This is her kingdom. She gives expensive hotel rooms the feeling of the apartments she grew up in. Someone slumbers on the unmade bed, fully dressed. Make-up is scattered across the dresser, powder spilled out. The suitcases are all open, the contents scattered over the sofa, a chair and the surrounding floor. The TV is obscured by pizza boxes, and grease stains mark pages of fan mail. Everywhere you look there are music magazines and CDs. The journalist sits opposite, taking notes while the recorder turns. He is bleary-eyed from alcohol and waiting.

Courtney Love is well practised at interviews, and everything she says is a potential pull-quote. She has a knack for the perfect thing to say, something a journalist can report as direct speech, followed by a description of her actions, a quick sketch of the rock star.

"I was born to be a widow," she says, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray, knocking an avalanche of butts onto the table.

Every hotel she lived in was the same place - the view could change, they might be put on a higher floor, but everyone was well-mannered and spoke English, every fridge had Coke inside. MTV plays silently, showing a rock/rap crossover video. Courtney lies on the sofa wearing a vintage dress, legs sprawled out. She wears one high-heel, the other fallen nearby. She looks the part, and one can feel the truth of that line of Euripides, that there is a hole piercing right through her.

“Yoko went through the same thing after John died,” she says, tipping out her handbag. Eye-shadow and gum are among the things that scatter on the floor. A copy of Medea, well read, almost artful in its irony. There are a couple of crumpled cigarette packets. She takes a Marlboro, lights it and continues.

“People want me to go off to the Dakota building, do my penance like a good girl. Fuck that.”

The journalist excuses himself to go to the toilet before she can get into her stride. The slumberer on the bed raises their head, says something indistinct, then drops back to sleep.

And suddenly she is sick of saying clever things in interview. All these cigarettes, all these perfect quotes are defences against the ugliness of grief. Trying to restore some fucking dignity to the awfulness of it all. To be abandoned by a husband and father, the whole thing on public display, knowing that the role of rock widow is the only thing that can carry her through, but it can’t stop the pain.

She had planned to grow old with him. If she could have him alive just for a moment, just to hold him. Because all the images and clips have nothing of the man she knew, the one she loved, the one he was without an audience. That one, so precious and fucking unique is gone forever. They used to pray together or make up silly songs. She wished it was their first night still, not this wretched present, back when he was excited about being a star, when he tried on her underwear and they made love so loudly that the drummer had to move to another room. God, he tried so desperately to believe in love.

Sometimes she would phone him for hours, in whatever hotel on the other side of the world he'd ended up in. They wouldn't talk sometimes, just listen to each other breathe. And she wished she had a number for where he was now.

There is a hole that pierces right through her.

Background

This is one of a number of pieces I’ve written about Kurt Cobain. It’s ridiculously over-researched - some of the lines are quotes from Courtney Love, or things people said about her. There are issues about writing a piece about a real person but I wanted to write explicitly about the media persona.

Thirty years ago today, Kurt Cobain was reported as missing to the Seattle police. His body was found four days later. At the time, the story was barely reported in the British press. With the changes in media, I’m expecting far more coverage for the anniversary than there was of the death itself

Love claimed that her band was named ‘hole’ after a line in the Euripides play Medea. Few people went back to the text to find the quote (although Elizabeth Wurtzel once tried). Love is currently working on her biography, and has admitted that she made the quote up.

I remember listening to Live Through This in a grim summer and it was an amazing album. I finally got to see Love playing live years later, in Bristol with my friends Sally and Rosy. It felt like an exorcism to hear those songs that had meant so much to me when it was many years later and I was alive and happy.

Clownstarter

The kickstarter for True Clown Stories continues - we’re now up to 63%, with 16 days to go. I’m hoping we can reach the goal, as the project can only go ahead if it does. Please do check it out.

Recommendations

I fell into Easter with a sense of relief. I’d felt increasingly worn out, and the prospect of four days off felt like a life raft. I spent good Friday walking Rosie the dog and reading Richard Norris’s biography Strange Things are Happening.

I didn’t listen much to Norris’s main band The Grid in the 90s - apart from the KLF, most of rave passed me. Norris tells a vibrant and joyous account of creativity, from his schoolboy band the Innocent Vicars, through to his more recent Music for Healing project. I love reading accounts of creative projects, and Norris brings his time in the studio to life.

My favourite section is when Norris collaborates with Genesis P-Orridge on the Jack the Tab album. This was an attempt to produce an acid house record without having heard any acid house - the musicians were just excited by the concept. This is something that can no longer happen now we have the Internet. I blogged about this a long time back, how musicians were inspired by music they couldn’t hear - including Kurt Cobain: “I was trying to play my own style of punk rock, or what I imagined that it was, I knew it was fast and had a lot of distortion.”

There’s an element of wish fulfilment in reading books like Strange Things Are Happening - if only I could clear my own head, I too could produce a work of art. But then I expect that nobody feels like that even when they are producing a classic, that all these things work smoothly in retrospect.

Swedish Pizza

A few weeks back, I shared a story I’d written about a disturbing pizza restaurant in Sweden. I’ve been joking for a year or so with my friend Lou Ice about writing an entire novella about Swedish pizza restaurants. I sent here another two sections in the last week, so I guess this project might actually happen.