Though no-one in the Pacific North-West's tightly-knit music community ever liked, much less embraced, the term 'grunge' as a description for the punk/metal/garage/sludge hybrid which oozed out of Seattle and spread like thick black tar across the world in the early '90s, the word has stuck.
And although Nirvana's Nevermind album is generally acknowledged as the scene's 'breakthrough' record - this despite the fact that Alice In Chains had sold 500,000 copies of Facelift before Smells Like Teen Spirit was released - grunge most definitely didn't start with Kurt Cobain's band, nor did it die with his passing in 1994, less than 9 months on from the release of In Utero, the album the trio considered their finest hour.
