| Interview January 12 2004 This section uploaded 2nd July 2004. In December 2003 I received an e-mail from Andrew Wilkie of BBC Radio 2. He requested an interview for a programme which was to be aired in April to mark the 10th anniversary of Kurt’s death. I called him to arrange a time for the interview, some of the questions in that call: Wilkie: I’d like you to be the person who puts forward the Kurt was murdered side of the story and want you to tell me how you got interested in the case and if you were a big fan of his when he was still alive, and what your story is, really. Barnett: Will you be asking any specific questions, have you done any research? Wilkie: I’ll probably put together a list of questions which I’ll e-mail you in advance so you can have time to think about what you’re going to say…….I’m trying to get in touch with Tom Grant at the moment, I e-mailed him at that address, it says “I’ll read all your e-mails but I don’t know if I’ll be able to reply to them.” I don’t know how often the inbox gets checked. Barnett: I haven’t got a clue. Wilkie: Have you ever had any dealings with him at all? Barnett: I’ve had minimal amount, not much. I try to keep my work independent and go my way, asking myself questions and trying to find answers, take it the way I think it needs to go. Wilkie: At what stage did you become interested in this story? Were you a fan at the time? I don’t even know how old you are! Barnett: I’m over 40 (laughs). (Born 1961). Wilkie: What was it about the whole thing that attracted you to it? Barnett: I read Wallace and Halperin’s book and started digging up stuff that they hadn’t included, which I thought was important information and I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been included (in their book). Wilkie: Where did you get it from? Barnett: It’s on my website, I provide all the sources. I noticed patterns of misinformation and ignoring of certain information, so I sent it to journalists, none of them picked it up. That seems totally unacceptable to me, because that’s their job and I thought that if they weren’t going to report it, then I would, which is why my website started. Wilkie: As far as you know, was there anyone who was digging about for this information before you were? Barnett: No. If they were, they weren’t reporting it anywhere. Not in magazines or newspapers, it wasn’t being reported on the internet. It’s important information and you can’t have nine years of reporting from the mainsteam media and have them miss out relevant information and miscontextualising information, which is what’s been happening. The media’s there to report and it hasn’t been doing that. Wilkie: Why do you think that’s happened? Barnett: Well, there’s big money interests, advertising, pressure, probably, from various sectors, various individuals don’t want it known. Loads of people are making a lot of money out of Kurt’s murder, who want it kept quiet. They’ve been getting away with it for too long, ignoring it, and it can’t continue, and I’m determined to do whatever I can to bring this to peoples attention. Wilkie: What sort of success have you had? Have the Seattle police communicated with you? Barnett: No. I've concluded that while they can keep it quiet, the media and the Seattle police will do just that. Wilkie: I’ve been reading that (Charles R Cross) book and I’ve seen the Broomfield documentary as well and of course the two stories are completely different. Which bits in the biography are you not happy with? Barnett: Cross is on chummy terms with Courtney and has been for years, he doesn’t bring up relevant information, which is what I expect (from him). To anyone with any common sense, that’s biased reporting in favour of Courtney Love. And that book is being promoted by all the big publishing companies, but what’s this silence on other information that’s more verifiable than stuff Cross has brought up? Courtney was plugging that book before it was ever published, she was desperate for that book to come out. Wilkie: Yes, it’s very obvious it was authorised, beyond any doubt. Wilkie: What is it about this case in particular that fascinates you so much? Barnett: I like Kurt’s music, although it’s not my favourite band and I don’t like the other two members at all. I think Kurt deserves better treatment than he got, he’s been totally mistreated by the media, not only since his death, but even before that. I think he deserves better….and like you say, forensics can do so much and you see programmes where they go to the ends of the earth to find the answers to someone’s death, and yet with Kurt, he’s not been given that, and he deserves that. Wilkie: At the end of Cross's book, he says quite clearly that it took the police 40 days and 500 interviews to come to the conclusion (of "suicide"). So what's that all about? Barnett: Right from the start they were looking at this as a suicide, and they were probably using the fact that Kurt’s own wife was saying he was suicidal as information to go on. She’s the last person you'd want to take information from, as fact. If you are going to use information from them, you have to question it every step of the way, and they didn't. Wilkie: That’s what you're doing. Barnett: Yes Wilkie: Great stuff! Wilkie and I then arranged a date for the interview and on January 12 2004 I went to the BBC Radio 2 building. Here’s a transcript of some of it: Wilkie: I’m not convinced that Courtney Love and Hole is a big enough fish for it to be worth their (the media/journalists) while to purposefully avoid bad mouthing her. I’m not convinced by that. I think if the boot was on the other foot, for example, if it was Kurt Cobain who had survived and the suspicion was on him then I would have thought that, yes, he was certainly a big enough star for that argument to work. Why it should be, then, I’m not entirely sure. I’m really not sure. Barnett: But if you look at the attitude that, if you take one particular journalist, Jerry Thackray, and he was always really supportive of Courtney right from the start and he was always taking her side. When you read joint interviews where he interviews Kurt and Courtney, you’ll see him going with her and you’ll see a kind of tension between him and Kurt, and the fact that Kurt tried to explain his drug use to Jerry Thackray for the articles that he wrote, and that Thackray continued with Courtney to try and play on the drug hysteria, rather than taking it as a serious issue, if he was doing that when Kurt was alive then obviously he’s going to take Courtney’s part when these allegations came forward. Because that’s what he was doing when Kurt was alive. Wilkie: Yeah. Barnett: And so they (journalists) are stuck in that trap. I suggest that I start off with a summary of Grant’s initial murder allegations and what lead him to form those conclusions. Barnett: In January 1995 Tom Grant, the investigator hired by Courtney Love in April 1994 made public his belief that Kurt had been murdered and that Courtney Love and her friend, Michael DeWitt were the prime suspects. Michael DeWitt, also known as Cali, was a longtime friend of Courtney’s and in 1993 he was employed by Kurt and Courtney as a nanny for their daughter, Frances. Grant was initially encouraged to investigate Kurt’s death by the promptings of Courtney’s entertainment lawyer, Rosemary Carroll, who, from as early as April 13 1994 had serious concern that Courtney was possibly involved in Kurt’s death. Carroll was adamant that Kurt wasn’t suicidal and she also informed Grant that Kurt had called her, after the incident in Rome where Kurt had suffered a near fatal overdose, that he hadn’t completed his will and that he wanted Courtney taken out of it. When Grant got a copy of the so called “suicide” note, he showed it to Carroll and she was very disturbed that Courtney’s writing was similar to that writing in the so called “suicide” note. So Grant, over a period of about eight months, developed and investigated further and concluded that Kurt had been murdered and he had been encouraged, during this time, and helped by Courtney’s entertainment lawyer, Rosemary Carroll. Wilkie: Just to get that clear, Grant’s evidence is, on the one hand, the fact that it’s disputed that Kurt was suicidal and that also, is there not evidence that he wasn’t the only person in the room and that it was to do with the position of the chair in relation to the door? Barnett: In the greenhouse? Wilkie: Yeah Barnett: When the police reported this they were making out that the room was barricaded from one set of windows, which purely lead to a balcony, so it wasn’t an exit, anyway, and that the exit door had been locked and therefore (implying) that Kurt would have been in that room on his own. But it wasn’t barricaded, there was nothing propping against the doors at the balcony end of the greenhouse. The lock on the exit door was of the type that, when you shut it, it locks, which I assume is like Yale locks, you don’t have to double-lock it with a key. So the fact is, the police were trying to make out that Kurt had shut himself in the room and that no one could have had access to him. But anyone could have been in that room, and when they pulled the door shut, it locked. Wilkie: And the problem then, is that the Seattle police, in a very short space of time, concluded that it was a suicide. Barnett: Yes, I’ve got reports here which show that they were calling it a suicide on the crime scene, where Kurt died, at 9.50am, which was about an hour after they arrived. By about midday a spokeswoman for the SPD was saying that a suicide note had been found. Well, they’d done no tests whatsoever at that point. So they were treating it right from the start as if it was a suicide. And it was reported that it was a suicide, the Seattle Times April 8, the day Kurt was found, said that there was a “single page suicide note” next to the body. That was the overall impression that was being given, right from the start. Wilkie: The question over the suicide note is that there is a section at the top which is Kurt’s handwriting, but then there is a section where the handwriting changes. What should we infer from that? Barnett: The last four lines of the so called “suicide” note is completely different writing, different style, different spacing. Grant believed that someone else had written that section of the note and that’s the only section of the note that could look like it was with suicidal intent. (On page 112 of Wallace and Halperin’s book 'Who Killed Kurt Cobain?' they quote Grant: "However, anybody reading those last four lines would automatically assume that it was a suicide note. The question is, did Kurt really write them, or were they added later?") Rosemary Carroll, when she saw this note, called Grant up, quite disturbed, asking him if he would go to her and have a look at Courtney’s writing in reference to this so called “suicide” note. So Courtney’s own entertainment lawyer, who knew Kurt quite well and who didn’t believe Kurt was suicidal, had strong suspicions that Courtney had a part in writing that note and also the terminology in that note she said was more the kind of terminology Courtney would use, rather than Kurt. Wilkie: Do you want to explain what the situation is with the will? There’s a question that Kurt was about to write Courtney out of the will. Barnett: I think that after he returned from Rome he called Rosemary Carroll up, saying that he was writing a new will in which he wanted Courtney to be taken out of it, but that he hadn’t signed the will. That’s all I know about it. So after the Rome incident, where Kurt suffered an overdose of Rohypnol and champagne, Kurt was showing signs of having Courtney Love written out of his will and also that he was intending to get a divorce. He died before he could sign the will and get a divorce and leave her. Grant released recorded conversations with this entertainment lawyer and Courtney Love, and Courtney is clearly on those tapes telling Grant that Kurt was leaving her and that he wanted a divorce. Now, this is on tape and it’s coming from Grant, but it’s never been brought up in books and coverage on this case. The fact that these tapes exist I don’t think has been mentioned in any mainstream music magazine. How can you ignore that kind of information? You can’t” Wilkie: Sticking with the mainstream music press, every interview or report that you’ll ever read about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain will mention at some point that he was quite a heavy heroin user. You claim that he’d actually kicked the habit by the time Nirvana were disintegrating and by April 1994. Barnett: There are witnesses stating that Kurt was clean during his tour in February 1994 and these witnesses directly contradict information that has been given to various authors which claim that Kurt was getting a bigger heroin habit in that time period. So you have to wonder why they (journalists) were being given that information and yet there are people who were saying that Kurt was clean as far as they were concerned, Kurt was clean during that tour (Feb 1994): Pete Shelley, the vocalist and guitarist who toured with Kurt in February 1994, said of Kurt : “He seemed really clean when we were on tour.” Tony Barber: “I know Kurt was not taking drugs on that tour, he was walking around drinking Evian water and looking clean every time I saw him.” The photographer, Youri Lenquette who photographed Kurt in Feb 1994, when he was asked if he thought it was obvious that Kurt took heroin, Lenquette replied: “No, he never looked like a junkie. He took drugs like everyone in the business, but no, he never appeared to me like a druggie”. So you can’t ignore information that’s coming from them. You have to question why these journalists are trying to make out that he was such a heavy drug user when there’s people who say that he wasn’t. Wilkie: Why do you think that journalists like to chew up that story? Barnett: Well, it means that they don’t have to ask any questions that differ from the official “Kurt was a junkie, he was suicidal and that’s what it was building up to, and he committed suicide, fullstop." Before the death they were calling him “Kurt “just say no” Cobain” because he was known not to be taking part in the drug taking and drinking. He was being reported as clean. Another journalist, Jerry Thackray, when Kurt had the overdose in Rome, was saying that as far as he knew, when he last saw Kurt in December 1993, that Kurt had looked cleaner and cut down on his drug use quite a lot, and he was saying that after the Rome incident. So he should have been asking himself: well, if I perceived Kurt to be cleaner than he had been in the past and that, as far as I knew he wasn’t drinking and taking the drugs that he had been taking (in the past), and these people from these bands say that Kurt was clean when they were seeing him, why not start asking questions as to why Kurt suffered that overdose in Rome in the first place? Because that’s an important thing to do with Kurt’s death, that he suffered an overdose of Rohypnol and champagne shortly after Courtney Love joined him in Rome and he nearly died from that and there’s a whole lot of suspicious things going around with regards to that incident, too. You have to take that into consideration because Grant believed that that was an attempt by Courtney to murder Kurt. Wilkie: Let me put a possible sequence of events forward then: that Kurt had cleaned up his act in the early part of 1994, he was keen to kick his habit which it seemed to me to have been fairly out of control at times. Then in April he relapsed and because the toxicology report from the death said he had something like three times the lethal amount of heroin in his body. Grant says that’s impossible because if he has all that heroin in his body…. Barnett: …would have been immediately incapacitated? Wilkie: Yes. So what I don’t understand about this is how he had three times the lethal dose of heroin put in their body without their consent? Barnett: Well, if he was with someone that supplied him, talked him into having a shot of heroin that was purer than he believed, then it wouldn’t be difficult to render him unconscious. I really don’t know how that amount of heroin could have got into his body, the proposition that he shot that amount up and then put a gun to his head, isn’t possible. And Grant did believe, and I think in his manual said that if you’re going to take drugs you have to be very careful about who your friends are, because he considered that someone managed to talk Kurt into taking the drugs and that it’s quite possible that he had purer heroin than Kurt would have known about. Wilkie: OK. When you first became interested in this case, what was it that prompted you to take it further? Barnett: I’d read an article in Mojo’s May 1998 magazine about the possibility that Kurt had been murdered. The article wasn’t particularly written very well, it was a bit jokey in the way it was written. But it did mention two authors, Max Wallace and Ian Halperin who had written a book on the subject. It’s when I was reading that that Grant in that book was given the opportunity to explain why he came to the conclusion that Kurt had been murdered. He was also specific in claiming that Courtney Love and Michael DeWitt were the prime suspects. Wallace and Halperin did report that, but they asked why Grant should suspect Michael DeWitt? And said that Grant offered nothing to support his suggestion. And so I read the book and old articles on things that were happening at the time when Kurt was alive and I noticed that, where Grant had claimed that he believed that the Rome incident was a murder attempt, Max Wallace had said that although Grant claims this, he offers no evidence to support that. And reading old articles of around March/April 1994 when this incident was written about, it became clear that Michael DeWitt was actually with Courtney in Rome at the time of that incident. Before Courtney flew to Rome she was interviewed by a couple of journalists in London, which is where she was before she went to Rome. In one interview she was talking about her habit of combining Rohypnol with champagne, as a practice of hers when she used drugs. In another interview by a journalist from Select magazine the journalist reported that there was a box of Rohypnol on the hotel table when he was interviewing her. So the day before she went to Rome she was talking of her use of combining Rohypnol and champagne and she also had that drug with her. Then she went, with DeWitt to Rome and something happened there, there was an argument between Courtney and Kurt and within hours of that Kurt was in hospital, in a coma, from an overdose of Rohypnol and champagne. In context with other things that had been reported, that Kurt left a note in the hotel (saying that he was leaving Courtney, running away), you have to wonder how did Kurt came to take an overdose of those drugs and drink? He was known not to be using drugs and drinking at that time. Rohypnol is a notorious drug in date rape cases, it isn’t difficult to administer that drug to a person without their knowledge, it has not taste, smell or colour. So if Kurt was leaving her, in Rome, and there’s evidence to suggest that he was, then maybe she administered that to stop him without his knowledge. Wilkie: And there’s some discrepancy with the timing? Barnett: Yes. It’s been written in Poppy Brite’s book that Courtney woke up at four in the morning to find Kurt unconscious. Well, we know the ambulance wasn’t called until about 6.30 in the morning. So that’s a big question, if Kurt was unconscious at 4am, why did it take 2.5 hours to call the ambulance? Wilkie: Is Poppy Brite’s book an authorized biography of Courtney Love? Is that Courtney as told by her? Barnett: Courtney was helping Brite and Courtney put Brite in touch with friends that could give Brite information. Courtney has, in almost every book, been in contact with the authors. In Melissa Rossi’s biography on Courtney, Courtney was quite often phoning Rossi and pointing her in directions that she wanted Rossi to investigate. And it looks like Courtney was trying to get Rossi to take up false alibis and leads that Courtney herself was providing. With Brite, again, Courtney called Brite and Brite wrote the book. With the Cross book, Courtney would e-mail him information which he reported in that book (HTH) without any attempt to question Courtney Love. Wilkie: Have you ever had any contact with Courtney Love? Barnett: No Wilkie: Do you have any indication of whether she’s aware of your website then, all the investigation that you’ve been doing? Barnett: Well, I think that information that I’ve brought up on my website, which has never been brought up within the context of Grant’s claims that Kurt was murdered, has affected her, because I do see Charles Cross’s book as an attempt to explain certain issues that I have brought up. From the phone conversation with Wilkie, prior to this interview: I’m sure her deterioration in the last four years coincides with certain information that I’ve brought up, very publicly, without compromise, something she’s not used to at all. I mean, even Max Wallace, Halperin, Broomfield, they provided a bit of information, it helped, but they didn’t actually piece stuff together. So that’s what I’ve tried to do on my website. It was never reported that Courtney had Eric Erlandson sent to Seattle back in April 1994 to look for Kurt. It wasn’t in the police reports. In the report it was mentioned that Courtney stated that she sent Grant up to Seattle to look for Kurt on April 6th, and yet Cross is claiming that she sent Erlandson up on the 5th of April. They contradict. That was never mentioned in the police report and I think that it was an attempt to make out that Courtney was so concerned that she sent Erlandson up there. But it clearly wasn’t true. Wilkie: She herself didn’t go up there (to Seattle to look for Kurt) at all? Barnett: She didn’t go up there. No. Wilkie: In these days of the internet it seems that there’s so much information shared that in former times was kept in the files of journalists and the police. How has your use of the internet helped you gather information and to put information out? How do you go about that? Barnett: I don’t really use the internet to gather information. I look at old articles which were written at the time, police reports which obviously were written at the time, and then I look at how events which have been written about in biographies such as Rossi, Brite and Cross are a total contradiction to information which was being put out at the time, and how certain information has been ignored and other bits have been completely changed. But I don’t use the internet for research, I prefer to view original articles. Wilkie: And how do you go about getting police documents? Barnett: I do actually use the smoking gun website to look at the reports with regards to Kurt. Note: after this interview I obtained copies of all the police reports that the Seattle police department are willing to release. There are several reports on the inventory supplied by the SPD which they will not release. See my recently updated Eldon Hoke aka El Duce section. Wilkie: For anyone that doesn’t know the smoking gun website, the reports are all scanned in as they appear. Barnett: They are actual copies police reports, but you can get copies, the police will provide them. Wilkie: 99 percent of people, if they read the Mojo story (May 1998), even if they seriously thought there’s something fishy going on, most people wouldn’t have dedicated so much time as you have and collected so much information. Why? What is it about this case that leads you to specifically zoom in on this case? Barnett: It was mainly that Wallace and Halperin in their book were saying that Grant had Michael DeWitt as a prime suspect and that Grant believed that the Rome incident was an attempted murder, and W & H mentioned that, but then they said: but he offers nothing to support this. Well, the fact is that Max Wallace and Ian Halperin didn’t even mention that DeWitt had been in Rome. And when you start to look at the Rome incident as attempted murder, things begin to go into place. So I thought that was quite important. Why had they missed that out? And when I looked at the Rome incident, it did seem to be quite possible that had been a murder attempt. So, building on from the questions Wallace and Halperin asked in their book is how my website developed. And I was sending that information to journalists and I was getting no reply. Wilkie: So did this almost start as an accident? Barnett: It did snowball into what my site has become now, because the reporting on this case has always been very biased, it’s been either an attempt to downplay what Grant was saying, or a total ignoring of information that Grant has provided or it’s been misreporting of events that were happening at the time. And that, to me, isn’t acceptable, and someone had to report this with some kind of responsibility and looking for the truth, rather than just going along with the accepted verdict. Wilkie: And tell us about your website and just how much information is on there? You’ve got all this paperwork and all these quotes and reports from the police. How much stuff have you got? Barnett: I do consider that there’s quite a lot of original material that has been brought up on my website that hasn’t been brought up by anyone who has ever written, other than Grant, about this murder case. Information that, when you take everything into consideration and you have that information to hand, supports Grant’s claims. The fact that W & H didn’t mention that DeWitt had been in Rome was quite important, and I brought that up. And then I began to focus on Michael DeWitt because I noticed that references to him had been lost over the years. It was like he had been written out. Wilkie: What do you know of his history before all this? Barnett: All I know is that he was a friend of Courtney’s from years before he ever met Kurt, and between Courtney and Michael DeWitt they were acting very suspiciously in the days leading up to and after Kurt was found dead. And you cannot explain their suspicious behaviour if you believe that Kurt committed suicide, because their behaviour isn’t consistent with him committing suicide. They were up to things that they wouldn’t have been up to, unless it was a murder. Wilkie: How much time do you spend on this whole project? Barnett: I used to spend a lot more time on it than I do now because I consider that most of the work I have on my site shows that Courtney Love and Michael DeWitt were acting suspiciously. It does support Grant’s claims and it shows the way in which the media and journalists have been manipulated by Courtney directly, in that she would be phoning them up and giving suggestions which they followed and went along with, and that was a blatant turn off from what Grant was saying. You have to take all that into consideration because it’s all part of Courtney Love’s attempts to cover her tracks. Wilkie: Were you a Nirvana fan? Barnett: No. I wasn’t into Nirvana at the time. I didn’t get into their music until 1996. Wilkie: So when you first started would you say that it was more or less a clean slate? Barnett: When I first started, when I read the Mojo article, I thought Kurt had committed suicide. I didn’t change my mind when I read that article, it wasn’t until I read W & H’s book and realized that Grant was very able to back up what he was saying and prove his claims that Rosemary Carroll was a main instigator in believing that Kurt had been murdered, that I began to take things seriously. And the fact that Grant can prove this, I think you have to listen to what he was saying and at the same time it’s not acceptable that the mainstream media haven’t reported on these tapes, because they’ve been saying for years: Kurt loved Courtney but he just couldn’t cope with his depression and that’s why he committed suicide. But he was on the verge of leaving her, having her written out of his will. And then suddenly, he was dead, and none of his friends thought he was suicidal, he stated that he wasn’t suicidal, and you can’t ignore all that and that’s what has happened and that’s not fair. Wilkie: You’ve obviously done so much research on this that you must almost feel like you kind of knew Kurt Cobain really quite well, just from the amount of information that you’ve read about him and the amount of conversations you must have had about him? Barnett: Well, if you read interviews of him at the time and if you see bootleg recordings, a different Kurt comes across than the Kurt that you find in the Charles Cross book. When Kurt was alive he was fed up with a lot of the drug rumours and hysteria that followed him around and he spent a lot of time in interviews trying to explain that, yes, he used heroin and he used it to deal with the stomach problem that he had. And that stomach problem was well documented. So give Kurt a fair hearing of what he was saying at the time with regards to his drug use. You cannot just say that he was a junkie, that he was suicidal, when there is so much evidence contrary to that picture that has been painted. And that picture that’s been painted of him being a suicidal junkie comes from Courtney Love. Wilkie: Have you presented all this information to the authorities in America as well as to the press? Barnett: I sent quite a lot of my work to the Seattle police department in September 1999. They never replied. It’s clear that they have no intention of having this case reopened. They reached this verdict (“suicide”) within an hour or so of finding Kurt’s body. They are blatantly ignoring important information. Cross claims that they did 200 hours of interviews with Kurt’s friends and that they did a thorough investigation, but the fact of the matter is, they didn’t. They were reporting that Kurt was barricaded in a room, that’s not true. Grant, within a week of Kurt’s body being found, was voicing his suspicion to Detective Sgt Cameron of the Seattle homicide department that there was something wrong and Cameron wasn’t willing to listen to what Grant was saying. Wilkie: Did this become a full time job when you first started it, it must have? Barnett: No. I have a job. I have to go to work. This is stuff that I do in my spare time.…. Initially it did take a lot of time and now it’s just a matter of every time I read an old article I might find something new in there that I hadn’t thought of before, that puts more of the right picture across. Wilkie: Is there anything that you want to say that I’ve not covered in this? Barnett: I think that the whole way that this case has been treated in the media is totally unfair. It’s irresponsible. But when you look at the way Kurt was being treated by the media and various journalists when he was alive, they were treating him unfairly in that respect too. Kurt, when he was alive was plagued by all the drug innuendo and rumours and Kurt took the time to explain why he used heroin. He wasn’t using it all the time and there are many people that state that he wasn’t using it all the time. You have to look at why Courtney Love was telling people that she and her boyfriend used heroin all the time, shortly after she got pregnant with Frances. I have her on tape at a gig throwing what look to be packets of sweets or something out to the audience saying: “This is heroin, I love heroin, I do it all the time. Me and my boyfriend, we do heroin all the time”. That was in December 1991 when she was pregnant. I offer to play Wilkie a tape of this comment by Courtney Love. He said that he’d like to record it from the actual video that it comes from and that he’d e-mail me and arrange to collect it, record it and return the video back to me. After I left the studio, I never heard from him again. He never used any of this interview. Press play to hear it for yourselves. She then did the Vanity Fair article and the interviewer, Lynn Hirschberg, wrote that Courtney had knowingly taken heroin after she had found out she was pregnant. That particular article caused a lot of problems for Kurt and Courtney. Courtney Love denied that she ever said that to Hirschberg, she said that she was misquoted, that she didn’t say that and that she was reported out of context. Hirschberg’s reply to that was, I recorded the interview, I have it on tape. Well, if Courtney Love is on tape bragging about using heroin at a gig in 1991, it isn’t inconceivable that she wouldn’t have been saying that to Lynne Hirschberg. Kurt and Courtney then lost custody of their daughter and when they got custody of Frances back, in November 1992 Courtney was phoning another journalist (Rossi) and starting off the whole drug thing again: “Kurt is off his head on heroin” and “I’ve lost my husband to drugs”. When you see pictures of Kurt in 1993 a lot of the time he looks fairly normal and clean and there are people to back that up. So you have to wonder why Courtney Love was doing that, because it looks to me like an underhanded attempt to bring about all that misinformation and misperception of how they used drugs and why. You have to ask why she was doing that. The fact that a lot of misinformation about Kurt and the events leading up to his death came from Courtney Love, she was doing similar there. So you have to look at the media’s treatment of Kurt when he was alive. Their inability to question anything Courtney Love has done, and yet they are willing to accept any misinformation that comes their way, even though there’s evidence contrary to that, to me is unacceptable. Wilkie: Do you think it’s bravado that lead Courtney to give all these quotes and interviews about how much drug using, in an attempt to sort of live up to the rock and roll…it’s often been mentioned that Kurt and Courtney Love bears an uncanny resemblance to Nancy Spungen and everyone knows that story. Barnett: Well, Courtney was encouraging that. She could say that she was joking about it, but it’s not a joke when your daughter’s custody is lost. It’s not a joke when your husband is perceived to be an out and out drug addict when he’s not. You can’t do that to a person. Would you want to be married to someone who was telling journalists that you were taking drugs all the time? Would you want to be married to someone who was telling another journalist that she knowingly took heroin after she found out she was pregnant? Would you want to be married to someone who, within a short while of getting custody of your daughter back was telling another journalist that you were ‘lost to drugs’ and off your head on heroin? Would you want to be married to someone like that? That isn’t a joke, that’s serious. They lost custody of their daughter for that. Would you want to be married to that? Would you? Wilkie: Maybe I am! (laughs). Barnett: Who in their right mind would want to be married to someone who was causing that amount of trouble? And that was serious trouble and it’s not a joke. And the fact that she did that to him when he was alive and the fact that she has put out so much misinformation and has had unnamed sources that are giving that (mis)information out, and the fact that journalists are using that (mis)information as fact, isn’t right. I just want to say that Christopher Sandford, in his book on Kurt mentions the discrepancies between the accounts of the so called official, that's named sources, friends of Kurt’s, Dylan Carlson, Mark Lanegan and even Novoselic, their accounts differ completely from the unnamed sources. Sandford stated in his book that: “Where sources asked for anonymity, usually citing friendship with Cobain’s widow, every effort was made to persuade them to go on the record. Where this was not possible I have used the phrase ‘a witness’ or ‘a colleague’ as appropriate. So Sandford recognized the discrepancies there and wrote about the differences between named and unnamed sources, and the fact that the unnamed sources were usually friends of Courtney’s implies that Courtney was having stories put out that were false. And Sandford did that, and Melissa Rossi (Courtney's biographer) fell for the false leads, and none of these reporters have shown any integrity in trying to discern what is the truth and what is lies and where those lies come from. And when you trace back those lies to their original source you find Courtney Love. And nine years of that begins to look like she’s been trying to cover her tracks, and that supports Grant’s claims that Kurt was murdered and that Courtney Love and Michael DeWitt were the prime suspects. Wilkie: Do you think you are any closer to getting any action on this? Barnett: No. My attitude is that while people aren’t informed, while people are being mislead through the media, then the Seattle police are sitting easy and they aren’t going to do anything. The media have had nine years to report this case properly and they blatantly haven’t. So my attitude is, if the media aren’t going to report it the police are happy and Courtney is happy. So the thing to do is to tackle the media, challenge the media’s reluctance to cover this case with integrity. Wilkie: OK. Barnett: Which is why I put out the flyers. Wilkie: Oh, yes, tell us about the flyers. Available on your website for people to print out are a number of flyers in different languages which you encourage people to print out and leave in library books and… Barnett: “…music magazines. If the media and journalists, which I name on my site, aren’t going to report this case properly then they should be held accountable as to why they’re not reporting it properly, why they are continuously presenting misinformation as fact. So they need to be held accountable for that and I encourage people to put out flyers tackling that issue. Wilkie: And just tell them where you can get the flyers from and what they are. Barnett: There’s a link to my flyers on my websit. There’s flyers specifically for people in the UK, two general flyers, and flyers in Spanish and Italian. I do encourage people to distribute them, because the media isn’t reporting this fairly and if we let them get away with that, then nothing will happen with this case. If we challenge the media, challenge named journalists, maybe something will happen. At least they’re not getting away with it unchallenged. In late 2000 I provided a flyer which included more information on the Rome incident and Michael DeWitt’s presence in Rome. The flyers highlighting named journalists and their shoddy reporting methods were uploaded on 12th October 2002. Thanks to everyone who took the time to distribute the flyers I hope you will continue to hand them out. Wilkie: Do you visit the Kurt Cobain chat rooms and message boards? Barnett: No. I used to read them when I first got involved with it but there’s so much idiocy that goes on there, so many attempts to confuse issues that I haven’t got time for that. I’d rather take on named journalists and corporate publishing companies which are perpetuating the misinformation. That’s all I’ve got time for. Wilkie: And do you get many contacts from people on message boards? Barnett: No. I’ve had a lot of time wasters that have contacted me over the years. I don’t visit message boards and I don’t get involved with anyone in too much depth who e-mails me because I have things to do in my own time that are more important. I think taking on named journalists is more important. Wilkie: How about people who run other websites, is there much collaboration there? Barnett: I don’t collaborate with anyone. Again, I’ve had people waste my time in the past, people that I’ve met through the internet, and right from the start it became clear to me that I was the one bringing up new information or information that has been lost. No one else at all was bringing up that information, that I met through the internet. So, you know, my work, I decided, I’ve done this, I’m going to remain independent. A couple of people wanted me to merge my website with theirs, I said no. I’m responsible for what I write and I can’t be distracted by anyone else. Named journalists, corporate publishing companies. If they want to argue with me, or take anything on, fine, but I haven’t got time for unnamed people on the internet intent on causing as much confusion and time wasting as they can. Wilkie: And tell us about your website and just how much information is on there? You’ve got all this paperwork and all these quotes and reports from the police. How much stuff have you got? Barnett: She didn’t go up there. No. Just as a summary of the way Kurt was treated by the media when he was alive, can I read this? It gives an idea of one journalist’s treatment of Kurt and his response to this case. In an article printed in NME in October 1993, the journalist accused Kurt of “perpetuating his own sordid little myth”. (The actual phrase was "Kurt Cobain is, contrary to his many public statements, fostering and encouraging us to buy into his sordid little myth." Read the full article below.) This particular journalist chose to ignore the fact that in March 1994 Kurt wanted to divorce Courtney and leave her. This journalist has completely ignored that, and has also ignored that Courtney’s own entertainment lawyer played a big role in the developing of this case for murder. This journalist then went on to claim that there was “no credible suggestions of foul play” (in Kurt’s death) and that Kurt’s “suicide” note was “alarmingly explicit”. He made no mention of the fact that Courtney’s entertainment lawyer had urged Grant to go over to her house and look at samples of Courtney’s handwriting and the handwriting on the so called “suicide” note. This journalist has never pointed out that Courtney Love was bragging about how she and her boyfriend (who was Kurt, at that time), used heroin all the time, in December 1991. This journalist never questioned how it was that Courtney came to be on tape admitting to using heroin after she found out she was pregnant, or why she denied saying this when the interviewer, Lynn Hirschberg, claimed she had this interview on tape. This journalist never questioned Courtney’s motives for encouraging the drug rumours and never highlighted the hypocrisy in her statement to him in 1993 that, with regards to the drug rumours which surrounded her and Kurt “everyone else on the planet didn’t need to magnify it and make it 50,000 times worse”. Courtney Love was the one that was encouraging the drug rumours. In short, the attitude this journalist had to Kurt when he was alive, is no different to the attitude he, and others, have shown to Kurt since he died. It’s an unfair attitude. Wilkie: Who’s the journalist that you’re talking about? Barnett: Steve Sutherland. Wilkie: Right, he was the editor of NME. Barnett: The editor of NME, he was also the editor of Vox and I think he’s now the editorial director of NME. Wilkie: OK. Fine. Thank you. END Following is the October 2nd 1993 review of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’, by Steve Sutherland. After Kurt died, a reader sent a letter to NME, taking Sutherland to task on his attitude towards Kurt in this article. See the end of this article for the reader’s letter, and Sutherland’s reply to that letter. 24-HOUR PITY PEOPLE NME October 2 1993 Why is it that pop stars think their fans are interested in songs about the problems of being famous? STEVE SUTHERLAND bemoans the fate of artists who find they cannot live with the person they become after Joe Public sets them on a pedestal. When is a new Nirvana album not a new Nirvana album? When it is a soap opera. Think about it. ‘In Utero’ is a record that exists entirely inside the drama that dogged its creation. It’s a record that chooses never to distance itself from its creator. It’s a record that screams, “You’ve read all the stuff about Courtney and the smack and the pain that I’ve been through. You’ve read all about the paranoia, about the way the press tried to crucify me. You’ve read about how I nearly killed myself. It’s a miracle I exist. Hey, you better buy me!” So ‘In Utero’ is a pretty good scandal but does it make it a good record? I doubt it. A good record stands up on its own, means something beyond its own biography, assumes the shapes of each listener’s joy and pain. But ‘In Utero’ is just the sound of Kurt Cobain washing his dirty linen in public and then complaining about the soap powder. I mean, if he hates his notoriety so much, why make a record so obsessed with that hatred that its bound to generate even more? Surely by railing against it so publicly in print and vinyl, Kurt Cobain is, contrary to his many public statements, fostering and encouraging us to buy into his sordid little myth. If he loathes fame so much, why hog the spotlight? And it’s not just Nirvana who are currently profiting from this whingeathon. They’re all at it. There’s an epidemic of self-abusers out there falling over themselves to confess and come clean. Just glance back at the last few issues of NME. What litany of woe! We’ve had Carter banging on about the stress of growing up in public and then making a record about it. We’ve had The Wonder Stuff talking about their self-respect in an imbecilic industry and then making a record about that. We’ve had Evan Dando whetting our appetite for the new lemonheads album with a few “I take drugs me and I don’t know if I can control it”-type confessions. We’ve had Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins titillating up the sales of the ‘Siamese dream’ album by talking about it in terms of brutal group therapy…The list goes on and on. Where’s all the dignity? Where’s all the mystery? Where’s all the FUN? Looked at cynically, this tendency towards publicly confessing those private appointments with the shrink can be seen as smart marketing. After all, everyone knows the old joke about record companies cheering celebrity deaths because nothing sells the back catalogue like a good, preferably scandalous stiff. Well, maybe the artists have cottoned on. Maybe crying wolf while you’re still alive might not be such a bad way of pumping up the public interest. Maybe talking about suicide and threatening to become addicted to smack is nearly as good as the real thing when it comes to boosting those sales. Talk is cheap and so is crack and, hey, there’s nothing like a few self-perpetuated rumours to distract the critics from that writer’s block or the fact that your last three albums have all sounded exactly the same. A more generous explanation of this current rage for screaming at the top is that our stars really are helpless. Whereas the graft against poverty and anonymity translates neatly into romance and heroics on record, a useful mirror to our own frustrations and under-achievements, the tearing of hair over riches and fame seldom sounds like anything but bad grace. And the natural reaction is, y’know, if Kurt doesn’t want his millions, they’re welcome up here on the 25th Floor. But Kurt can’t help it because he’s a punk. And fame is the great punk betrayal. Most of those afflicted seem to have gained an acclaim which they feel is entirely inappropriate to the music they make. In short, they feel guilty. Take The Levellers. Where once they were happy to speak out on behalf of a disenfranchised generation, they’re now getting rich pretty damn quick and growing away from the audience they once purported to represent.. How can you be a dole class hero when you’re quids in? Answer: you can’t. Hence all the bitter nonsense The Levs have been spouting lately about how the press misinterprets their motives. It’s not the press that’s to blame. Nobody is. It’s just that they can’t live with themselves, with what they’ve inevitably become. Their very success is symbolic of betrayal. Nirvana are in the same predicament. Punk-rockers at heart and by habit, they are now faced with the impossible task of being established anti establishmentarians. They make small, hard, petty, griping music –punk rock- and, because it strikes a chord with so many millions of other small, hard, petty, griping lives, it grew big. Bigger than it should ever be. So Kurt Cobain must face up to his biggest fear, the thing he lashed out against in the first place, the thing that made him famous – fame. Billy Corgan recently said: “You stand through a thousand photo shoots, do a few thousand interviews, play in front of people who expect you to be something you’re not, and it eats away at your soul. It’s so easy to become a cliché. It’s an old problem and yet the brightest musical talents of our generation are losing their minds because they can’t handle it.” What Billy Corgan means is that, since punk, there’s no way you can become rich and famous and remain credible. In effect, you become the thing you set out to destroy. So what’s the cure? I don’t know if it’s true that, “the brightest musical talents of our generation are losing their minds”, but it’s damn certain that they’re doing a lot of whingeing about it. And, with few exceptions, they’re so hung up on their anti celebrity guilt trips that they’re making navel-gazing soap operas instead of records; ephemeral works that will scarcely outlast their traumas. I mean, will the new Pearl Jam record really be a punk rock mess because Eddie Vedder doesn’t wanna be the great rock messiah that he seems to have convinced himself we want him to be? Or is that just his way of ducking out of the responsibility of producing a worthy follow up to ‘Ten’? We’d better buy it to find out just as we bought ‘In Utero’ because we’d read about all the grief that surrounded it. I doubt we’ll be playing either in a few months time. They’re too inward-looking, too self-pitying to outlive their own scandal. They’re not records. They’re diaries. Their attraction for us is voyeuristic. They are not art. They will not last. As Billy Corgan suggests, the dilemma fame presents to the would-be artist is nothing new. John Lennon wrote ‘The Ballad Of John and Yoko’ about this very subject and it’s no coincidence that while Kurt and Courtney have acknowledged the parallels, nobody plays “The Ballad Of John & Yoko’ any more. Lennon also went through all that primal therapy stuff and made terrible, embarrassing records about it. Terrible but honest. Perhaps that adds to the problem –the fact that all this self-flagellation and hairshirt wearing has been done before, means that, when Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan suffer, even their pain is robbed of originality. And, by suspicion, authenticity. What a dreadful thought, that those who threaten suicide are merely acting out roles. That their honesty is somehow dishonest. So is there any way to survive the pain of fame? You can go the Suede route and consider all that punk guilt an old-fashioned hindrance that will doom you to a brief and tawdry career in the indie ghetto. Why not embrace fame and fortune and use it to reach more and more people with your music? Or you can do the Michael Stipe thing and retreat into your own privacy. That way you become eccentric and, if you’re lucky and you write vaguely enough, untouchable; an artist. But maybe for Kurt and Billy and Eddie there’s no way back. Once you’ve verbalized your self immolation and mental torture so publicly there are only two routes – OD, which is dumb, or rehab, which is boring. Neither are that dignified, nor particularly interesting. They’re just kinda inevitable. And that’s the irony. Perhaps completely by accident, Kurt and Billy and Eddie have administered a small wound to the rock’n’roll monster they sought to slay. Perhaps with all their whining and threatening and public soul-baring they have served to demystify the state of stardom to such an extent that they are beginning to render it tedious. Perhaps if Kurt Cobain ever gets around to making another Nirvana record, we won’t all rush out to buy it because he spent the 12 months leading up to it shouting about how he takes heroin and how pathetic we are to be interested in it (so why is he shouting then?). Perhaps we’ll just ignore him and his record. And then perhaps he might go away. Which is what he really wanted all along. Isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? NME LETTERS PAGE APRIL 23 1994: April 8, 1994, 10.40pm: Read your ‘Fame Fatale’ issue (Oct 2, 1993) over again.“‘In Utero’ is a record that screams, ‘You’ve read all the stuff about Courtney and the smack and the pain that I’ve been through. You’ve read all about the way the press tried to crucify me. You’ve read about how I nearly killed myself. It’s a miracle I exist. You better buy me!’” And again: “When Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan suffer, even their pain is robbed of originality. And, by suspicion, authenticity. What a dreadful thought, that those who threaten suicide are merely acting out roles. That their honesty is somehow dishonest.” I know it’s only one article and it’s only one journalist’s opinion, but it’s yours Sutherland, so read it you f---er. What do you feel? Bill Hull, Guildford Reply to the above letter: In retrospect, of course what I wrote last year appears callous. Listening to Nirvana records now, in the light of Kurt’s suicide, the songs carry an almost unbearable poignancy. But I stick to my criticism. At the time, ‘In Utero’ was being marketed as ‘Buy my f--- up’. That’s how it was sold. It’s not rock’n’roll that stinks, it’s the music industry. Steve Sutherland NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS APRIL 8 1995: Steve Sutherland: Kurt killed himself. He left an alarmingly explicit suicide note. There’s no mystery to it, no conspiracy theories, no phantom sightings in supermarkets, no credible suggestions of foul play. End of story. So why bother if there’s nothing new to add, no untold revelations? Because, at the risk of seeming callous and opportunist (Kurt sells issues, in case you didn’t know), people still care. A glance at this week’s Angst page should be enough to silence the cynics… Not everyone, though, had a callous attitude to Kurt, some people did question Courtney Love’s behaviour. In NME's November 12 1994 edition, Steve Sutherland interviewed Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes: Robinson: “It’s so sad, I’m flipping through the channels and they’re selling pictures of Kurt Cobain...on the Home Shopping Network...And he’s got this chick that he married on TV talking about shit that he’s not here to defend himself against.” “Y’know, as someone who's very interested in music, she makes me mad. Here’s this woman whose husband is barely in the grave and she’s like, 'Look at ME! Look at ME! All you Nirvana fans should buy my records now'.” “And she’s on TV saying she's doling out his lost songs." He goes into a squeaky, dumb-ass girly voice. "Y’know, I’m gonna give one to Iggy ’cos it’s a hit and it’s really funny, like a Devo song. And then I’m giving one to the guy in Screaming Trees ’cos it’s really happy like The Beatles White Album.” “Now, first off, Devo’s a f---in joke and secondly, you’d have to be one ignorant person as far as musical history goes to think that The Beatles' White Album was a happy little Beatles record. It’s very dark and very weird and depressing. Maybe she’s just not very bright.” “It’s not that she shouldn’t go on and do her thing," says Rich. "She should make records, do whatever she wants. But why cheapen it? Why disgrace your husband? To carry on is great, you should never give up what you do, but why use him and his persona and his death to further her career?” “She should be careful what she says," says Chris. "She should show some integrity.” Back to Frances Barnett's In Defence MAIN |