While recently discussing the early days of grunge, a term he himself coined, Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm decided to single out a few acts that he considers to be copycats of the original Seattle-based sound, notably singling out Stone Temple Pilots and Australia’s golden boys, Silverchair.
“Before [grunge] became a noun it was used as an adjective,” Arm told Tone Deaf. “You know, like, ‘It’s a grungy sounding guitar,’ If you just sort of apply that to a small group of bands in Seattle, some of who sound slicker than others, that really works for me. But I don’t really care about it.”
“A couple of years ago we were getting questions about the grunge movement and that just sort of seemed strange to me,” Arm continued. “What most people were talking about was a handful of bands that started in Seattle, and then maybe afterwards there were sort of copycat bands around the world – Bush in the UK, Stone Temple Pilots in California, and Silverchair in Australia.”
“I think what was happening in Seattle was an organic thing because these were a small group of people going to shows and seeing each other play. It wasn’t a movement [or] a worldwide thing,” he concluded. Mudhoney will soon be in Australia for Big Day Out 2014 and a series of East Coast sideshows, touring off the back of their latest studio effort, 2013’s fuzz-laden Vanishing Point.
