Fear Factory Singer Recalls Being in Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Video

2012-08-02

Story by Cat Badra

Fear Factory singer Burton C. Bell was a big Nirvana fan

Fear Factory are a pretty heavy band and not necessarily the first group one would expect to be Nirvana fans. But, frontman Burton C. Bell, apparently, is a mega Nirvana fan and even appeared in the grunge rockers’ famed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video.

“I was a big Nirvana fan for a long time, and I saw them a bunch of times on the ‘Bleach’ tour,” Bell told MusicFrenzy.net (via Blabbermouth). “After seeing them a few times, I’d run into them, a friend of mine actually played on [Nirvana’s 1991 record] record, ‘Nevermind’ — he played cello on ‘Something in the Way.’ So we had a copy of that record almost five months before it came out.

“What happened was that, before the record came out, they had a show in L.A. at the Roxy, and after the show, they threw out flyers saying, ‘Hey, come to our video shoot.’ And so me and my roommate got the flyer with the directions on it and we went to the video shoot the next day. . . And what happened in the video wasn’t even supposed to happen. The audience just went nuts.”

Bell added that he made it to a Nirvana show once after that, and then he knew he wasn’t going to see them live again “because [‘Smells’] was on the radio and they were blowing up.” Bell went on to pay tribute to Nirvana and singer Kurt Cobain with a cover of the band’s track “School” on Fear Factory’s 2004 release, “Archetype.”

 




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