Teen spirit

The experience of seeing Kurt Cobain play live on-stage with Nirvana in 1991 (in my case, at the Kilburn National Ballroom) is not one anyone lucky enough to have had it is ever likely to forget. Electricity seemed to be flowing through Cobain's body - his guitar appeared to be playing him, rather than vice versa - and, from the men in overalls who come on to dust their instruments between songs, to the final orgy of carnage in which guitars and drums were trashed in an carnival of gleeful pointlessness, the whole band seemed to have achieved a perfect, precarious balance of creativity and destructiveness, honesty and sarcasm.

This punk-rock paradigm was not just a one-off fluke, but the climax of a long process of musical evolution. And when that complex series of DNA strands - cranked-up Sixties garage fuzz, full-on Seventies metal power and sardonic Eighties slacker attitude - knitted together into Nirvana's high-tension mesh, an underground turned into an overground virtually overnight. It's a thrilling cultural moment which Charles Peterson's pungent photographic memoir Touch Me I'm Sick captures with rare immediacy.

"Rolling Stone put out a book of pictures a few years back," explains the Seattle-based photographer, "and I was shocked, because in a volume that purported to visualise rock'n'roll, there was not a single live shot ... really all you had was a bunch of overpaid celebrites standing around in stilted poses."

Overpaid celebrities standing around in stilted poses is one thing you won't see in Peterson's photographs. What you will see is scruffily dressed musicians coming together with their public in a gloriously ragged scrum of flailing limbs, flashing lights and very smelly hair. The sheer excitement of a great live band playing in a small room - what Peterson calls "the high, divine release that comes from jumping up and down madly for an hour courtesy of your pals, room-mates, heroes, beer, whatever" - has rarely, if ever, been better captured in two dimensions: booze, sweat and smoke virtually ooze from the page.

"If bands were animals," Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder muses in his impressively thoughtful introduction, "and clubs their natural habitat, Charles Peterson becomes National Geographic." There is certainly an anthropological thrill to Peterson's photos. First in the circumstances of their taking ("I know how to fall," the battle- hardened snapper notes gratefully, "I know how to stiff-arm somebody if need be, I know how to keep one eye looking through my camera, one eye looking out behind my head"). And then in the pictures themselves; a tattered Converse All Star sneaker resting on a dashboard ... a man f (Cobain as it turns out) falling into a drumkit ... the spectrum of expressions on the faces of the individuals in a crowd as an anonymous stage-diver wheels through the air above them.

When Peterson first started taking photographs of his friends' noisy bands in the Pacific North-West in the late Eighties, presumably he would have found the idea that they would one day end up in a beautifully presented large-format coffee-table volume somewhat surprising? "Not really," the photographer demurs with engaging candour, "I think that was always my ambition."

Shortly after graduating from the University of Washington with a photography degree in 1987, Peterson found himself sharing a flat in Seattle with Mark Arm, a member of the band Green River. They were in the process of evolving into Mudhoney, who would in turn become godfathers of the thriving local scene later to be globally branded as "Grunge".

Through his friendship with Bruce Pavitt - boss of the Sub Pop label which was the epicentre of this particular musical earthquake - Peterson soon found himself established as the nascent movement's official photographer.

"The opportunity to get a photo published was exciting enough in itself," says Peterson, "but to see it wrapped around a friend's single or on a magazine cover was even better." When things suddenly started to take off, however, the nature of the business he was involved in changed dramatically. As Nirvana and Pearl Jam went global, it would have been all too easy (and indeed for many people, it was too easy) to lose perspective, but Peterson for one seems to have kept a firm grasp on what was and what wasn't important. "After 1992," Eddie Vedder remembers, "when we were all swimming in a sea of other people's agendas, a trustworthy face whose actions backed up his words was an invaluable commodity."

You don't have to have been a diehard scion of the Eighties indie- rock underground (though it probably helps) to see grunge's early- Nineties accession to the mainstream as a distinctly mixed blessing. There's a definite shift in the attitudes on the faces of the crowds in these pictures - from the sceptical yet whole-hearted engagement of the rough and ready early club gigs, to the unthinking acceptance and macho self-assertion of the later stadium shows.

The sombre tones in which Peterson talks about "what grunge became" and "the overwroughtness of the celebrity side of things" suggests he was not altogether happy with this change. Can he remember a particular moment when he looked around at a crowd he was photographing and thought, "Why are these people here?"

"Definitely by 1993 - there's a picture of Kurt from behind on a huge stage surrounded with black, and you can see a ring of the audience and they're all over-sized testosterone-crazed males, which is so not what Nirvana or any of those bands were about ...

"It was a very conscious thing to downplay Kurt Cobain's celebrity status in terms of how the pictures were presented," Peterson explains, "so that any other anonymous band or audience member would be given the same weight as him." The book's inside cover says something about "smashing the godhead of rock stardom," but it would be truer to say that by wresting Kurt from his current pseudo- messianic limbo - pinioned to the front of bootleg T-shirts worn by children who weren't alive when he killed himself - and placing him back in the company of his peers, Touch Me I'm Sick actually restores his mythological lustre.

Beyond the surgical precision of Cobain's guitar-playing or the emotive hoarseness of his voice, there was an air of charismatic dishevelment about Nirvana which seemed to embody the hopes and aspirations of all those who felt themselves excluded by the glitz and fakery of the Eighties. The transformation of this sense of indentification from a private feeling into a public fact was a process in which Peterson's photographs played no small part.

I wonder if Charles Peterson has ever had cause to raise a wry eyebrow at the thought of highly paid fashion photographers and their innumerable assistants struggling for days to duplicate the effect of work he did on his own, in a fraction of a second, with a drunken stranger's boot in his ear?

"My style is so different to that of the commercial fashion or music photography," he insists gamely, "that even though it hasn't exactly translated into commercial success for me, it has at least translated into being unique... and being able to do a book like this."

Looking at Peterson's best pictures, all the things that went wrong - Cobain's suicide, the not-so-merry widowhood of Courtney Love, the film Singles - seem to fade into the background. The only thing you can hear is the life-giving roar of the music, and then, almost best of all (in the photographer's own words, which in this case really do paint a thousand pictures): "that afterwards sound of your ears ringing, and the feel of sweat hitting the cold night air as you reel out of the club".

`Touch Me I'm Sick' by Charles Peterson is published on 1 December, priced pounds 26.50, by powerHouse and distributed by Turnaround

CAPTIONS: REBEL YELL

Previous pages: Kurt Cobain held aloft by adoring fans, Vancouver 1991. This page, clockwise from top: Mudhoney at Northgate Mall, Seattle, 1988; the audience goes wild at a Supersuckers gig, Tokyo 1993; Girl Trouble performing in Seattle, 1987

MOSH ADO

From top left: Stage-diving at Endfest music festival, Kitsap, Washington, 1991; Courtney Love of original girl-power band Hole, Seattle, 1993; Cobain in relaxed mood, Los Angeles, 1990