Kurt Cobain’s hand-drawn self-portrait sells for a blush under £200,000

The team at Louder would like to extend a sincere apology to the millionaire art collector constituency among our readership. 

Three weeks ago, we may have given the impression that a self portrait drawn by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain could be yours for £20,000. 

This, we now realise, was a grave under-valuing of the significance and value of Mr Cobain’s art, for the sketch, which depicted the late Nirvana frontman with a guitar and the self-penned caption ‘I don’t know how to play and I don’t give a hoot!’, gifted to photographer Jacque Chong while Nirvana were promoting their Nevermind album in Singapore in 1992, has just been sold at auction for $281,250 which, at the time of writing equates to £199,849.22.

Soz. 

Meanwhile, in a new interview to celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of Nevermind, Dave Grohl has again reiterated that Nirvana also under-valued their own importance and value in the run-up to their second album’s release in September 1991.

Nirvana’s former drummer recalls: “Donita [Sparks] from L7 came by and said we were going to be fucking huge. My old friend Barrett Jones, who I had grown up with in Virginia, who was a musician and a producer himself, heard Lithium and said we were going to be fucking huge. He thought Lithium should be the first single.”

“Everyone had these lofty opinions and I thought, ‘Well, it’s nice of you to say so, but there is no fucking way that is ever going to happen.’”

“You also have to remember what was popular [in music] at the time,” Grohl added. “It was Wilson Phillips, it was Mariah Carey and fucking Bon Jovi. It was not bands like us. So it seemed totally implausible that we would ever even get close to that kind of success.”

Nevermind has now sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.