This documentary about the Nirvana singer’s demise is at its best when it uses archive interviews with fans to show the scale of their loss. Otherwise, it struggles to really convey his impact

Unfathomably, for those of us who remember it, Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago this month, at the age of 27. Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music has been scheduled as the centrepiece for an evening of programming that celebrates Nirvana’s music and legacy, but the emphasis of the documentary itself is firmly on Cobain killing himself and the days surrounding his death. It uses archive video of news reports and amateur footage from people attending a vigil held in his memory, in a Seattle park, just days after his body was found. There is no Nirvana music, other than their covers of other people’s songs.

Presumably this is a rights issue, and no fault of the film-makers, but the absence of the band’s original music does highlight the documentary’s singular focus. It spends less than five minutes on the astonishing, world-dominating success that Nirvana achieved in just a few short years – and, for Cobain, the concomitant dread that seems to have accompanied that – but, at the beginning, it does contextualise them as a band concisely. There is an old Reddit thread about how 1991’s Nevermind was released closer to the Beatles’ Love Me Do than to today, and this is a stark reminder of how long ago it was that Nirvana were the biggest band in the world. We see footage of Tiananmen Square, of President George HW Bush talking about the menace of crack cocaine. There is a news report about the band’s second album, Nevermind, knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts. It is all bookended by a short, sweet interview with Cobain, conducted in the summer before he died, in which he reflects on marriage, love and being a father.

Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer

For a new generation of fans and musicians, the 90s grunge band – and in particular their frontman Kurt Cobain, who died 30 years ago next month – have provided not only inspiration but a blueprint for a more inclusive style of rock stardom

Five years ago, when the alternative artist Ekkstacy was 16, he stole two T-shirts from a record shop in a mall by his childhood house in Vancouver. They were both merch for Seattle bands: one was a Nirvana shirt, the other was an Alice in Chains shirt. “I was like, I’m not wearing this unless I know what this is,” he remembers. After listening to the artists, one of the shirts got a lot of use; the other was an Alice in Chains shirt.

Next month it will have been 30 years since frontman Kurt Cobain’s death in April 1994. Over these decades, there has been a natural and constant flow of artists name-checking Nirvana in interviews – Lorde and Lil Nas X count themselves as fans – or creating work that sounds similar to theirs, perhaps without even realising it. In the words of alternative singer-songwriter and performance artist Poppy, 29: “You can’t throw a dart and not hit a band who hasn’t been influenced by them.” But how did Nirvana become one of the most influential bands for a generation born after Cobain’s death?

‘The energy at this show was chaotic. This guy scrambled to the top of the amplifier and leaped. I thought he was going to break his neck’

In the late 1980s I was working at Sub Pop records in Seattle as a jack of all trades, and also doing in-house photography. One evening I went to see the label’s new signings, Nirvana, but I just didn’t get it. I didn’t even photograph them that night, as I wasn’t impressed. But that all changed very quickly. I heard their debut album, Bleach , and was blown away. And the next time I saw them I was like, “Oh my God, this is not the same band.” Kurt Cobain was doing Pete Townshend jumps and it was a crazy show. I photographed the band for years after that, taking thousands of pictures. They knew my work before I knew them as a band, so I think they trusted me from the get-go. It was the same with the other grunge bands I photographed – I was just another local dude, I wasn’t parachuting in from New York or London.

Seattle had a reputation for wild audiences. We were enthusiastic and physical without being violent. It seemed natural to me to include the audience in my photos, because it’s all part of that cathartic interaction between musicians and their fans.

As the old man on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album artwork is identified, we take a look at albums that are as famous for the faces on their sleeves as their music

When I was young, I was entranced by the mysterious figures who appeared on the sleeves of vinyl albums. Where did Roxy Music find its inexhaustible supply of glamorous women? Who was the weather-beaten fisher on the front of the Cure’s Standing on a Beach and how did he know the Cure ? Like many children, I assumed that the nine celebrities on the sleeve of Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings – including Michael Parkinson, comedian Kenny Lynch and Liberal MP Clement Freud – represented the actual line-up of Wings, which would have made for a challenging studio environment.

In the Google era, one can answer these questions in seconds. Roxy Music knew a lot of models, and Bryan Ferry dated half of them. The fisher (retired) was called John Button. (“The man featured on the album cover was not a member of the Cure,” Wikipedia helpfully notes.) Parkinson did not play with Wings. Some mysteries, however, have proved harder to solve.