Sonic Youth and Body/Head founder Kim Gordon has moved to put a lid on the recent controversy caused by caustic comments, made by her, about Hole founder and lead singer, Courtney Love.
In her newly published memoir, Girl in a Band, the 61-year-old rock icon – who produced Hole’s acclaimed 1991 debut album Pretty on the Inside – described Love in less than flattering terms, saying that ultimately she was “someone to avoid and ignore.” The comments were leaked in advance of the publication of the book, in what now appears to have been an a successful attempt to drum up publicity by the publishers.
Speaking to Hot Press, Gordon now sounds as though she regrets writing dismissively of Love – who was also wife of the deceased Nirvana leader, Kurt Cobain. “You know what?” she told Olaf Tyaransen, "I actually didn’t really care to talk about Courtney. It was something my editor kind of nudged me into. I have a lot of empathy for her; I think she’s a fascinating person. I was really just trying to set the record straight about certain things, because you hear so many different things.
“Basically they didn’t feel like there was really anything that anyone else didn’t already know or hadn’t been talked about in some way,” she adds, "so I was just trying to create a context of information into my story. You know, people think we were friends. I was just trying to explain things. I wasn’t trying to slag her off.”
You can read the full interview in the next issue of Hot Press, out next Thursday.