In a grunge scene dominated by stateside bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Hole, and Alice in Chains, British acts seemed few and far between. This all changed with Bush, led by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Gavin Rossdale. With their 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone, the band found immediate success outside their home country, establishing themselves as a British answer to the Seattle sound.
Glycerine would become the album's biggest hit and take the band around the world, but it began its life in a basement flat in London.
“I physically remember where I was for some reason,” Rossdale tells Guitar World in a new interview. “Four people were living there at the time, there was a blue underlying carpet, no top one – I had this really weird Feng Shui, OCD bullshit, where it was like a graffiti-covered kitchen, no carpet, just the underlay.
“I stood there in my bedroom; I could see that blue carpet lying to my left through the door. I turned the recorder on and wrote that one in two passes.”
While writing what would eventually become Glycerine, something clicked so profoundly that Rossdale worried he had unintentionally copied someone else’s work. “I was in full fear that I had just repeated someone else's song because it was way too accomplished for the kind of stuff I had been writing in piecemeal,” he admits.
“I'd write a riff, be on a tape recorder, and send that riff and record my voice and that tape recording of Machinehead, or something, into another thing. So, I was always walking around the parks with two tape machines; that's how I'd do that… crazy times.”
Like its predecessor, Comedown, Glycerine topped Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart for two weeks in December 1995 – helping solidify Bush and their debut as one of the blockbuster acts and albums of the grunge era.
Guitar World's full interview with Gavin Rossdale will be published in the coming weeks.
