I'm geeking out so here's the first half of the interview.

Text: Paul Flynn / Pop Magazine.

I offer Courtney Love a note of sympathy about her missing luggage. What a disaster I say. “You think this is a fucking disaster?” bellows Courtney, incredulously, while flinging the door open to her hotel room in the sunny seaside enclave of Santa Eulalia, Ibiza. It is 12.15am. “Well hello! Welcome to my life.”

Courtney Love has spent the last 48 hours en route to Ibiza from Los Angeles and things have already gone awry. This comes as little surprise. Drama, after all, is Courtney’s shadow. Where she goes, theatrical degrees of incident follow. It is part of what makes her the most noteworthy woman of the modern rock age. It is part of what makes her The Punk Diana. Drama is her thing, and not always in the way she would like it to be.

Her baggage – well, her physical baggage – has been impounded at Heathrow and she has been left with only the clothes on her back (a splendid T-shirt with the logo of the Palm Springs rehab unit, The Betty Ford Center, tight denims and a righteous pair of far-me heels) and her hand luggage. Somehow, even with such slight travelling accoutrements she has still managed to semi-trash her hotel room. This takes a degree of dedication to messiness that a four-year-old child would clearly wow at. You know how they say “clean house, clean mind”? Courtney is kinda the opposite of that.

She has just been arguing with ‘a boyfriend’ for the past hour on the phone. She doesn’t get anymore specific, but the debris of a stressful conversation can be seen everywhere. Cigarettes are burning down to their stubs, vertically, on the counter. BBC World News is blaring from the TV set. The covers are askance on the bed and the remnants of room service are littered about the place, bits of cutlery and crockery on the floor, a few more ciggie stubs decorating the porcelain coffee mugs. Whenever it rings, her cellphone is chucked around the room. “We have a relationship.”

For the proceeding five and a half hours I will sit and listen to the current high and lowlights of Courtney Love’s life, with a scattershot debriefing on her actual lovelife thrown in for good measure. Now, I’m sure there are more fun and possibly more fascinating ways to be up all night than spending a few hours with Courtney Love in a hotel room, but right now I can’t think of any. The woman simply cannot open her mouth without a quote dropping out of it. She is a cascade of anecdotes – some belly-laugh funny, some nothing short of heartbreaking. This much I had anticipated. But if somebody had told me that one day I would be up all night with Courtney Love – in Ibiza! – and nothing stronger would pass her lips than bottled water and approximately a billion cigarettes (you give up counting after the first packet has been scrunched into the garbage; often there are two on the go at once), would I seriously have believed them?

Suspend disbelief. After trying on every single garment in the rock-chick closet over the last two and a half decades, and a couple more besides, Courtney is putting on a new frock and checking herself in the mirror to see how it sits. After four years of being “America’s very own Pete Doherty” (her words), Courtney Love is doing sobriety. She’s a year in and counting. You can only pray that she finds the new outfit to her taste. Because she is an absolute blast on it. Courtney Love is probably the only woman in the world who can make being straight appear more rock’n’roll than being strung out. It’s definitely a skill.

In the cab on the way back to Ibiza airport an hour after leaving Courtney, two things stick distinctly in my mind. The first is little short of astonishing. At one point in the conversation she dropped in the casual aside that she lives two weeks ahead of the news. As alleged proof of this she told me that her new friend and supporter Mel Gibson would be getting into trouble with drink a fortnight before his latest scandal hit. “He’d already had a little slip. It was going to happen.” This, of course, is untestable as it had already happened. But another nugget hadn’t – not at that point. She also told me that Whitney Houston would be serving divorce papers on her husband of 15 years, Bobby Brown, sometime in the following couple of weeks.
On returning to England I scan the newspapers for 14 days to see if there is any evidence of Courtney’s speculation on the Brown/Houston separation. Nothing materialises. Perhaps Courtney is not quite as prophetic as she thinks she is. Another week passes and – kazzam! There it is on Reuters. Perhaps she is even more prophetic than she thinks she is.

The second thing that sticks in my mind is a little more troublesome. After leaving Ibiza, Courtney will fly to London for a week. She has made a fun little bet with her friend – she doesn’t specify who or how much for – that she can go for seven days in the UK without making it into a tabloid newspaper. She seriously seems to believe that it is a possibility. Yet Courtney is currently at a British tabloid premium. She is still recovering from the hangover of a maelstrom of events that would eventually “give me a nervous breakdown” (her words). Last year, at the zenith and eventual end of her drug madness, an affair with the Mancunian comedian Steve Coogan dragged her actual sex life, as opposed to her Love life, for the first time in her career through the red tops. Post-Coogan, the British press is still gunning for her.

While the Coogan story was breaking to open-mouthed amazement from the British public, Courtney Love would find her phone at the Sunset Marquis hotel in LA tapped. Nine LA stingers for British tabloids checked into the hotel. She was doorstepped at her gynacaecologist’s house. Her former female crack dealer, who Courtney claims to be ‘obsessed’ by Coogan, sold a story to The News of The World for £40,000, featuring five minutes of taped conversation with Love before Courtney’s best friend and former bass player Lisa Leveridge ripped the phone from the wall.

In Ibiza, Courtney says that keeping out of the tabloids will be a breeze. “The thing is with The Sun and the 3am Girls and The Biz and Rav and…Look! I know all their fucking names now! But you can keep away from them. So I actually made a wager with my friend that I could go to London next week and not make the tabloids. Okm possibly one straight paparazzi picture. But I’m not even going to The Ivy for dinner. They’re like, “You can’t get through a fucking week without being in the tabloids.” I’m like, “You bet I fucking can.” So, we’ll see. I think you attract the tabloids when you want to. When you’re doing things that tabloids like – like taking drugs, hanging out with tabloid-ish people, like going to dinner with Kate Moss – then you’re gonna put yourself in a position where you might have to start all over the next day.”

Three days into her stay in London and there she is, making page five of The Sun, papped on the arm of another British comedy crank, another infamous lothario and multiple ex-addict, Russell Brand. My heart sinks. It appears that Courtney Love simple cannot help herself. But, as we will see, there is often more to a banner headline in a tabloid newspaper than meets the eye.

There are several roles that we are used to watching Courtney Love play out in public. But sober and tender mother isn’t primarily among them. Yet here she is, at 6am in that hotel room in Ibiza, straight, talking about her daughter, Frances.


“Carrie Fisher had a party recently and Ruby Wax was there. Ruby was just screaming at me about certain aspects of my life at the moment. Because I love Ab Fab and because I’m going through the British comedy thing at the moment, I listen to Ruby. Frances loves Ab Fab, too.” It doesn’t take an advanced level of psychoanalysis to join the dots here. “Sometimes she says to me, ‘Do you think I’m Saffy?’ and I’ll say, “Do you think I’m Eddie? Do you think Lisa is Patsy? Come on!” Courtney Love is very, very good at getting her own irony. “There are bits.”

Then she continues, laughing her big, throaty laugh. “The fact that Edina actually does my particular Buddhist chanting is a little too close to home. But a lot of people assume that Frances parentifies me. No way.” By way of illustration, Courtney plucks out another recent family vignette. “I’ll tell you what happen the other day. No one asked my permission, but Frances went to Disneyland with [the daughter of a famous pop icon]. And she came back and said, “Momma, I just wanna thank you for sheltering me.” I said, “What do you mean?” and she said, “I was out with [said daughter] and she’s had like, 20 boyfriends and she curses.”

Sometimes Courtney draws astute and poignant comparisons between herself and her daughter. “When I was 13 I went to Japan to strip. My daughter is 14 now and she’s never kissed a boy. She’s never smoked a cigarette. She’s never drunk wine. And she’s never cursed. When I was 13 I was naked in what were called Kinky Shows on the outskirts of Tokyo and I would have to move every four days. The only way I ended up getting out of the country was to turn myself in to the authorities. I still have diaries from the Deportation Tank.”

Courtney Love, as it turns out, is great with a family story. She is blunt-speaking and strikingly caring and she doesn’t shy away from the more painful details. “There was a situation in this New York stage camp that Frances was at, where she was threatening suicide – and suicide is not funny in our family. I had to call her and Michael Stipe had to call her and Edward [Norton] had to call her and Drew [Barrymore] had to call her after they gave her a shitty part and they were calling her on particular name that I will not repeat. I went alone and dressed to the nines and I totally just went Joan Crawford on it. I figured it was appropriate. And then? They were up her ass like you would not believe when I got there. Frances wants to get into the acting world but after that experience she just made up her mind that she wants to work on her craft and get really good at it and not do anything until she’s 18.”

Frances Bean Cobain is a clever, sensible girl who’s popular at school, gets good grades and loves her Mom. It isn’t the stuff of salacious tabloid gossip, but her Mom loves her right back.

“We’re doing this documentary on Kurt right now and Cameron Crowe, in the most non-exploitive, brilliant way, came up with the idea of Frances narrating it. And Frances looked me in the eye and said, ‘If Cameron Crowe wants to cast me in a movie when I’m 16 like he did with Katie Hudson then fine. But I am not going to talk about my Dad.” Of course, I told Cameron and he loved her for it.”

I ask if Frances is starting to process her life so far. “She is really going through a thing right now. I asked her if she wanted to help out with the artwork on this Nirvana thing we’re doing and she said “Why should I?” I’m like, “Well, what are you going to do when you are 25 and you inherit X amount of money and X is quite a lot? Don’t you think it’s only fair you help with this?” Her feeling is more… Look, she doesn’t blame herself, thank God. But she does blame him. Her attitude is: he left me, fuck him. So she said, “No. You do it. I want to be known for my own self.”

I say that that seems like a totally reasonable thing to say for Frances to be going through. “It absolutely is,” steps in her mother. “And the good news is that I’ve talked to a lot of people who say that children of suicidal parents often blame themselves, and Frances doesn’t do that. She understands that in her family on her father’s side there were three uncles that committed suicide in the same way. On the mother’s side there’s a grandfather who stabbed himself with a knife on Christmas day in front of the family and died a few days later in the same room that Frances Farmer died in. Suicide is heavy on that family. It’s in their tree. Frances tells me if she ever even smokes pot then I gotta send her to rehab for a year. Frances is a square.” Courtney Love does not deliver the word ‘square as an insult.’ She delivers it as a compliment.

“We went to Rumour Willis’s birthday party – it was Bruce [Willis] and Ashton [Kutcher] and Demi [Moore] and Tallulah [Willis, Bruce and Demi’s daughter] who Frances goes to school with. They’re very European, they have little sips of wine with their dinner. Nothing major, at all. Frances says, “I don’t like this.” She’s very square. People can say whatever they want about me as a mother but I think that the proof’s in the pudding. In how she does her homework and how she is at school and what good manners she has. Frances was not raised by nannies. She was raised by me, apart from that six months when social services got involved that was absolutely evil and unnecessary. Even at my worst, she has never seen me do drugs. When I did drugs I would do them in New York or in a hotel. She never came in the room and saw me do drugs. That thing that happened with the [British] tabloids? Thank God those papers weren’t in America. I mean, she heard about it and went out and rented Around the World in 80 Days, which is not Coogan’s greatest recommendation, let’s be honest. And I had to say, “He’s a friend of mine and he’s really nice.”

Five random things you might not know about Courtney Love.

1. It was Mel Gibson who got Courtney sober.

“Mel is the guy – he is the guy who stayed at the Four Seasons when I was high on crack. He came to my door for two solid days to get me out of there. I had these two parasite fucking cocksucker drug dealers with me and Mel Gibson kept coming to my door and I kept saying “Fuck off!” because I was high on crack. He’d say, “It’s Mel”, and I’d say, “I don’t care!” and slam the door in his face. Eventually the drug dealers wise up to what’s going on and they’re like, “it’s Mel fucking Gibson!” and they answer the door and go have a cheeseburger with Mel just because he’s Mel Gibson. And then [her drugs counsellor] comes in and gets me and puts me in the car and takes me away. Mel Gibson was totally instrumental in getting me to rehab in the first place. I love Mel. He’s a good guy. And the people who are freaking out about him ranting and raving when he was drunk are being ridiculous and judgemental. And I say that having gone Jewhoo – you know – the website? I’ve five-eighths Jewish and the rest is Irish, so…. “

2. Courtney has never taken ecstacy and didn’t take cocaine until she was 35 years old.

“I don’t mind anyone drinking in front of me now, but they can’t chop lines in front of me. They just can’t do it. I don’t know. I always used to hate lines. I remember hanging out with Liam Gallagher years ago and he was going blow in front of me and I was like, “Can’t you just stop?” He was like, “Do it, do it!” and I was hating that shit. Then when I got to be 35 years old I started doing it and I didn’t stop for, like, four years. Explain that! Isn’t that weird? Starting at 35? Having never done it before. Because to me cocaine was always a more bourgeois thing, or it was for dumb metalheads. Then after I became a film actor I was around fashion a lot. So you’d be sitting there with, like, [two supermodels] and they’d be naked and they’d be a Jackson Pollak on the wall and a Picasso on the wall and you’d be in a $100,000 couture gown, and I remember calling my old bass player Melissa [Auf der Maur] and saying “OK, I’m going to try cocaine. We’re going to be Scarface. There’s a guy who keeps walking in with a platinum plate and platinum straws and offering me coke, so let’s just go for it.” We did it. We did it for two days non-stop with some of the richest people in the world and some of the most beautiful people in the world and we ended up at sic in the morning outside a club called Twilo with Dave Navarro in little silver shorts going, “Let’s go get some smack.” I mean, this is a downward spiral however you slice it.”

What are you like on coke?

“Cocaine is a really demonic drug that makes you really demonic and gets you in a lot of trouble.”

Have all your drug phases been demonic? Did you ever have a thing for less demonic drugs? Ecstasy, maybe?

“I’ve never even done ecstacy! I’m like the one person in the world who’s never taken it. In actual fact if I ever do take it I’m not going to count it as a slip because it’s a hallucinogen and hallucinogens are not slips in my programme. I would take it with somebody I really love, like one time. And actually I do plan on taking it once before I die.”


3. Courtney is terrified of Oprah Winfrey.


“There was a poll the other day in a small newspaper of the most insane celebrities in America. It was Mel [Gibson], Tom [Cruise] and then me, AND THEN JACKO? I was like, ‘When I was on crack? Maybe.’ But that was a year ago. People have got the wrong idea about me now. Jesus, I need to do an Oprah. But I can’t. Rosie [O’Donnell]’s on The View right now so I’ll do The View. And I’ll do Diane Sawyer. But I’m terrified of Oprah. I’ve done Rosie lots, five times, done Diane Sawyer three times. But I can’t do Oprah.”
What is it about Oprah that terrifies you?

“She doesn’t have a sense of irony. Rosie and Diane do. Oprah’s very mainstream. I’m not good at that. I need a little edge.”

4. Courtney does not consider Kurt Cobain to be the true love of her life

'I don't want to speak ill of the best friend that I've ever had, but he was a big twat if he didn't trust you. Nobody remembers that about Kurt. He was a hostile motherfucker sometimes.'

But nobody ever remembers anything bad about anyone who died young. An early death will pretty much forgive you anything.

'People don't remember how hostile and untrusting he was. It took me two years of tenacity and constancy and letting him ignore me and just being there when he fell and being a very bad boy before I even began going out with him. I may only have been married to him for three years, but there was two years of courtship before that which was almost all one-sided. I think he did love me. But I think, in the end, when you're dealing with someone who is that brilliant and that tortured, you just have to put up with a lot of misanthropic shit. A friend once said to me, "Talent does not help you change the diapers." You can't love someone for the talent, you know? And that's not just what that was about. I loved him because I really loved him. He was funny and sweet, too. I was going through some home-video footage for this Channel 4 documentary that I just did and there's one scene where he's swinging Frances round the bathroom and you can tell just what a good daddy he was. But when the camera moves up to the toothpaste holder you see syringes. She was too small to get to them, but....'

It's dark nonetheless.

It's fucking dark. But at the same time you can see what a great daddy he was. So I didn't let them show that footage. There's some really beautiful footage that no one's ever seen but that was too much. There's a scene where I'm talking to Frances and I say "We're gonna go make daddy lunch" and he's like "I love you!" and it's really sweet. There are creases on my face. It's poignant. But I like big game. I know that I tend to find certain men... You know, Edward [Norton] was a tough one too. It was about eight months of me pretty much grocery shopping for him every day before we dated. Nobody knows this, but I dated Gavin Rossdale for eight months and on Valentine's Day 1996 or 7 I did not go and see Bush play in Little Rock, Arkansas. Me and Edward were in Memphis and I got sent a pretty diamond ring from Gavin. Not an engagement ring, but it was... something. I said to Edward, "If I throw this ring that Gavin gave me into the Mississippi river, do you think we'll go out?" He turned to me and said, "There's a slim chance, but if you do not throw it into the river there is no chance."'

So you did it?

"Of course I did it. Gavin is such a gentleman. Nobody gives him credit, but he didn't kiss Gwen Stefani until the next day that I didn't show up in Little Rock. Isn't that a sweet story? I adore Gavin. I miss him, actually. That's one person in my life now because he's married to Gwen and whatever. I don't consider Gwen an enemy or a problem, she's just... It is what it is."

She seems to be the opposite of you, Gwen.

'She is really light. But you know, we were once at SIR studios, and I was with Melissa and I was nude and Melissa was in her panties. And then Gwen walked in with a poodle and she said, "You know, I've got this huge platform and I don't know what to say." I said, "I'll write your lyrics" and she goes "What are you guys talking about?" And at that time Melissa was sleeping with a married man, and I was sleeping with a married man, and she looked at us and said, "You guys think I'm dumb, don't you?" And we were like "No! No!" That was my one funny interaction with her. After she left, I said to Melissa "If we were in high school right now, you'd be in the art class, Gwen would be in the cheerleading squad and I'd be in detention."

Has there been true love since Kurt?

Oh yeah. Ed, certainly. He's been more of a daddy to Frances that Kurt ever was.

you know you didn't have to go through all that. its already been posted up on mwr. http://www.moonwashedrose.com/media/popmag.html
but i applaud your effort

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