I HAVE three big anecdotes from the time I was a quarter-famous TV presenter. (It was an “alternative” music show called Naked City on Channel 4, 1993-1994). To put this fame into perspective, my own brother often got me confused with Hufty from The Word.

The first two involve sobering sexual encounters with “faces” from the scene at that time, one of which always provokes the reaction “No! To the theme tune from his own show?” The third is the time I killed Kurt Cobain. I always start the anecdote by saying “This is the story of how I killed Kurt Cobain,” to which people reply “No, I bet you didn’t really.”

After they’ve heard the story, they try to murmur something comforting such as, “I always say you should try to kill at least one of your generations’ idols before you hit 20,” or, “If it makes things easier, I’ve always believed Nevermind was overproduced.” Or, more usually, “God, you really did kill him, didn’t you?” When I killed Kurt Cobain, I was a jejune music journalist of 18. I was more than jejune — I was jeapril, or jemay. Until nine months before, I had had only ten records in my collection, one of which was When The Word Knows Your Name by Deacon Blue, which effectively wiped out the other nine. However, by the time Melody Maker started printing my unsolicited reviews of Deacon Blue-esque bands playing in the Midlands, I’d undergone enough of a crash course to know that I had a favourite rock star, and that it was Courtney Love, lead singer of the band Hole, and also, coincidentally, Cobain’s wife.

How to explain what Courtney Love was like, back in the dark depths of 1994? Exactly the same as she is now, in all fairness. She was in the papers taking drugs, getting arrested, being a lunatic. It’s just the papers were smaller then — NME and Melody Maker instead of The Sun. She was just this woo-hoo grunge star, and I loved her for the fact that she was doing all the classic rock-pig things, like sleep around, take drugs and be unexpectedly clever, but in a dress and high heels. So when I was sent to interview her in Seattle ( the viper’s nest of grunge) for the front cover of Melody Maker (the viper’s nest of pretentiousness), I was so pleased that I bought a new ripped petticoat, as was fashionable at the time, to mark the occasion.

We met at 11pm — I turned up at the end of a photoshoot and the first words she screamed at me were: “I used to be EXACTLY LIKE YOU! FAT! YOU’VE GOT TO STOP EATING CHEESE!” This in lieu of a “Hello!” or “Did you have a nice flight?” We then got into a battered van and drove, seemingly at random, until we came across a student house party in the suburbs. In a sheepskin coat she gatecrashed (“Just ****ing let me in! I’m the fun!”) and roamed the house until she found what every house in Seattle with teenagers must have contained in 1994 — a poster of her husband. She then posed underneath it, miming the act of injecting heroin while the partygoers — who were all by now silent, staring and incredulous — took photos. Then we got back into the van (“It was starting to turn into a drag, wasn’t it?”) and went to a truck-stop, where she got into an argument with a redneck guy in a Queen T-shirt (“Freddie was a faggot! You have to accept that you love homosexual guys!”), and asked for her coffee “to go” so we could go back to the hotel and talk.

Which she did from 2.30am until midday. She decided she wanted to tell the story of her life, “Goddammit”, from the moment of her conception. She finally left saying “I’ve got a baby I have to see. Print nice things about me! Or I’ll blow up your toilet!”, and I went back to England and wrote up my story.

Because I really liked her, there were many stories from that ten-hour chat marathon that I didn’t print — such as the eagerly proffered address of her and Kurt’s heroin dealer, Kurt’s first experience on Ecstasy (“He was just staring at these twigs”) and the story of her and Kurt’s first sexual congress, which involves so much fluid and viscerality that I prefer listeners to request it 15 minutes in advance, like a crêpe suzette.

One story I did print, however, was the Billy Corgan BedMaster Story. In brief, Billy Corgan was lead singer of Nirvana’s sworn enemies, Smashing Pumpkins. Their rivalry was compounded by the fact that Courtney had left Corgan for Cobain. Therefore, Courtney’s quote, to me, that Corgan “was good in bed” was of great interest to the grunge massive. And yet another reason why I really liked Courtney. One thing the 1960s was really missing was a female rock star who could compare Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger’s respective jigginess.

So the story was printed, and that was that. Except, a week later, Cobain killed himself. Obviously I was upset — I was 18, and had often fallen over to Smells Like Teen Spirit in nightclubs — but I didn’t take it personally, until Someone Who Really Would Know rang me. “It was apparently your story that did it,” he said, almost happily.

It turns out that Cobain, in his last days, was convinced that Courtney had resumed her old affair with Corgan. When Cobain read Courtney’s quotes in my piece, he took it as a coded message, climbed the walls of his rehab centre, and shot himself. I remember becoming so hysterical upon hearing this that my friend Pricey had to come over with his new Homer Simpson keyring and keep making it say “Doh!”, to which he would helpfully add “I’ve killed Kurt Cobain!”

Of course, in the years that have followed, I have managed to rationalise it a little. Cobain was a man who had just recorded an album he wanted to call I Hate Myself and I Want to Die and posed for photographers with a gun in his mouth. My triggering his suicide wasn’t quite as impressive a feat as inspiring the self-administered death of, say, Mr Motivator. Short of getting an optimism transplant, Cobain was going to kill himself sooner or later. But who knows how many more unhappy songs, predominantly based around how much he wanted to die, Cobain would have completed if I hadn’t pushed him over the edge? One thing’s for certain, however: I’ve become a lot less jejune since I realised that you should never, however urgent your deadline, insinuate that a depressed, heroin-addict rock star with a gun obsession is a crap lay.