An Australian cyclist has celebrated the 30th anniversary of Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ by recreating the famous cover art using GPS tracking.
Pete Stokes, a national parks project manager, cycled about 150km on a single-speed bike through the streets of Adelaide, using exercise tracker Strava to sketch the outline of the swimming baby featured on the 1991 album’s artwork.
Speaking to The Guardian, Stokes, who regularly imposes pictures over mapping software through cycling, said the Nirvana baby took about eight hours to complete with bakery stops in between.
“It’s whatever takes my fancy at the time. Nirvana has its place in my record collection,” he said. “When this album came out I was in high school – I was about 14, and that’s when you’re forming your love of music.”
In addition to the ‘Nevermind’ cover, the 45-year-old cyclist has also sketched out Ludwig van Beethoven to mark the composer’s 250th birthday, along with sketches of dinosaurs, dragons, foxes and even a selfie.
Nirvana’s genre-defining LP was released on September 24, 1991 and featured the hit singles ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Come As You Are’. Inspiring legions of music fans around the world and three generations of musicians, it brought alternative music into the mainstream.
The band have announced a special reissue of ‘Nevermind’ to mark the album’s 30th anniversary. Set to be remastered from the original half-inch stereo analog tapes to high-resolution 192kHz 24-bit for a series of reissues, it will be released on November 12.
Spencer Elden – who posed as the swimming naked baby on the cover – has said he wants his image censored on the reissue.
Elden, now 30, is currently suing the band’s surviving members and Kurt Cobain’s estate, among other individuals and entities. The lawsuit alleges that the use of Elden’s image on the album art, taken when he was a few months-old baby, amounted to “commercial child sexual exploitation”.
Meanwhile, the BBC recently celebrated 30 years of ‘Nevermind’ (1991) with a new film about Nirvana’s time in the UK. Titled When Nirvana Came To Britain, it can be streamed here via BBC iPlayer.