For a fair bit of the 1990s, Steve Pavlovic was the coolest guy in Australia. “Pav” had the home phone numbers of everyone on the cutting edge, from Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl to the Beastie Boys and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. He started his recording company and signed a string of Australia’s most credible modern artists – Ben Lee, Tame Impala, the Avalanches, the Living End and Wolfmother. Given that track record, it’s more than a little ironic his exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo is called Unpopular.

Pavlovic still has that laid-back demeanour. Even in catastrophe, he is unruffled. Perhaps it’s his Buddhist practice.

Kurt Cobain on stage with Nirvana at first Big Day Out, held at the Hordern Pavilion on January 25, 1992.Credit:Neil Wallace

Unpopular covers Pavlovic’s career as a music promoter in the early 1990s when he toured alternative bands at the precise moment these artists were upending music and pop culture. The show is an essay on what happens when the underground meets the mainstream.

“The reason I called this Unpopular is because when you go and do what you want to do, you inevitably offend people along the way,” Pavlovic says. “I was into the idea of popular/unpopular and how knife edge this is. [For instance] Kurt [Cobain] didn’t want to be popular. A lot of these artists start out in some outsider weird community punk rock thing, f— everything. And then suddenly it takes off.”

Pavlovic, who was born in 1966, moved to Sydney from Canberra, desperate to work in music. He booked tiny gigs in pubs before taking the plunge in 1990 by bringing Seattle grunge pioneers Mudhoney to Australia.

Mudhoney at the Barwon Club in Geelong, Victoria, on February 26, 1990.Credit:Mel Randall

“Mudhoney had a good time and they said, ‘Why don’t you tour our friends Nirvana?’. ‘Here’s Kurt’s number. Call ’em up.’ I called them up and they said, ‘We’d love to come to Australia, but we’re busy making this record – check back in a few months.’”

There is music before September 24, 1991, but after that date, nothing was the same. That week Nirvana’s LP Nevermind and its single Smells Like Teen Spirit rocketed through the music business. The sound was young, loud and snotty, and was made by a new generation that rejected the slick 1980s and the corporate culture of big-hair bands and slick pop. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, was dethroned by kids in flannel shirts and shorts.

“At first, there was a little underground community and we were all getting excited about our bands getting more popular,” Pavlovic recalls. “We thought, our bands are changing the world. The new society is taking over! It was exciting. There was this optimism. Then Nirvana blew it up. It was an exciting moment. It felt like, ‘Wow, our world has been validated’.”

Steve “Pav” Pavlovic in the 1990s.Credit:Jesse Peretz

Pavlovic already had Nirvana scheduled for a show at Sydney’s Lansdowne Hotel when they blew up. Suddenly too big for a pub, Pav made an arrangement with the Big Day Out festival and history was made.

The new style of 1991 was anti-showbiz, anti-capitalist, anti-rockstar. It was all T-shirts, flannel shirts, shorts, independent record labels, work boots and broken homes reaching some cathartic, ecstatic state through very loud music. The mosh pit was where music and violence met.

The music also tended towards the unpopular – it was hard-edged, angry, unpolished and paid no respect to smooth, radio-friendly tunes. “It’s beyond the boundary and that’s half the excitement,” Pavlovic explains. “You don’t really know what’s going to happen, but it’s going and it’s not like the guy next door.”

For the exhibition, Pavlovic has created an oral history with reminiscences from key players such as Sonic Youth’s Moore. Perhaps the most significant interview was with Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, who still feels the overwhelming rush of fame. “Yeah, we dug a moat around the band and then we put a moat around our music by working with [hardcore producer Steve] Albini just to try and stop all the craziness.”

As it turned out, the moat wasn’t deep enough. The pressure of fame and heroin led Kurt Cobain to suicide in 1994. Over the Christmas break of 1995-96, Pavlovic presented his first festival, Summersault. The line-up featured Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, Beck, Noise Addict with Ben Lee and others. It was the first tour the Foo Fighters had done, but the others were cresting.

Beastie Boys, performing live at Wollongong Waves nightclub in 1994.Credit:Neil Wallace

Despite a stellar line-up, Summersault was a financial bust. For Pavlovic, it represented the end of an era.

“By the mid-’90s it felt like the beginning of the end because, suddenly, everyone with a guitar is alternative rock,” he says. “This format got created and took anything that wasn’t Bruce Springsteen or Jimmy Barnes. All the bands that were at the peak of their powers in ’95-’96 started changing.”

After getting his shirt back, Pav eased his way into the recording business with his label Modular. He signed a schoolboy, Ben Lee, and then Melbourne group the Avalanches whose record, Since I Left You, is internationally acclaimed. Likewise Tame Impala. Wolfmother had a massive hit in the US and earned a Grammy while the Living End is one of Australia’s most beloved trios.

Over recent years, Pavlovic has curated festivals including Vivid in Sydney and two in Croatia, as well as presenting parties and events internationally. Meanwhile, his storage space was heaving under the weight of memories. Which is where the Powerhouse came in.

“I’ve got all this stuff that will really resonate with people,” he says. “We’re not going to be the Hard Rock Cafe and show people some lanyards and posters.”

There’s a thin line between curator and hoarder. Pavlovic has kept every poster, tour book and keepsake. He has augmented this hoard by curating an extensive photo exhibition featuring the work of Sophie Howarth and others who had unlimited access to the artists.

A multi-camera shoot of the Summersault festival has been turned into a moving, almost abstract film with a score by Warren Ellis. There is a room devoted to Nirvana including a loaned Cobain guitar.

The challenge has been to capture the anarchy, the noise and the excitement of young people creating a new style. “It’s been really fun,” says Pav reflecting on Unpopular and the triumphs and dangers of the times. “I took [the band] Fugazi camping and one of them was attacked by a giant kangaroo. So we’re all running through the bush naked because we had just been for a skinny dip, cowering from this huge kangaroo.

“Ian McKay from Fugazi said to me, punk rock was the new idea and when the new idea is new it is at its best moment. It’s exciting, fresh, wonderful and thrilling.”

So see it while it’s still Unpopular.

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