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NIRVANA – Come As You Are (1992)

“I did four music videos for Nirvana. They used to open up for Sonic Youth a lot whilst I was working with them, but we never actually met during that time. But I’d known Courtney [Love] for a while, because she was really good friends with Roddy from Faith No More. She was always the puddle that you stepped over at the party, and she was always sort of a mess. One day she said to me, ‘Let me play you some music by my boyfriend’s band,’ and she played me Bleach by Nirvana. She was like, ‘Oh my God, you know Nirvana,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I don’t think she even knew Kurt at that point, but time passed and they eventually hooked up.

“I remember being in San Francisco one day with Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and Primus, as I was working with all three bands around that time and all of them were in the room together, and Courtney said ‘I wanna introduce you guys to Kurt.’ So that’s when I first met him. He was really disarming. He said to me, ‘You made my favourite video of all time – Halah by Mazzy Star,’ and I was like, ‘Cool, I love that video too.’ He then asked me to make Nirvana’s next video, which I agreed to do, and that was Come as You Are.

“The band was on every newsstand in the country by this point, and Kurt was really sick of that fact, so he said the only thing he wanted was to not be in the video. I obviously knew that was sort of a hurdle, especially since this was still the introductory phase of the band, so I tried to create some motifs that allowed them to be in the video without really being in it. I tried to figure out all sorts of ways to obscure their identity, knowing that their record label was going to want to put the faces of the band in the video – they were the tube of toothpaste, and you have to see the toothpaste in the ad. So the whole video was this dance of how we could obscure them but see them at the same time. Dogs in Elizabethan collars were an obsession at that time, too!”

NIRVANA – In Bloom (1992)

“As far as I could see Nirvana was Kurt’s band, and he made all the decisions. But I got along with the other guys great. There weren’t any power moves or anything like that either. We all wanted the same thing in a way, and they trusted me completely.

“The original concept that we were going to shoot for In Bloom had to do with a girl who grew up in a Klu Klux Klan family, and it was a lot more overt in terms of the social message in the song. But sadly due to time constraints we couldn’t afford to do such a lavish video, so we decided on this concept after discussing The Beatles level of fame that the band was going through at the time. There’s something about the DNA of The Ed Sullivan Show and those performances that hardwires you into the way that America consumes its favourite bands, so it was a pretty organic decision to do a video that references those old shows in a tongue-in-cheek kind of a way. We got a hold of these big old cameras and basically mimicked the process of how those old shows were filmed, and we shot two takes in suits and two takes in dresses, where they come out and destroy the set. That was it. It was a pretty short day.

“We were actually in the middle of the Nirvana documentary [Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!] when Kurt died, but that project was complicated by the fact there was a law suit going on, which was rooted in the origin of the Heart-Shaped Box video. That sadly complicated our relationship. ”