Cobain 'was too heavily drugged to pull the trigger'

Published on 06/04/2004 01:00

FANS of Kurt Cobain marked the tenth anniversary of his death yesterday as a new book stoked conspiracy theories about the rock pioneer’s suicide.

The singer with the grunge rock band Nirvana shot himself dead ten years ago after taking a huge dose of heroin.

But the authors of a new book claim that Cobain was actually murdered at his Seattle home.

In their new book Love Death, the rock writers Max Wallace and Ian Halpern claim that the singer was too heavily drugged to have pulled the trigger of the gun which killed him.

They also argue that police rushed the investigation after immediately concluding that it must be suicide.

Fans marked the day quietly, with no major plans for vigils or memorial ceremonies. Some gathered on the banks of the Wishkah River beneath a bridge in Aberdeen, Washington state, where Cobain would go in his youth to escape an unhappy home life.

His parents were divorced when he was nine-years-old, an experience said to have left him deeply scarred.

It was there that he told friends he had "suicide genes" and that he would die young, as a rock star.

Nirvana revolutionised music in the early 1990s with their brand of grunge music. Their most celebrated album, Nevermind, which includes their most famous hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit, has sold ten million copies and is still regarded by music critics as one of the seminal rock albums of the decade.

Cobain attempted suicide in Rome In early 1994, by taking a massive dose of tranquillisers. He survived and recovered from the coma the overdose left him in. In April, he fled from a detox centre in Los Angeles and returned to Seattle.

On 5 April, 1994, aged 27, he wrote in a suicide note that he had become a "miserable self-destructive, death rocker".

After taking a massive dose of heroin, he shot himself in the head. His body was found by an electrician three days later.