I didn’t like grunge. I hadn’t bought Bleach (Nirvana’s first album) and, until Smells Like Teen Spirit became a hit in Britain, I hardly knew Kurt Cobain’s name. A few months later, of course, I had to pretend I’d been into Nirvana since the start, but like most people whose music tastes had changed with Acid House, I hadn’t actually listened to a rock record for years. Nevermind got everyone I knew back into guitar bands and it got me back out to proper gigs. Ironically, it was the first album I’d bought since the end of the 1980s that didn’t sound better when you were on drugs.

LISA VERRICO

A brilliant musician and a tragic loser, Kurt Cobain sums up for me all that is most noble and squalid about the bittersweet world of rock’n’roll. I love his angry, anguished songs and the untamed spirit of his music.

He is an avatar — the troubled kid who turned a guitar into a weapon of mass inspiration. He is also a terrible warning. I despise the cult of nihilism which grew up around him and the heroin culture which seduced him into believing his own myth. His was the most disturbing of the major rock fatalities. “Faking it” is not, as he insisted, the worst crime. I feel sorry for his daughter.

DAVID SINCLAIR

There was only one route to immortality for a fellow who apparently invented the idea of doomed youth. Not suicide: Kurt’s apotheosis came in Chris Morris’s parody of Teen Spirit as panty-liner ad in The Day Today: “Once a month, you become a slave/to a tidal wave/Body’s little clock/could mess up your frock . . .”

Kurt might have done the decent thing and taken Courtney with him. Grunge could hardly appeal to someone already in his thirties when Nirvana sloped dejectedly onto the scene: Ozzy was better on death, and Seattle in the 1990s had considerably less to whinge about, and did it with less spite, humour and verve, than London in the late 1970s. Still, it was a good song.

ROBERT THICKNESSE

Every teenage generation needs its nihilistic, whingeing anti-hero, and I guess Kurt Cobain was it for the pathologically morose Generation X kids of the early 1990s. Nirvana’s best songs were primordial screams of pain, undiluted by the knowingly sardonic humour of the earlier punk era. At the timeI didn’t grasp where the pain came from: after all, these “alienated” Seattle trailer-park kids had never known true oppression, hunger or misery — except that which they inflicted chemically on themselves. But then, long after Cobain died, I read his anguished Journals (Penguin), with their vitriolic if barely literate rants against the “baby boomers” who “came so close to social change” and then became “the ultimate, conforming, yuppie hypocrites”. And I started to sympathise. Trouble is, Generation X seem to have conformed and yuppified even more quickly than their despised dads. At least Cobain ’s tragic exit preserved for ever the purity of his rage.

RICHARD MORRISON