I got my first guitar – a £30 half-size acoustic from Argos – on Friday 8 April, 1994, when I was on holiday down south, writes Kevin Dyson.

I was ecstatic! I had been pestering my mum and dad about it ever since I had developed my Nirvana obsession to the point of holy/holey cardigans and mawkit hair. From the end of 1992 through to that point I had listened to Nirvana to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Like millions, I completely tuned into Kurt Cobain’s aimless anger and outsider status.

This was pre-internet, so any magazine article which I spotted was pored over dozens of times, bootleg tapes which sounded like they had been recorded in a hedge were purchased as thrilling badges of the ‘true’ fan.

It would have remained an indelible spot in my memory for the guitar anyway.

However, it was to be an infamous day, as- guitar in hand - I returned to the B&B ready to learn ‘that’ power chord and those songs, channelling Kurt.

The owner of the B&B we were staying at had spotted me reading a Nirvana ‘special’ earlier that day – the kind of rubbish magazine that sold the type of material that now gets posted on the web five minutes after it happened.

‘I heard your Nirvana singer Kirk (sic) killed himself!’, he piped up, neither jokingly or serious. Given Kurt had taken an overdose the month before, I thought he was just another idiot making a crap joke.

Still, after trying to learn About a Girl (in vain) I sat down to watch the News at Ten. It reached the second half of the programme without mention.

I was all ready to breathe a sigh of relief when the hammerblow came. Kurt Cobain, aged 27, had killed himself at his home ‘with a single gunshot to the head’. The words still echo now.

I can’t actually remember too much after that, other than my efforts to keep my greeting to myself, both in my bed and on the long drive north.

The headphones weren’t off my head for days.

I was already infatuated with Nirvana, so I reckon I would have been playing their music on guitar anyway. However, the timing convinced me that I had to learn all of their songs. Indeed, twenty years down the line I know that I could remember the ones that I haven’t strummed out for more than a decade.

I will still defend their great music – often unfairly accused of being the simplest form of rock music possible. Yes, there are really super-simple songs. But there are plenty of tunes which have surprised musician friends for their form.

The spark which got me playing was partially rekindled last year, when we marked the 20th anniversary of Kurt’s suicide.

But this week I bought the NME for the first time in about 15 years after spotting blurb for ‘Cobain: Montage of Heck’ – a documentary which looks like it could be one of the, if not the very best rock-umentaries ever made.

For all the accusations of Courtney Love’s interference in the past, it is telling that she apparently gave director Brett Morgen unprecedented access to film, letters and diaries with which to paint a picture of Kurt in a different, possibly more painful, light.

How which veto she retained is difficult to say. However, the film apparently bears little evidence of the traditional Courtney influence.

Of course, there have already been a lot of coverage of the darker side of Kurt.

Interviews with friends, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, Kurt’s mother Wendy, father Donald and many more genuinely close players in Kurt’s life, look like creating something genuinely special while avoiding many of the cheap conspiracy theories that have plagued his suicide.

I still have my first ‘proper’ electric guitar – the one which got the special treatment with stickers etc. Maybe time to get that out and batter out some of the greatest aggressive but tuneful songs ever written.