I find it difficult to imagine what the final months of 1991 and the first months of 1992 could possibly have been like for the members of Nirvana. Nevermind came out on September 24, 1991, and has been a staple of “top albums of all time” lists ever since. It must have been a supreme mindfuck to go from believing that it would be an improbable long shot that your band would ever achieve a status comparable to their buddies the Melvins to being hailed as something akin to a Beatles for the Generation X. In a space of a few weeks, Nirvana went from a band admired by a passionate coterie to the band on everyone’s lips, and suddenly absolutely everyone wanted a part of them.

As a result, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl were busy little beavers that winter, as this crowded chronology suggests. A couple days before the album release, on September 20, they commenced a fast tour of North America, starting in Toronto and hitting some 30-odd locations by the end of October. On November 2, the same day that Nevermind entered the top 40 (at a humble #35), the band flew to England for a European tour, the first show happening in Bristol on November 4. They hung out in England for a few dates, then played Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, returning to the British Isles for the last week in November and the first week of December. By this time Nevermind‘s status as an authentic phenomenon was sealed, as the album was certified gold and platinum simultaneously, on November 27.
 

 
During that second visit to Great Britain, Nirvana taped an appearance on Top of the Pops on November 27 and a day later taped an extensive interview with Antoine de Caunes of Rapido, which at the time had attained some status as a cult music/interview show of the type that future readers of Dangerous Minds adore.

Nirvana was in some kind of historico-cultural zone during this stretch, and the band’s appearance on Top of the Pops is an excellent case in point. The band could do no wrong by this time, somewhat like the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964. This appearance is well known as the one in which TOTP demanded that Kurt lip-sync his vocals on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but the band demurred, leading to a compromise in which only the vocal track would be taped live. So in protest, Kurt sang his vocal in an unnaturally (hilariously) bass register that had nothing to do with how the song’s supposed to go, while all three guys ostentatiously “non-played” their instruments with outsize gestures in which their hands were never remotely close to where they were supposed to be. (That appearance is embedded at the bottom of this post.)

I wish I could remember who wrote this, but someone argued a few years ago that what we think of as “the 1990s” was born during that very taping—note the yawning disconnect between the obviously forward-thinking antics of the band and the thoroughly “1980s” trappings of every other aspect of the show, from the announcer’s intro to the stage set (all that neon!) to the onscreen graphics. Not many could have known it at the time, but so much of the thinking that went into that telecast was about to be banished to the dustbin of history. The band’s the only thing in sight that seems of the moment, and a year later TOTP would surely seem a good deal more authentic.
 

 
Rapido was a show on BBC2 that covered new music and was hosted by a French TV personality named Antoine de Caunes, who often spoke in an flamboyantly “French” accent despite his perfect mastery of the English language (you can hear him off-camera in the clip below). Rapido ran from 1988 to 1992, and in fact the Nirvana interview was conducted just a few months before the show’s cancellation. It’s striking the genuine enthusiasm the three members of Nirvana display for the show—Grohl calls it “the only thing worth watching” on English TV (much better than “international snooker,” as Novoselic says).

There’s nothing really that “significant” about the interview that Cobain, Novoselic, and Grohl did for Rapido sometime during that same week, it’s merely highly resonant footage of a band in the throes of rapido change. A few days after this interview Kurt and Courtney Love decided to get married, and the band cancelled the final handful of dates left in Europe and returned home a week early, on December 7. (The official reason given was that Kurt had lost his voice, and you can surely hear a rasp in his voice during the Rapido spot.)
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: Kathleen Hanna tells the story behind the song
Casting call for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video