Cobain fans mark tenth anniversary

Fans of Kurt Cobain marked the 10th anniversary of his death as a new book stoked conspiracy theories about the rock pioneer’s suicide.

The Nirvana front man shot himself dead 10 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.

Rock writers Max Wallace and Ian Halpern claim in their new book Love Death that Cobain 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 were marking the day quietly, with no major plans for vigils or memorial ceremonies.

Some were gathering on the banks of the Wishkah River beneath a bridge in Aberdeen, Washington state.

Cobain often went there 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 arguably their most famous hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit – has sold 10 million copies.

It is still regarded by music critics as one of the seminal rock albums of the decade.

For the past decade friends, journalists and biographers have tried to trace the roots of Cobain’s music.

Many believe his sound was the result of a broken home, and a childhood spent between different homes, which were scarred by alcohol abuse.

He met Nirvana co-founder Krist Novoselic at school and they were joined by drummer Dave Grohl in 1990.

The same year, the band signed a major record deal – and Cobain began taking heroin.

He wed Hole singer Courtney Love and they had a daughter Frances Bean in the summer of 1992.

But his drug problems persisted and he checked into rehab several times in the years before his death.

In early 1994 he attempted suicide in Rome by taking a massive dose of tranquillisers. He survived and recovered from the coma the overdose left him in.

In early April he fled from a detox centre in Los Angeles and returned to Seattle.

On April 5, 1994, aged only 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.

While thousands attended a vigil for him at the time, there were no formal plans for such a gathering to mark the tenth anniversary of Cobain’s death.

But among impromptu gatherings would be one at at Viretta Park, next to Cobain’s house in Seattle, where some of his ashes were scattered.