Olaf's Greatest Hits: The Explosive Courtney Love Interview

Music
13 Oct 17

One thing is for sure: Courtney Love doesn't doe things by half. One of rock's most controversial figures, she lived in Ireland for a time in the late 1970s. She recalls taking photos for Hot Press, before moving to Manchester. Later, she famously met and married Kurt Cobain. While Cobain was still alive, she had established herself as a musician in her own right, successfully fronting her own band, Hole. Later, she starred in The People vs Larry Flynt, lost vast sums of money, dried up artistically and fell foul of any number of controversies. At the age of 45, she came back, with powerful new record Nobody's Daughter, a very strange boyfriend and - in this remarkable, free-wheeling interview - a shitstorm of gossip to get off her chest.

“Oh and I don’t CAAARE what I ... HAAAVE to defend ... I will NEVVV-ER go hungry ... go hungry ...’ Fuck! I just broke another damn string. Gimme a minute. Sorry – I’ll get it right.”

Courtney Michelle Harrison – better known as Courtney Love – is on the phone, and I have a serious pain in the head. The most notorious widow in rock ‘n’ roll is sitting on an unmade bed in her LA home, playing me a rough acoustic version of a new song she’s written called ‘Never Go Hungry Again’. Or trying to play it. Several aborted takes in, she keeps either forgetting the lyrics or breaking guitar strings.

She sounds stoned out of her gourd. She’s possibly naked, or that’s the impression I get from shards of the rambling conversation we’ve been engaged in for what – a couple of brief “pee breaks” included – must be almost two hours now. I’m sitting in my office, thousands of miles away in Galway, head-numbed from my mobile, so there’s no way of really knowing what state of dress or undress she’s in.