Meet Dr Grunge

Popular music journalism students may know him as Dr Jerry Thackray but to the rest of the world he is better known as Everett True - “the man who discovered grunge” (Entertainment Weekly, 1992) and pushed Kurt Cobain on stage in a wheelchair for Nirvana’s final UK performance at Reading Festival in 1992.

Everett True is a world-renowned rock critic who has written for a vast range of magazines. He was on the editorial team of Melody Maker throughout the 1990s before going on to found influential DIY magazines Careless Talks Costs Lives and Plan B. Kurt Cobain called Everett the “biggest rock star critic in the world”, while Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev called him “our generation’s Lester Bangs”.

Now you can read about his extraordinary life in his new autobiography The Electrical Storm - Grunge: My Part in its Downfall.

True has also published best selling biographical books on Nirvana and The Ramones, as well as the first full length account of the original grunge scene, Live Through This. He was also the first person to release a record on Alan McGee’s Creation imprint and still gigs as The Legend today.

The Electrical Storm (with illustrations by reclusive French genius Vincent Vanoli) is a collection of sad, racy, funny, cruel, clever and brutally honest stories from Everett’s life. It has been excerpted on various influential websites - Collapse Board, Drowned in Sound, God is in the TV, The Recoup and The Stranger to name just a few.

In 2016 Jerry Thackray completed his PhD, entitled The Slow Death of Everett True: A Metacritism, in which he explores the shifts in the music criticism industry through the focus of his performance as Everett True.

The Electrical Storm - Grunge: My Part in its Downfall is the second book to be published by Jerry Thackray’s crowd funded imprint Rejected Unknown. 

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