(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
Mon 13 October 2025 16:30, UK
Reading Festival may not play as pivotal a role in shaping the discourse around British festival culture and its most treasured moments in history. But, in 1992, it delivered one of the most talked-about instances of all time.
The Nirvana headline show that year said all there was to say. The band captured their lightning-like power, bottled it up and then poured it all over a wanting British audience, who from then on out were transfixed by the band’s fresh discography. Walking the tight rope between Kurt Cobain’s delicate songwriting and the entire band’s unbridled power, it was a perfectly crafted setlist that helped define this new age of rock.
It was a show that defied all odds and crystallised what their greatness meant, in the face of their growing adversity. “Kurt was living in LA, Krist and I were in Seattle,” Grohl remembered of the lead-up to that show. “People weren’t even sure if we were going to show up. We rehearsed once, the night before, and it wasn’t good. It turned out to be a wonderful show, and it healed us for a little while.”
It was the perfect show for the band at that time. One year after their seminal 1991 album Nevermind, it helped them become the sound of early 1990s alternative music. A few years before the Britpop explosion, Nirvana had a chokehold on those early years and soundtracked a generation disillusioned by the world around them.
But the very reason Nirvana and grunge flourished in the subcultures of the world in those early ‘90s years was because of what they were pushing back against. The 1980s was a decade of outrageous commercial excess, and that sentiment bled into the arts. The appetite for glossy, extravagant films was matched by a similar desire for pop mega stardom in music, and so grunge presented a subcultural antidote to that.
But while it experienced huge success and culminated in a mammoth show at Reading’s 1992 festival, the point is, it was still a subculture. That’s exactly why even their biggest track, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, didn’t hold the top spot for the longest time in 1991, the year of its release, or in 1992, the year it truly dominated the speakers of every alternative kid in the world.
So, what song held the number one spot for the longest in 1992?
In keeping with the balance of how pop music and alternative music interact with one another, the longest-standing number one song in both the US and the UK in 1992 was a bona fide pop mega hit.
It was Whitney Houston’s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’ used as the soundtrack of the film The Bodyguard. It topped the charts for 14 weeks in the US and ten weeks in the UK, even after being released at the tail end of the year, in November.
Rather oddly, in 1991, the longest-standing number one song was ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Bryan Adams, which, like ‘I Will Always Love You’, served as the soundtrack for a Kevin Costner blockbuster hit.
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