The sound of a deep, phlegmy cough can be heard outside the door. "I hear the cough of my daughter," Love says, calling out. "What is that bronchial coughing? Come in, Francesca!" The door flies open and Frances Bean runs over to her mother and sits in her lap, wrapping her arms around her neck. The 9-year-old is clearly her father's daughter, with Cobain's intense blue eyes and dimpled chin.

"Oh, when is the coughing going to stop? When?" Love says in a cooing, concerned voice. "What's happening? Are we on the antibiotics? What's going on? When was the last time you saw the doctor?"
"Last week."

"What did he say?" Love asks. "Nothing in the chest X-ray?"

"He said it was fine. He said there was nothing wrong with them."

"Well," Love says, rocking Frances back and forth. "I only smoke in here and in my bedroom, so that's kind of good. I had some incense burning the other day. No more incense. Are you okay at school? Are your teacher's concerned? Do you have your Kleenex and stuff for when you cough stuff up? How many times has it happened today?"

"Twelve."

"You have to spit it up and not swallow your phlegm," her mother says. "You've got to stop that. You know what's nice?" Love stands up and puts her hands on her hips. "Handkerchiefs! Sexy old handkerchiefs. Like Winona [Ryder] and I got at the lace show. I think I have some that are really pretty and have lace on them. Frances, you've got to blow the nose."

"Where's Jim, Mommy?"

"He's in New York."

"Why?"

"He's doing business."

Frances has grown attached to Barber since he met Love more than three years ago while Hole were recording their last album. At the time, Barber was married. (He and ex-wife Lesley have two children.) He declines to comment on his divorce, but Love doesn't. "He was sleeping in the basement!" Love claims. The divorce took two years. "She positioned herself as this Oprah-audience-member martyr," Love says of his ex-wife.
The divorce was not without high drama. Love filed a stalking and harassment suit against the former Mrs. Barber in December 2000, claiming Lesley had drive to Love's house and tried to run her over. "It was crazy!" Love says. "I was like, 'All right, look, if I poached your husband when you were having a good marriage, that would be one thing.' But the fact is I gave her a six-month warning. I called her and said, 'I really have the hots for your husband and you're treating him like shit.' I've never poached anybody's fucking guy!"
She reconsiders: "Maybe a one-nighter here and there." Love takes a drag off her cigarette and exhales wearily. "How you go from a woman with a degree in library sciences to me, I can't explain."



NEXT to the beds at Skipworth Juvenile Detention Center in Eugene, Ore., were clipboards stating the names and phone numbers of parents to contact in case of an emergency. Courtney Love's read, "Whereabouts of parents unknown." She knew where they were, but she didn't want anybody else to know. The 13-year-old convicted shoplifter was afraid that if it were discovered she had a $1,000-a-month trust fund from her grandparents, she would have to leave.

Love's mother, New Age psychologist Linda Carroll, is the adopted daughter of a wealthy San Francisco family. 'She was blue-eyed and blonde-haired,' Love says. 'And when her adoptive parents found out she was a Jew on her mother's side, they forced her into Catholic school.' At 17 Carroll got pregnant by Love's father, Hank Harrison, a Grateful Dead follower with whom Courtney has no contact: 'He's a psycho.'

Love's birth certificate reads Love Michelle Harrison, Love says her mother always called her Courtney, after the heroine in Chocolates For Breakfast, a 1956 pulp romance novel about a teenager whose mother is a has-been actress living at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Love pulls the book from a shelf and reads from the jacket in a melodramatic tone: "'Courtney had a need for love that drove her on a frantic and hectic pursuit of an unattainable ideal!'"

It also turns out her mother is the daughter of screenwriter Paul Fox, brother of Douglas Fairbanks Jr (Fairbanks changed his last name). "Douglas Fairbanks is my great-uncle!" Love says wowed. "Oh my God! And if you think I'm going to fucking let the fact that I'm the great-niece of one of the first movie stars go down unnoticed, you are out of your fucking tree, thank you very much!" declares Love. "Finally I got a little pedigree!"

Ayear after Love was born, her parents divorced, and Carroll embraced the '60's lifestyle, remarrying several times and living in New Zealand with her daughter. "She didn't really want me around," Love says. "And I didn't want to be around her." When Love was 11 she returned to the States, and moved to Oregon with her mother's gay therapist, who was happy to let her board for three grand a month. Two years later, Love found a more structured life by stealing her way into Hillcrest Juvenile Detention Centre and then into Skipworth. A social worker filed a report with Oregon Children's
Services in 1980 stating "Courtney... repeatedly asks for authorities to find her a 'home.' It is apparent that Courtney has been in search of a family life she has been deprived of for so many years.

Once out on her own, Love led an itinerant existence stripping, acting, and punk-rocking her way from Portland to Dublin to Hong Kong to Minneapolis to San Francisco to Los Angeles. Keeping track of exactly where Love was and when is like keeping up with her current suings and counter-suings and the speculations they ensue - not easy.

By 1982 she was living in Malibu with her "first real boyfriend," Jeff Mann. The couple soon fell into the culture of heroin, the drug on whichshe would later become dependent. After Mann broke up with her, Love moved in with his mother, Bernadene Morgan, a Hollywood costume designer whose credits include The Eyes of Laura and American Gigolo. Part of Love's lore is that she worked in Paramount's wardrobe department: 'The shit they were throwing out was allgoing into my closet. I was wearing Lauren Becall's shoes, Grace Kelly's dresses, and Frances Farmer's hats.' But it was really Morgan that worked there, letting Love tag along. 'She spent a lot of time with me there,' Morgan remembers. 'She was fascinated by the clothes and so excited when she found something genuine.'

The rest of her time was spent writing what Morgan describes as 'very deep, soulful stuff that she'd always just leave around the house.' Morgan suspected Love was still doing drugs but encouraged her interest in acting, dropping her off at casting calls for movie extras. Her first time out she was typecast as a punk rocker. 'And when Courtney walked back into the house that day she said, "I'm changing my name." And that's when she became Courtney Love.'



LOVE taps on the limousine's glass divider, which is marked with a big "no smoking" sticker; and asks the driver
for a match. She was four hours late leaving for the long drive to the We Care spa, citing 'phone drama'. The limo is strewn with a duffel bag, books, a carton of cigarettes, and her guitar. Love's been writing songs for months, playing them for close friends. Written before September 11th, the original version of 'Life Despite God' might never be recorded. 'I keep not wanting to sing this one line,' Love says. "And the plane can go down, we can all hit the ground, God knows what I've done to you..."

Love has also been fighting to keep her movie career on track. She has just been cast in Vixens as the real-life Victoria Woodhill - the first woman to run for President. And she's still trying to get a Janis Joplin project going: "I'm no spring chicken. So if I don't play Janis now, I'll be almost 10 years older than the woman when she died." When she grows up, Frances wants to be an equine veterinarian (she named her horse Charisma). But she could well take after her mother.

"She's got a five-octave voice," Love says, proudly. "And she's been in two school plays - Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin. She's got range.... You know Kurt was enamored of Hollywood. He was going to do a part in The New Age with Judy Davis. He was entranced by the whole Hollywood thing. He courted [director] Gus Van Sant... Nobody had any idea because they all had this picture of St. Kurt the Unambitious. But, it's like, Oh, God, please! He's more ambitious than Ashley Judd on latte!"

A road sign up ahead: In-N-Out Burger, one half mile. "I'm starving," Love says, pushing a button to lower the glass between her and the driver. "Excuse me, sir," she says. "I want to stop at the In-N-Out Burger." Love figures it will be her last supper before five days of fasting and colonics. "What difference does it make?" she reasons. "Tomorrow morning it'll be in and out of me."

Turning into the fast-food joint's parking lot, the driver informs her that the limousine is too big for the drive-through. "Are you going inside?" he asks. "No," Love replies. "You're going inside. We'll take two cheeseburgers, two fries, and two large Cokes."

Asked what their lives would be like if Cobain were alive, Love replies, "I don't think we'd still be together. He had such a high tolerance for [heroin], always going to death's door. By the time I stopped doing it six years ago, I'd had it. Enough."

"But I'd have found him a good wife. I'm good at that. I get along with my ex-boyfriends. Edward [Norton] loves/hates me. But I did dump him, so it's got to be tough. He still has mine and Kurt's marriage bed, I should get that back. Jeff Mann, dumped me, and after that I said, 'I'm never getting dumped again.' Well, if you consider a suicide getting dumped, which I guess it is, getting dumped on an epic level."

Cobain has yet to be put to rest, in more ways than one. His 23-volume journals were finally sold last month to Riverhead Books for a reported $2.8 million and are certain to cause a storm on publication. And after splitting the husband's ashes with his mother, Love has yet to find the suitable spot to bury them. "I can't get Kurt buried anywhere," Love says. "No graveyard in Seattle wants him. Although many in Hollywood do. They like that kind of tourism."



After five hours on the road, not five minutes away from We Care, Love changes her mind and tells the driver to turn around. "It's too late to go to the We Care spa tonight," she says. "It's so grubby and gross there." Dialing information, she calls the Ritz in Palm Springs. "It's Courtney Love," she says. "I'm in the neighborhood and I'd like to book a luxury suite for tonight. Do you have one with a private pool? No? Hot tub? Is a masseuse available? No? Then open the yellow pages and get a certified massage therapist to come in and let's hope it's not a crazy old hooker or something."

The limo pulls up. The door is opened. And out steps "a Dr. Seuss character on chemo." But she doesn't care. Hat in hand, Love smiles back at the stares, lights a cigarette, and strolls through the lobby to the front desk, where the clerk, as instructed, is scanning the yellow pages.




One week later, "Hey, it's me," Love's voice is low and conspiratorial on the answering machine. She's calling about an interview request I left with her mother.

"Let's not scare my scary mother, because she's scary, okay?" she says. But that's not all. "I have to deal with legal insanity today. I'm being followed. Some guy in a black SUV, and it's terrifying. If anything should happen to me in the next month that seems untoward, don't say I didn't say anything about it... I have two phone lines, so I don't think my phones are tapped. I've been taking pictures of the car for court. I think they're trying to get to me. You have to remember a lot of the music business ends up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where the Sopranos really come from, so there's an aspect that's frightening, about as frightening as my mom...."

The Face 1993:

hole lotta love

Hole were once one of Seattle’s hottest bands, but then their singer married
someone more famous and the music got lost is scandal and speculation.
But now, with a second album on the way, it’s time to get back to basics.




Tonight Courtney Love’s hair is a strange shade of orange red. Yesterday it was auburn, and tomorrow it will be white blonde, but without the usual dark roots. Vanity probably has something to do with it, because tomorrow she is doing the cover shoot for this story. But during a phone call to London a week earlier, she explained how she no longer wanted to go platinum because people automatically associate blonde with bimbo. Now she has a “fuck them” attitude; she prefers the colour, it’s more her. It’s louder, more in your face: it
makes a statement. “I don’t see why I have to take on this frumpy housewife look just because I’m married and have a baby.”

After waiting in Seattle for two days to meet Courtney (the nanny is on leave, and she’s been babysitting), I eventually join her partners in grunge, Hole, in a bar to wait for her. She arrives around midnight. You can feel her presence in the room before she comes into sight, her charisma projected in front of her. She smiles, a huge red lipsticky grin and saucer-round green eyes, and extends a hand. Courtney is the eccentric, artistic, larger-than-life front person with the strangely addictive personality. Who wears baby doll dresses, often a size too small, which give the impression of a grown woman presenting herself as a child. Tonight a stripy, hand-knitted woolly hat perches on the back of her shock of hair, a diamante heart hangs around her neck, a yellow plaid jacket covers a knee-length patchwork dress, and dark blue tights with occasional holes lead to dark, shiny strap-over shoes. The others excel at understatement. They are a jeans and Ts band, wearing the same clothes during the day, out at night, for the photo shoot.

I’ve been warned that there are three subjects I should steer clear of: Courtney’s husband and Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain; their five-month old baby, Frances Bean; and drugs. I meet Courtney and, as you’d expect of any loving mother, her conversation is
punctuated by concern for the child, who she misses constantly. She can’t help but refer to Kurt and his music-after all, she shares a bed with him, and Hole are part of the same grunge rock scene. And drugs. Last September’s issue of Vanity Fair, which ran an investigative piece on Courtney, made on-heroin-during-pregnancy allegations and published a now-famous photograph of her semi-naked and heavily pregnant, with a cigarette obviously air-brushed out of her raised hand. So she can’t dismiss that subject out of hand either.

Courtney insists she wants this piece to focus on Hole, but the events of the past year make it hard for her to devote herself to discussing her music and nothing else. She wants to do the best for Frances Bean, who she obviously dotes on, but she also wants to follow a career. There is a dilemma in wanting to be a right-on, politically correct woman and at the same time assenting to the attraction of the “hot rock chick” stereotype. From the stories she tells, she has always been a wild child-but, now that’s she’s getting paid to be one, she’s also finding that it has a price. Despairing about the past year’s events, she sighs heavily and says: “I guess my message to woman would be not to marry men who are more successful than them. I know I’ve got a this big mouth that probably would’ve gotten me into trouble anyway, but not this much.”

She pauses, blows her nose loudly and continues. “I don’t do many scandalous things, I really don’t lead a debauched life. All I want to do is make good records. So far I’ve sold four crates of records and I don’t matter, I shouldn’t matter. I want a clean slate. Even if I have to dye my hair brown and put on tons of weight.”

Welcome to the confusion that is Courtney Love’s world, to being more famous for being part of grunge’s royal family than for fronting a band that could by now have been successful in its own right. As Courtney herself says, she and her husband have become cartoon characters. The media records their every move, right down to the macaroni cheese and ice-cream they may (or may not) have eaten for dinner. At the height of Nirvana mania towards the end of ’91, their “Nevermind” album was shifting units in the States at the rate of around 50,000 a day. To date it has sold around eight million copies worldwide. While the leading exponents of Seattle grunge were still in the limelight-and rumours were abounding that Kurt was dead-Courtney and Kurt got married in Hawaii in February last year. Certain
parts of the press delighted in describing Courtney as, among other adjectives, manipulative (she apparently talked him into the relationship and the wedding: very unfeminine) and evil (she supposedly got him into shooting up heroin). A few months later, amid
continuing heroin rumours, Courtney’s pregnancy was announced, prompting more tabloid-style slander.

By August, if you believed everything you read, Courtney’s baby was dead and Nirvana weren’t playing Reading, they were splitting up.
Nirvana headlined at Reading; Kurt was resplendent in a blond wig, and encouraged the mud-caked crowd to chant “Courtney, we love
you.” Later that month, a heavily-pregnant Love appeared in the Vanity Fair piece. Frances Bean was born and, although Courtney says
she was a healthy seven pounds plus, information was “leaked” from the L.A. hospital to the effect that the child weighed in at only
three pounds. The tabloids swooped on the rumour and insinuated that it was a crack baby. No stranger to insults, Courtney could live
with having been dubbed the “wicked witch of the west.” But the drug stories, circulating at a time when Bush’s administration were
stressing the importance of family values, made the couple and their baby acutely vulnerable and open to public and state inspection.
She speaks of it now as a “witch trial.” “I’m famous for really crass, gross things. People here think I live in a different dimension, so I
can’t hear them talking about me. Everything gets reported, like how many zits I’ve got. It’s like the game of Chinese whispers; I hear
that I wasn’t wearing any underwear, that blood was running down my leg. I get it more than my husband, and that’s the really scary
part.”

Perhaps one of the scariest aspects of being in the limelight is how much money people can make out of you. Another event which caused
a furore last year - and which will continue this year - was the researching of an unofficial Nirvana biography. Apart from shamelessly
approaching friends and ex-lovers, the writers also allegedly offered the band’s tour manager a substantial amount of money to talk. And, Courtney says with disgust, they rifled through the dustbins outside her and Kurt’s L.A. home, only to find mountains of empty beer cans because Hole’s drummer Patty had been staying there. “I think I sacrificed our band to make Kurt more interesting,” she quips, playing up to her image.

Before Kurt, before Frances Bean, before the press reports, before public (mis) understanding of and reaction to those reports, compromise was never a word on Courtney’s agenda. As a child she reacted, in the most part, to her parents, who used to chide her for her pre-pubescent naughtiness: “Why don’t you act normal? You could do really well at school, you could excel. You don’t need to
indulge in extreme behavior.” Love was born 26 years ago: her mother was a bit of a hippy, her father a part of the Grateful Dead
entourage who abandoned his family early on to dedicate his time to the band. She traveled with her mother to New Zealand and Australia, got into minor trouble and returned to the West Coast.

Between then and now she has played in several bands, including an early Faith No More and Sugar Babydoll, which she formed with Kat Bjelland- now of Babes In Toyland - and L7’s Jennifer Finch. She auditioned for various films and got a part in Sid & Nancy, a couple to whom she and Kurt have since been compared, and starred in Alex Cox’s disastrous spaghetti western piss-take, Straight To Hell. She spent time in Liverpool, sharing a squat with Julian Cope and listening to Echo And The Bunnymen records. And, she mentions in passing, she married a transvestite in Las Vegas on a drunken whim and divorced him days later. Moving to L.A., she decided on the name “Hole” for her new band, taking it from Euripedes’ Medea. There’s a line in the classic Greek play where Medea talks of a hole piercing straight through her, through her soul. “It’s about the abyss that’s inside,” says Courtney, simply.

“I was terrified of being mediocre, so I never behaved in a socially acceptable way,” she says with a hint of post-adolescent
embarrassment at her mis-spent youth. “Now I wish I would’ve [been more mediocre], because then I’d be more centred.” These days,
she’s suspicious of people, wary of speaking her mind quite so freely. She’s obviously trying to be more balanced, but if she were to
really succeed, it’s unlikely she’d be quite such a magnetic force.

“I HAVEN'T DONE A PRANK CALL IN AGES,” says Courtney gleefully. We’ve moved on from the bar to the drummer’s apartment, and Courtney is leaning on a table leafing through a phone book. She’s sniggering at some numbers, scowling at others. “Who should we call?” she asks the other members of Hole, without looking up, but no one answers. Patty, who’s playing host, is preoccupied with choosing a record. Leslie, who joined the band on bass at the end of last year, is in a post-travel daze, suffering from a non-stop,
three-day drive up the coast from L.A. She sinks into the sofa and sips her beer. The six-foot-four lanky guitarist, Eric, the
longest-standing Hole member (he responded to an ad Courtney placed in a local L.A. paper), is on his way. Courtney makes a prank call (pretending to be a groupie to a local, rather famous band), ponders doing another one, then gets distracted by calling Kurt to see how the baby is.

Courtney Love talks incessantly. Almost every situation elicits an excited or disappointed shriek. She is fuelled by the sort of hyperactive adrenaline normally present in a child, she practically chain smokes, she laughs boisterously and speaks in jokey character voices with the band. They are perfectly talkative when Love’s not around (with the exception of the sultry Leslie, who, unimpressed by the attentions of the photographer, announces sarcastically that she only dates girls), but Courtney’s presence seems to signal a certain reserve. This could be because they can’t get a word in edgeways. Or maybe they’ve learnt from Courtney’s mistakes.

When Hole released its first and only album to date, “Pretty On The Inside,” in autumn ’91, it received critical acclaim on both sides of
the Atlantic, and for a while they were touted as the next Nirvana. The songs are a close reflection of the band’s singer-guitarist-songwriter: her moods, her confusion, her anger, flooding out in a torrent over an abrasive punky grunge soundtrack. Co-produced by Don Fleming (Teenage Fanclub, Screaming Trees) and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, it was dubbed autobiographical by some (especially the single, “Teenage Whore”) and New York’s Village Voice voted it LP of the year.

Both Courtney and Eric feel that, although the music on the LP may have been sloppy, the lyrics stand the test of time. But, she insists,
they’ve never been a “big cathartic hate band.” She is passionate now: “When you hear a great song, it touches your life. It affects
you, it’s like a scent, it reminds you of something. You fuck to it, you feel blue to it, you feel great to it. It’s like Joy Division’s ‘She’s
Lost Control’ - that song meant so much to me when I was younger.” Her frustration at being misunderstood spills over. “We were
getting associated with this dark side, with hate-mongering, with contrived hostility. The anger’s just something that comes out of me
naturally, even when I try to temper it. But I’m not like some young girl saying ‘Look at me, I tried to kill myself and I’ve got tracks!’
Things like that, your scars, you want to try to hide them from people. But people keep looking for them.” Which is hardly surprising
when songs are as provocative as “Teenage Whore.”

After a lengthy musical silence, Hole return this month to sell a few more crates of records with a single their PR person ambitiously
muttered could prove to be their “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “My Beautiful Son” will give Hole, and more importantly Courtney, a
chance to prove herself, a chance to deflect the attention back to a so-far promising musical career. Hard but melodic, as short and
sharp (but not as vitriolic) as a punk classic and not a million musical notes away from Sonic Youth, “My Beautiful Son” is surprisingly
accessible and is backed by “20 Years In The Dakota,” an almost tender song with Beatles-esque vocal harmonies. If there is a notable
step gap to be filled by a girl (grunge/punk) rock band this year (and there is), then Hole are in hot contention to fill it. That said, the
competition is certainly warming up - along with L7 and Babes In Toyland, there’s the fellow Seattle all-girl group Seven Year Bitch
and the nearby-based, Hole-inspired collective, Riot Grrrls.


PATTY'S BROTHER (who’s also in a band, as is Patty’s girlfriend - in fact, her band Sour Pussy would make a great double bill with Hole) comes into the apartment he shares with his sister with a gaggle of friends. One is an old boyfriend of Courtney’s who, she later explains, laughing, used to try to meet her on the sly “because all his friends used to make fun of me. They were punk rock and I was new wave at the time. I bust him every time I see him. I was hot! I had my own apartment.”

We move next door to Patty’s bedroom, where she treats everyone to a complete dissection of her own record collection - “Here they
are, you can bust me now.” She gets busted for Cactus World News (Courtney: “I bet you got some shitty records in there, The Alarm
or something”), given the cred thumbs up for Patti Smith and Janis Joplin, screamed at for Images’ second LP, and given all-round
approval for PJ Harvey.

One of Courtney’s pet subjects is the eternal dilemma between having certain post-feminist ideals in your head and still being aware
that it’s the way you look which makes that vital first impression. “Yeah, I know, I’ve done it to death, how you look and how you should
negotiate the world. There’s a mystique to rock music that I respond to that has to do with people being fucking hot, and having some
sort of charisma about them that’s not inherently about technical attractiveness. You get a critics’ band, and there’ll be fat guys in the
picture but they can still be seen as a great band. It’s not the same for fat girls.”

Courtney is no stranger to weight paranoia. She claims that in the days when she used to strip - “It was a totally normal thing to do,
every girl in a band did it do they could buy guitars and amps” - she was overweight. And as a child she spent all her energy on “chasing
boys that didn’t like me when I could’ve been in my room learning Led Zeppelin.” But ask her about plastic surgery and she
sarcastically ums and ers before saying, with a straight face: “The one operation I’m waiting for is when they learn to remove the gag
mechanism, so women can give better blow jobs.”


“THIS,” SAYS COURTNEY PICKING up a copy of Janis Joplin’s biography from Patty’s bedside and waving it in the air, “is the sort of biography I want written about me. I want to read out the first sentence, OK. ‘I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin and the girl lying between my legs was Janis Joplin.’” There are guffaws all around. But Courtney has more to say. “Why has no one written the same about Jim Morrison? ‘I was sucking Jim’s cock and there was semen all over my mouth….’ This Joplin book is insanely graphic, you know, all abscesses, butt sex, heroin this, cocaine that. I can’t believe she was like that.”

Putting the Joplin book down, she picks up some magazines, shrieks and pulls a face as though a nasty smell had suddenly appeared in
the room. “Oh my God! She could have been our boss!” The offering magazine cover features a close-up of Madonna’s face, an image
that is almost as unflattering as the Michael Jackson photos published by the Mirror last summer. In a widely publicised affair, one of
the first bands Madonna showed interest in when she started her Maverick label was Hole. According to Courtney, Madonna ordered a
clipping service on the band and then phoned her up. “This really insane, weird thing happened with her. I think she wanted to buy not
only us, but all these underground band she doesn’t have a clue about, like Pavement and Cell. I pretty much only had on in-depth
conversation with her, and she was going on about being a revolutionary. I’d sold like two records compared to her, but I felt like I’d
hate for her to be the person who put our records out. When you fuck with Jesus or God or whoever she thinks she is, you pay a price.”

Part of the price was the publicity machine that as yet still surrounds Madonna’s every move; Courtney’s refusal to consider the
Maverick interest seriously was turned into a bitching feud in some parts of the media. She shrugs as she recalls it. “I didn’t want to
make a big deal out of it. In fact, I didn’t even want anyone to know. Ijust made a few choice comments on it, I never did some of the
things I’ve been quoted as saying. Initally I did make some jokes, like I’ll go out for dinner with her if she pays, and the world’s too
small for her too be my boss. But I’d never say anything as ridiculous as someone is going to steal my look; I don’t even think sexist
things like that.”

After her interest in Hole, Madonna turned to Daisy Chainsaw. “Nothing against them, but that really told me something, that it was all
about visual image. And the fact that Nirvana had made so much money.” When asked for her side of the story for this feature, Madonna’s response echoed the one she made in Vanity Fair - “I’ve never heard of her.”

Commenting on the rush to sign Hole, America’s Spy magazine recently quoted a record industry executive as (rather cruelly) estimating
that “sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth a half million dollars.” Talent scouts couldn’t get enough seats on planes to Seattle to check
out the bands behind the new buzzwords: Hole, along with L7 and Babes In Toyland, were jokingly labelled as “foxcore” by Sonic
Youth’s Thurston Moore, a “girl rock” by Courtney, and “female grunge” by others. As well as Madonna’s interest, Hole were courted
by other majors, and a huge bidding war saw them opt for Geffen, home to Nirvana and others. The deal is said to be one of the biggest
ever for a predominantly female band.

Seattle and its famous Sub Pop label are no longer setting the musical agenda in quite the way they were a year ago or even six months
ago; the planes are now full of Japanese tourists making pilgramages to North Bend, the nearby town where Twin Peaks was filmed. As
Patty says: “Seattle was great for music for a few years, but now it’s a joke again. Because it’s a nice place to live, there are millions
of Californian number plates everywhere, all these yuppies driving BMWs.” Born and brought up in a small town half an hour’s drive
out of the city, Patty used to go to gigs in Seattle at weekends. At 16 she was in a punk band with two other guys from school. Everyone
else in her neighborhood used to wear cowboy boots, and they weren’t too keen on Patty and her band. People would chase her and beat her up with baseball bats.

But even Seattle has a slightly hicksville and smalltown, clannish feel about it: the scene is quite small, everyone knows everyone else.
Just about everyone seems to be in a band, and lots of bars have live music most nights of the week. Eric’s first impression of Seattle
was “What’s all the fuss about?”, although he says he now likes it after the superficiality of L.A. If Seattle is resuming the life it led
before the media circus happened, it has nonetheless established itself as the capital of grunge. The elderly man at Passport Control
asked what I was going to do in Seattle and when I told I was interviewing a band called Hole, he responded: “I can’t say I’ve heard of
them, but I’ve heard there’s some good music going on there.” And although things may have died down, when a member of Nirvana
recently wore a Wool T-shirt on stage, the relatively unknown band was signed within days.

“NIRVANA WRITE really good songs,” says Courtney seriously. “But - and this a really obvious statement - this whole frenzy to sign these bands is a repeat of what happened in punk rock, in power pop and in new wave. Now it’s just happening in alternative. Only this time it’s all bands with lead singers with really great chests, like Alice In Chains, the Chili Peppers, Soundgarden. The point is, these bands
were probably going to be big with or without Nirvana....” There’s a momentary pause, then, obviously reflecting on the people she’s
just namechecked, Courtney becomes angry. “They may supposedly be new school, but their backstage is old school: purring limos, drug
counsellors, psychics, roadies who get blow jobs from groupies in black bras. It’s just like being backstage at a Skid Row concert.
There’s no arguement fo it being part of rock ‘n’ roll - there are really big bands who’ve never got off on that because it would have
created an atmosphere of sexism and fear.”

Although she’s the first to say “thank God” Hole have one male member, Eric’s non-macho presense doesn’t always stop people from
seeing them as a girl rock band. “It’s weird what a boys’ club it is,” Courtney reflects. She hasn’t, she explains, encountered much sexism. But there was an unpleasant incident at a gig at the Underworld in north London which she now talks about with surprising calm. “I was having a really good time, decided to stage dive, and all these football supporter guys at the front tore off my underwear... stuck their fingers everywhere. It was a really grotesque experience. I didn’t think it was my fault, but at the same time I realized why they did it. It’s too threatening for a girl in a dress to jump on top of a bunch of football guys and be passed along. Considering what a liberal art pop music is, there really is an intolerable contingent of people.”

It may be relatively easy for strong young women in the limelight to harbour feminist ideals. Once people have access to big money,
though, you expect them to lose their liberalism. Courtney Love is a welcome exception to the rule: if anything her ideals have
strengthened with her power. She reads books about women voraciously. (Naomi Woolf; Camille Paglia - “I’m beginning to see why she’s
dangerous as well as original”; Susan Faludi’s Backlash - “it made me cry, it’s so fuckin’ true. You must read it, it’s your responsibility
as a journalist). She slams the “fucking homophobes” who go to Guns N’ Roses concerts: “And I don’t want people like that coming to
see Hole because they think they can see my underwear.” She says in a mock evil-greedy voice “no matter what happends I’ll have some
land” of the property (about three miles from the Twin Peaks location, 40 minutes drive out of Seattle) she and Kurt recently bought.
Then she goes on to explain that they bought a further six acres to prevent the local racist loonies from securing it. She describes
Seattle as having a “sick history of right-wing activities that are really scary” - not least its treatment of Frances Farmer (after
whom she named her baby and with whom she strongly identifies). An intelligent, uncompromising actress in the Thirties and Forties,
Farmer suffered for her radical politics and ideas. In what became a national cause celebre, she was committed to an asylum and
subjected to LSD therapy and, finally, a frontal lobotomy.

IT'S WELL PAST midnight after a nine-hour photo session. Courtney is concerned about Frances Bean having a slight cold, but, reassured after a quick phone call, she is eager to go out. There’s a sprinkle of white dusty snow outside, and it’s still falling. The local freebie music paper is throwing a party, and having a last drink or two as we turn up is Sub Pop sidekick Jonathan Poneman plus assorted members of Mudhoney. Courtney, on an adrenaline rush after the session, runs around greeting people and making introductions. Eric, Patty and Leslie look much happier than they have all day. “This is honestly the first time I’ve been out in ages and it’s been OK,” says Courtney, grasping a bottle of cider (only her second - she can’t drink) and grinning from ear to ear.

It’s time to go. Everyone is being herded out of the bar. The snow is deep now and drunken snowball fights have started. We get into the car and white chunks hit the windscreen with force. Courtney is laughing. She winds down the window and, in her best and deepest mock-serious voice, says to someone from Mudhoney: “Don’t you know who I am?”



“My Beautiful Son” is released on City Slang at the end of this month; an album is
scheduled for sometime in the autumn.