live audience a chance to get something close to what it might have been like to be in that tiny little television studio watching these guys do their thing. That’s been my ambition the whole time.”
