Before its 1991 release, Geffen Records were hoping to sell 250,000 copies of Nevermind. It eventually sold more than 100 times that amount and is also acknowledged as being a factor in its primary songwriter’s death.

With hindsight it is easy to work out why the frontman struggled with the LP after it had been made. In Utero, the last studio album the band made before his suicide, was a difficult, abrasive record, clearly the product of a mind pushed beyond its limit. But he dismissed this follow-up to debut Bleach as “a Motley Crue record” rather than a punk album.

The tunes are still ace, but there is an unquestionable MTV sheen plastered over the bulk of them. The band enlisted Butch Vig to produce the record and trusted him behind the desk. But when mixing went awry, Slayer mixer Andy Wallace was brought in to tweak the record.

Although Wallace used less studio trickery than the average pop producer, Kurt was right: what now sits on 26 million shelves is definitely not punk.

Instead, it’s an awesome mainstream rock record. Its four 45s including “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You” Are are exemplary, soaring rock singles and became angst anthems for teens across the world. The quiet/loud schtick that Nirvana made their own was stolen from the Pixies, as Kurt freely admitted, but even Frank Black’s merry crew never managed to hook listeners like the Nevermind singles.

The guitars are all crunched, phased and compressed to within an inch of their six strings and the drum sounds are predictably accountant-tight and brickie-tough. Lyrically, aside from “Polly”, Nevermind rarely goes beyond woe-is-me or the cryptic: witness “On A Plain”’s ‘The black sheep got/blackmailed again/forgot to put/on as a coat.’

But even the occasional nonsense lyric couldn’t hide the beguiling, revelatory side of his writing. The aforementioned “Polly” is about a rapist, while Kurt said “Something In The Way” was about sleeping rough (friends have since denied he ever did).

And there were Kurt’s vocals. By turns haunted and hurting, caged and desperate, it’s his scuffed, torn diary of a voice that you remember after the guitar crunch has gone, ultimately ensuring that Nevermind is a flawed classic, but a classic just the same.