6 Music - Music News

Frontman of legendary rock band Mudhoney, Mark Arm, claims that any sort of mooted grunge resurgence is a the stuff of fiction and that the term might even be meaningless.

This comes as Alice in Chains, Pixies, Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and Therapy are back on the road.

Mudhoney formed in 1988 and played in Edinburgh last weekend (9 Oct) with Vaselines.

Mark Arm said when they started the band, they thought of themselves as a punk band.

"It wasn’t just spiky hair and leather jackets, it was The Replacements and The Butthole Surfers," Arm explained. "Both those bands were hugely different, but they were considered underground punk bands in the US. We felt like we fitted somewhere in that continuum."

The subgenre of alternative rock known as grunge emerged during the mid to late 1980s, in and around Seattle, becoming commercially successful in the early 1990s with the release of Nevermind by Nirvana and Pearl Jam’s Ten.

After initially being used as a descriptive word for "the sound, the grittiness and dirtiness", Arm said the minute 'grunge' got used as marketing tool, it was dead.

"Maybe it was actually used in more of a fashion sense at the time, when people looking at it from the outside equated it with flannel shirts and long underwear being worn out in the open."

Mark Arm

"We were definitely a raw band and we had really narley guitar sounds in the early days, and still do, but the idea that it ended up being a word to describe a movement that is mostly known for major label highly produced records, is kind of baffling to me," he said.

Grunge musicians were noted for their unkempt appearances and Arm reckons the term was less about the music and more about the fashion.

He admitted the use of the word was bizarre to them and their peers: "Good friends in Pearl Jam, they were like, 'We’re not a grunge band, we’re not a dirty, narley sounding band'."

Adding: "Maybe it was actually used in more of a fashion sense at the time, when people looking at it from the outside equated it with flannel shirts and long underwear being worn out in the open."

Mudhoney aren’t the only band of that period to share this view on 'grunge'.

When Dinosaur Jr were last in the UK on tour, Lou Barlow told 6 Music: "Grunge is so over-rated.

"I never understand why people have any kind of nostalgia about that particular period or think that it actually started. It very quickly went into generic heavy metal. There was just one band...Nirvana."