10 Greatest Hard Rock Moments On Live TV
1. Nirvana on Top of the Pops
If there's one thing that no musician wants to hear about their performance, it's lip syncing. For any of the people who put time into their craft, having to just pay along with the track really robs you of the connection that you can build with your audience. Then again, Nirvana actually made the best of a bad situation when going on Top of the Pops.
Being told to play along with the CD version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, the band went out of their way to show that this was as staged as it could be, with Krist Novoselic throwing his bass in the air and not even trying to attempt to play it. The real icing on the cake though has to be Kurt Cobain, who sings the song on a live mic in a much lower register than before, almost sounding like how someone like Frank Sinatra might have played the song.
It gets even weirder as the song goes along, with one point showing Kurt Cobain trying to actually swallow the microphone. In an era that was about bringing down the superficiality of rock performance, you probably couldn't have asked for more here. This was a group of guys committed to their craft and if you stood in their way, they were going to take you down with them.