Unseen Nirvana gig footage from 1990 up for auction

Previously unseen footage from a 1990 Nirvana gig is up for auction.

• READ MORE: MTV Unplugged – the 20 best performances

The video dates back to February 17 1990, when the iconic Grunge band took to the stage for a live show at Iguanas in Tijuana, Mexico.

An unpublished original video and audio footage of the show is now up for auction at Bonhams, and expected to bring in between $100,000 and $150,000 (£74,000-£110,000).

All in all there is just above 45 minutes of footage from the show, which saw Nirvana in their formative days promoting their debut album ‘Bleach’. The two original master Sony Video 8 tapes of the raw footage is from two cameras that were at the live show.

The cassette covers come with labels reading ‘ORIGINAL MASTER CAMERA-A’, and ‘CAMERA B’ written in black felt tip, while the tapes themselves come with stickers reading ‘NIRVANA I AND NIRVANA II’, handwritten in red ink.

Also included is two Sony mini DV tapes – digital transfers of the complete raw footage from the Video 8 tapes – a portable SSD hard drive containing the “complete, digitised raw footage from both cameras, the professionally edited version of the concert, the edited version of the concert with a security watermark, and some stills taken from the video files”, and the U.S. Copyright Office Certificate of Registration for the cinematographic content plus editing of the concert video.

It comes with an original Nirvana tour poster for their show at Raji’s nightclub on February 15 1990 (two nights before the show at Iguanas), as well as a first original Sub Pop pressing of Nirvana’s album ‘Bleach’ on white vinyl, limited to 1000 copies.

On the night, the band played 13 songs, and frontman Kurt Cobain smashed two guitars – one of which was his homemade pink ‘Mustang’ guitar and the other was a ‘70s Gibson SG.

The ‘Unplugged & Unforgettable: Music Auction’ will end on Thursday (September 24) at 12pm PDT. Visit here for more information.

As for other Nirvana memorabilia, earlier this year, the guitar Cobain used in the band’s iconic ‘MTV Unplugged’ performance featured in an London exhibition earlier this year. Before then, one of his guitars became the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction in 2020 when it was purchased for over $6million by Australian entrepreneur Peter Freedman AM, founder of RØDE Microphones.

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