Gavin Rossdale, the post-grunge ’90s rocker known for co-founding the band Bush in 1992, is spoke out in a new July 15 interview with Blabbermouth.net about how he dealt with the criticism he and his bandmates sometimes faced for being perceived as “cashing in” on the grunge wave of the time.
Rossdale married his fellow alt-rock star Gwen Stefani in September 2002, and the pair announced in August 2015. Their divorce was finalized the next year. Stefani was a coach on NBC’s “The Voice” in 2014, and appeared on the show on and off until 2024.
Gavin Rossdale Suggests Potential Jealousy Made Peers View His Band as ‘Annoying’
In the interview, Rossdale admitted people at times found his band annoying, which he chalks up to the fact that they quickly gained lots of attention after appearing out of nowhere. “So people were, to some extent, wary of us,” he added.
The 60-year-old even said one of his musical peers, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, recently apologized for how he previously treated Bush, admitting he realized, “That’s it. I knew it. You’re one of us,” after tracing Rossdale’s career history. He added that he and Corgan are on good terms now, saying the artists are now “good friends.”
Bush broke onto the scene with the 1994 release of their successful album “Sixteen Stone,” which came out in December, just a few months after the devastating loss of Nirvana superstar Kurt Cobain in April. The next year, their third sing from the album, “Comedown,” became a Top 40 hit in the U.S. and reached No. 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. Rossdale says a perception that his band was taking Cobain’s spot and questions of whether or not the group deserved to fill it might have played into the lack of goodwill towards them.
“I think we were probably a lot to take because of the terrible tragedy of Kurt shooting himself and that void, and then having that void being quite a precious place, it’s like nobody wanted to build on the sort of the gaping wound in the scene. But then they’ve gotta play something on the radio, and they’ve gotta show something on MTV. They can’t just sort of have a shutdown,” he explained. He added that the heavy amount of radio play, TV airtime, and overall promotion his band received was “probably a lot to swallow.”
Gavin Rossdale Previously Talked About How Nirvana Inspired Him
I just saw them just before “Nevermind” came out, when they were finishing touring “Bleach,” Rossdale recalled, reflecting on how he’d been following Cobain’s band since its early days in a throwback interview.
He called seeing them at the Roxy in L.A. “a turning point” in the evolution of his career. He also listed Seattle-born grunge group Mudhoney as one of biggest inspirations.
“Seeing Mudhoney and seeing Nirvana made me understand that I did have a place in kind of – with making rock music.” He said the genre of glam metal, or what he called “poodle rock” did not resonate with him, but seeing Nirvana was a breakthrough moment because the band had all the elements of the “punk stuff” he’d grown up on.
