Thirteen years ago, about two and a half years before his suicide, I briefly met Kurt Cobain. That the episode took place in an altogether different age is proved because we crossed paths at The Word, the fairly risible Channel 4 programme that reached its apogee in the mid-Nineties. Nirvana were there to play their career-launching single Smells Like Teen Spirit; I had tagged along with a small crowd of fellow music journalists, having been tipped off that the band’s performance might be something worth seeing first-hand.

And so it proved. Back then British music was in a trough, laid low by the decline of acid house, and still a few years away from the wonders of Britpop. A typical genre at the time was defined by musicians known as “shoegazers”, who would stare at the floor, switch on their guitar effects pedals, and attempt to create the kind of amorphous songs that the music press was prone to term “soundscapes”. This, needless to say, was not exactly the stuff of primal rock ’n’roll thrills.

Nirvana, by contrast, had everything the UK was lacking. Their performance that night began with Cobain making a dedication to his new girlfriend Courtney Love (“the best f*** in the world”, he said, effortlessly grasping The Word’s ethos of shock for shock’s sake), before he led the charge into three minutes of music that was at once chaotic and incisively powerful. Weeks later, Smells Like Teen Spirit had made its way into the British Top Ten.

There was a small reception after the show, at which guests were encouraged to drink bottles of warm beer and talk to Dani Behr. The three members of Nirvana shuffled to a corner of the room and quietly held court with a collection of associates and hangers-on; after 20 minutes of awkward mingling Cobain latched on to a conversation I was having with a colleague.

We were talking about the Farm, an opportunistic gang of Liverpudlians who had recently had a hit with a song called Groovy Train; dressed in a weatherbeaten mac, Cobain was standing with a beer, peering out from under his unevenly bleached fringe.

“Who are you talking about?” he said.

“The Farm,” I mumbled nervously.

“Oh,” he said. “Uh, who are they?”

“They’re from Liverpool,” said my colleague, who had met Cobain before. “John Peel likes them.” And that was that.

Now, this story is not much. I would much rather be able to boast about having talked to Cobain about the true meaning of punk rock, why the prospect of success filled him with dread, or, indeed, why Courtney Love was the best f*** in the world. The strange thing is, however, that even this rubbishly anti-climactic yarn can make some people emit awe-struck gasps.

I discovered this a couple of years ago, when I was researching an article about teenage fans of so-called nu-metal, a musical form — derived, in part, from Nirvana — whose enthusiasts tend to dress in black hooded tops, thread their jeans with chains, and spend much of their lives fearing the violence of “townies”. The people I met paid tribute to such noise-crazed groups as Puddle of Mudd, Slipknot and Creed — but their most enthusiastic words were reserved for Cobain.

Their schoolbags were festooned with badges featuring his image. They talked, with little persuasion, about how he was endowed with the increasingly rare asset of being “real”: unpolluted by commercial concerns, driven by nothing more complicated than the desperate need to express himself. In their estimation, that he shot himself was a consequence of his purity being fatally sullied by his Faustian partnership with the corporate music industry.

Though inevitably romanticised, this posthumous view of Cobain is at least coherent and in keeping with the pain-racked tenor of much of the music that Nirvana released while he was alive. In Utero (1993), in particular, is this aspect of Cobain’s legacy incarnate. Recorded in the wake of his first burst of worldwide success, its opening lyrics are: “Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I’m bored and old.” From that starting point, Cobain flies into all kinds of statements of his predicament, ranging from the elliptical (“Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally,” goes Pennyroyal Tea) to the brutally transparent. One of its most ferocious songs is simply entitled Rape Me. Listening to that album — which remains stunning — his time as a star seems to add up to a cautionary tale about the corrosive effects of success.