90s rock icon Bob Mould: ‘When Cobain died, I pulled the plug – there was nothing worth saving’ | music

TSugar’s beating heart has always been the sound of Pop Mold’s guitar: something massive, metallic, thunderous, like a sonic boom you could whistle. “It was unbelievable, being surrounded by this wall of sound,” bassist David Barbee recalls from his office at the University of Georgia, weeks before the band began its first shows in more than three decades. “Bob was very loud, and there were times on stage when I could see Malcolm playing the drums, but I couldn’t actually hear him.”

“I didn’t wear earplugs when I started playing with Bob,” adds Malcolm Travis, the aforementioned drummer, from his home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. “But soon after I did it. It was fair.” DeafeningAnd although all the participants are 30 years older than the last time they played together, age has not withered them; anyone who has caught Mold playing solo in recent years will attest that his guitar is still eerily loud.

However, sugar wasn’t just about volume. Their 1992 debut, Blue Copper, put that hype in the service of sculpted, melody-hewn pop songs, garnering critical acclaim and commercial success that had hitherto been unthinkable for an underground artist like Mold. But when Sugar disbanded three years later, he felt overwhelmed by the intensity of this life-changing rollercoaster. As he says now, from his home in San Francisco, “There wasn’t much time to think during my drunken years.”

Mold wrote Copper Blue’s songs in 1991, the same year that the breakthrough of Nirvana’s model drew and inspired many alternative rock contemporaries into the mainstream. But while Mold’s previous band Hüsker Dü were a major influence on Nirvana, the crossover success enjoyed by fellow “godfathers of grunge” like Sonic Youth, Soundgarden and Dinosaur Jr seemed beyond his reach; He followed Hüsker Dü’s collapse in 1988 with two solo albums that sold modestly, leaving him without a band, label or management. “I could feel this cultural wave coming, and this great energy happening, but I was on the edge of it all, not at the center,” he recalls.

However, he retained his faith in songwriting, touring constantly across Europe and the United States with only his guitar, testing out new tunes in front of audiences. From the London offices of Creation Records, Mold collected a record deal from Alan McGee and a pre-release cassette of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. “I was fascinated, once I understood the rock music on the album, which would profoundly influence his later work,” he recalls. “I haven’t heard anyone get that sound right in a long time.”

To accompany him on what he envisioned as his next solo album, Mold reached out to his friends, Travis and Barbie. “Bob and I listened to his demos, drank coffee and smoked cigarettes constantly,” Travis recalls. “It was the songs amazingBarbie agrees: “They crystallized the best aspects of everything he did: the melody of the late Husker Du, the power of punk rock, the maturity of his solo albums… they sounded like great hits.”

Mold soon realized that these were not accompanists but bandmates, and they christened their new group while staring into a bag of the sweet stuff at a Waffle House in Athens, Georgia. Sugar then moved to the Massachusetts suburbs to record the album, which ranged from lullabies to love songs, to darker, more ambitious tracks like The Slim, a weathered waltz he wrote “in the voice of someone widowed by AIDS.” This delicate balance of sweetness and substance produced a multi-faceted anthemic masterpiece that inspired critical rapture upon its release in September 1992. “We hit the ground running,” recalls Mold. “I couldn’t really take off my shoes until September 1993.”

Continuous touring and glowing reviews eventually brought Generator its first top ten hit in the UK, and when Copper Blue won the NME Award for Best Album of 1992 – which Barbee says was “like winning an Oscar” – MTV and US radio stations like KROQ played the set. While the success was a nice vindication for Mold, he didn’t rest on his laurels, delivering Beaster, a 32-minute EP containing new material “with religious themes and heavy imagery” that he wanted to release around Easter 1993.

“‘Beaster’ was an emotional fever dream, all kinds of crazy at once,” Mold says of the six-song cycle that smashed rock star complexes and the dark underbelly of organized religion. His reasoning was “what the Moral Majority turned America into in the 1980s, how that affected me as a closeted gay young man; and how the government ignored HIV and AIDS for many years, at the behest of the church.”

Mold’s homosexuality was an open secret within punk circles. However, once Sugar’s star rose, Barbie says he “could sense journalists looking for scoops, so they could be the ones to outsmart Bob.” In 1994, Spin magazine sent novelist Dennis Cooper to interview Mold, on the basis that Mold had said in 2008: “If I don’t get out, they’ll get out of me.” The experience was painful, but today he shrugs his shoulders. “Why didn’t I do it sooner? I could have been of greater benefit to my community. The only backlash I encountered was that some radio stations in the Deep South removed Sugar from their playlists.”

But the incident was a wake-up call for Mold, as the post-Nirvana reality meant that even bands like his were playing the unconventional game of celebrity – in which, he says, “the innocence of 1992 was over.” In March 1994, Sugar moved to Triclops Studio in Georgia for his second full-length film, but emotions were off. Two more alternative rock albums, the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Hole’s Live Through This, have been recorded there recently – both triumphs, but the product of notoriously tortured sessions. Maybe the place was cursed? Then, on April 8, the television in the studio the band had left on MTV broadcast the news that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. Mold was dazed. “It was a good time to step away for a bit. I pulled the plug, wiped the tapes clean. There was nothing worth saving.”

Months later, Sugar toured again on their second album File Under: Easy Listening. Although powerful, it was not Blue Copper II; Mold wrote the first album over the course of a year, “testing out the songs in front of an audience. I wrote this second album in three months, from inside a Mason jar rather than out in the field, and I felt the pressure.” They toured the LP, but when Barbie said in early 1995 that he wanted to spend more time with his young children, Burnt Mold took the opportunity to call Sugar.

Over the next three decades, Mold pursued a diverse and successful solo career, Barbie producing albums for groups such as Deerhunter and Drive-by Truckers and teaching at the University of Georgia, and Travis becoming a hired drummer. Bad timing scuttled some mooted reunions, until — after receiving a birthday video message from Mold — Travis told the band leader that turning 70 had made him realize that “the window was closing fast on a reunion. If we were going to do it, we better do it.” now“.

And so the reunited Sugar will tour Europe and the United States from May until October, having recorded two new tracks to celebrate the event. However, the mold will not be drawn as to whether more sugar music will follow; His focus is elsewhere. “My only thought in the 1990s was to make sure this continued,” he says. “This time, I’m just trying to enjoy everything, in a way I couldn’t the first time.”

What is certain is that it must be loud – punishing and electrifying. Make sure to bring earplugs.

Sugar’s UK tour from May 23 to June 4; The tour begins in London.