Melody Maker: Did Andy Wood's death and then Kurt Cobain's affect your attitude to drugs?

Cornel: "No," replies Chris emphatically, "cos that was never the idea. The idea behind the band when we started was we are here to play the music we wanna play and there ain't nothing gonna compromise us. As far as the drugs thing goes, it's no big deal, we just didn't wanna do it. It wasn't a group decision or anything, there was no band meeting where we decided that we weren't gonna do drugs. It's just the fact that, as individuals, we didn't wanna do it. I'm sure that if any of us had wanted to get into that stuff, we woulda done."

Melody Maker: And how did you react to the death of your friends? | Cornell: The same as anyone else, I guess. I was confused. Like all these crazy things go through your head, the same crazy stuff that through anybody else's. I thought, 'I shoulda seen it coming', I thought, 'Too bad someone with that much talent had to die', I thought, 'Too bad he had a drug problem'. Then I guess I just thought about all the other kids that had died that I'd never hear about. You try to rationalise this shit, but there are no rational ways of looking at stuff like that. People ask me if I learnt anything from it, I don't really think I did because all the lessons that could be learnt, I had already learnt. I knew dope killed, that's why I didn't do it. To give another example, I was being interviewed by this little metal fanzine and this kid says, 'Do you think, now that Magic Johnson has AIDS, you wil lver change your lifestyle on the road and your attitude to sex?' And that made me real angry, the assumption that it would take a f***ing sports star and a huge national hero to contract a disease for me to get the idea that having sex with strangers is dangerous. Do you think that I'm that f***ing stupid, that I'm some kinda dopey cartoon character who'll stick his dick in anything until It either drops off or a national hero dies? Jesus. So these are things that you either learn at a pretty young age, or you never learn. The people that don't learn are dead, I guess, or getting there.