Steve Albini says everyone in Nirvana’s management “was a manipulative piece of shit”

Steve Albini, the American musician, and record producer famed most for working with Nirvana, Pixies, The Breeders and PJ Harvey, has revealed that his experience working with Nirvana wasn’t enjoyable.

In 1993, Kurt Cobain asked Albini to produce Nirvana’s third and final album, In Utero. The Nirvana frontman had been impressed with the producer’s previous work on Pixies’ 1988 album Surfer Rosa and The Breeders’ Pod. Given Nirvana’s majesty at the time, Albini would have been a fool not to accept to be involved with the follow-up to Nevermind.

Nirvana joined Albini at Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota and laid down In Utero over a couple of weeks, using Albini’s technique, which captures the natural ambience of the room with a few extra microphones.

Following the sessions, however, Nirvana’s label, Geffen, threw up red tape, requesting that the record be remixed to soften Albini’s production. Ultimately, a compromise was reached whereby the singles, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘All Apologies’, were remixed for optimal commercial appeal while the rest of the LP was left raw.

In a new interview with The Guardian, Albini reflected on his experience working with Nirvana and their management team in the mid-1990s. “The three members of Nirvana I have absolutely no gripe with whatsoever,” he said. “Every other person they worked with was a manipulative piece of shit who was putting pressure on them, scapegoating me and shit-talking this great record they made.”

Counterintuitively, Albini’s career in production began to dry up following his work with Nirvana. Smaller acts saw him as unobtainable and larger acts avoided him due to a bad word on the street.

“That was direct fallout from [major labels] blaming me for Nirvana getting uppity,” Albini explained. In 1995, he bought the building that would become Electrical Audio but failed to make financial returns for a while. “I went broke several times, down to my last dollar, building the studio,” he revealed.

Fortunately, Albini was saved from destitution in 1997 when he was approached by former Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who were looking for a producer with whom to work on Walking into Clarksdale, their first album as a duo.

Listen to ‘Most High’ from Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s Walking into Clarksdale below.