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BEFORE WE go any further, perhaps we should listen to Eric’s description of what’s
happened to Hole since the release of ‘Live Through This’. It’s almost the last time he’ll
intrude upon this interview, so bear with him. Did you feel intimidated making this record? "No. I felt more like I was hanging upside down suspended by a very thin thread round my big toe from a very tall pole and having to swing myself back the right way up. I’m amazed it didn’t fall apart. In fact, it did fall apart. We got off tour after Reading, went to live in a house in New Orleans, set the house on fire, got punched out by Green Day’s bodyguards at some show, then Courtney started her movie, then we tried again to write in Memphis, then we started writing seriously again once Courtney got done with her movie, recorded ‘Gold Dust Woman’ in LA, wrote a bunch of new songs, started rehearsing with everybody, did a little bit with that Billy Corgan guy and finished up writing in April a year ago. I’ve been working in the studio ever since. It’s crazy - especially since out last album was done in less than five weeks." How much have you spent on it so far? "Remember that big controversy with My Bloody Valentine five years ago, where they spent a quarter of a million pounds? I’d have to say we’ve spent four, five times that much. You know what it is? Like Kevin Shields says, it all goes on mini-cabs taking you back and forth to the studio in the middle of the night. The other stuff doesn’t cost that much." That’s what happens when you start taking taxis from New Orleans to LA. Was there ever a time you thought it wasn’t going to appear? "It isn’t out yet", he laughs. "Don’t count on it. I never doubted it would come out, but I’m surprised it’s even got this far." At the time of writing, it looks as if the album’s projected release date of June 2 will be going back by one, possibly two months. IT’S VERY late the following night. We’re at the sumptuos Olympic Studios in Barnes, South London, where Courtney has taken a break from filming her latest movie to fly in for a couple of days to oversee Mike ‘Spike’ Stent (Spice Girls, Massive Attack)’s mixes for ‘Celebrity Skin’. It’s a striking building - all-over wood panelling, a conservatory and reversible 20-ft high wall speakers being among the features which doubtless helped attract bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The atmosphere is subdued, quietened - Courtney never was much of a drinker and is still recovering from the night before. She passes her time uninterestedly watching TV (Prisoner: Cell Block H) and chatting to the VOX make-up artist, who is preparing her for a 5am photo shoot. Meanwhile, she takes the opportunity to put clear a couple of points from the previous evening. "Why am I alive right now?" she muses. "Because I had a child. So, for me - even in my darkest hours - to leave, to pass on to the other side, would have been ruthless. Obviously I used to think about it. That was the first thing - ‘I will be an empty vessel devoid of life and love and spirit and spark, but I will be here physically in her presence and I will love this child’. And you build from there. Other values started to come to me. Like ‘What can I contribute to society?’ ‘What are my responsibilities?’ Then you get this super-ego voice, this elder sister mentor person, Madonna on the phone, saying you’ve got a responibility with your lyrics and you start hearing a voice go: ‘You can’t sing’, which never happened to me before. So my challenge there was to stare that voice down and tell it to shut the fuck up and leave me alone. "I’m getting to be sober, sober in thought and deed - not all the time, but to a certain degree - to become a responsible member of society. When teenage children are telling you that they’ve done self-destructive acts because of you, you really have to sit down and think: ‘OK, what am I giving here? And how can I give what it is I have to give whithout being a fake?’ "You know, you go from your starter kit when you’re in pop, and you’re a writer, and you’re dark, you go from your Leonard Cohen/Baudelaire/Rimbaud starter kit and if you can end up inspired by Yeats and Rilke, then you’re going in the right direction. What Rilke did - write tragic, epic, gorgeous love poems to the spirit of God - is so much tougher than to write sexy morphine/opium poems to the cats. The hate spark dies much quicker than the love spark, and the love spark is much harder to achieve. If you’re gonna keep your inspiration going, you’ve got to have some light. That’s what this album is trying to do. It’s not like it isn’t cynical in parts, but it’s like ‘Build a new one, man! Build a new one’." SO WHAT’S Courtney Love really like? In peson? A lot healthier, fitter, more muscular and happier than VOX remembers from meeting her last. Annoying, inspiring, arrogant, funny, witty, gracious, paranoid, sometimes rambling, often incisive, a control freak she’s been burned badly by the media as a result of her own candour several times in the past (most notoriously, the Vanity Fair article written while she was pregnant which almost resulted in her baby being taken away) and is determind not to let it happen again. She’s been through several shades of hell and back since 1994. Not only is she the widow of possibly the most famous suicide victim this century, she’s also been close to several other celebrated fuck-ups since (Scott Weiland, Evan Dando, Jeff Buckley), but her own strength of character has given her the ability to continue. VOX remembers a conversation with Courtney, held about six months after the death of her husband where she repeatedly avowed her determination "not to let the assholes get the satisfaction of seeing me kill myself". On top of this, she’s always had an uncanny knack of finding herself in the right place at the right time. When Princess Diana died, Courtney was on the phone to Madonna. "And guess who heard the news first?" she asks triumphantly. "She did, of course! Then we thought we should petition. We thought we should go to Washington and do the anti-paparazzi petition thing. She was like: ‘Will you take action if I take action?’ I was like: ‘Sure, fuck all those assholes’." When Versace died, Courtney was on a plane over to Rome where she was supposed to lead a Versace fashion shoot on the steps of a cathedral in front of a parade of 20 models. "And then I get there and I’m looking at all the flowers laid out in my room and all his dresses and the fax personally welcoming me to Rome, when the phone rings" DO YOU sometimes feel like your life is run by ghosts? "Yeah. Well, I feel that it’s run by myths. If I don’t keep my head about me and I don’t perform daily spiritual rituals - and I mean this in sincerity and not on a doozy way - for instance, drugs are a ritual, as are self-destructive acts and acts of self-love. I perform my rituals, which is chanting [Courtney is a Buddhist] and I also do alot of yoga and I juice and tonight I’m drinking a fuck of a lot of tequila. "You know what’s great about people knowing that you could punch then out because you’ve done it before? You never have to, because everyone’s terrified that you might do it again." Courtney is referring to incidents involving people such as Kathleen Hannah and fellow Olympia underground icon, Bud Narcotic’s Calvin Johnson. Oh, and the odd English journalist or two. "You have a security throught people knowing that you’ve lived real hard. "My Solution and my advice to all the British kids, all the scenesters who are going through their Seattle 1991 game right now, is to change your fucking social life! Seriously. Have a child, change your social life. The first thing I did was to deny my ridiculous dependency on substances. And you know what? When you’re motivated it’s not that hard, it’s fucking easy! Now, I just don’t hang out. The second thing I did was to remove God from my life because I didn’t buy it anymore. The atrocities were too heavy and the sins committed against my karma were too large, so I got into my Darwinism - that this is Survival Of The Fittest and there is no gender politics. "I’m pretty depressive, but my depressions are more panic attacks. I had this whole deconstruction period when I dealt with all my problems where I went into an isolated society and chain-smoked for a month. When I left that place, I had real spiritual problemsbecause I started seeing everything in Darwinian, nihilistic terms, which I’d never seen before, because at the core I’ve always had a real innocence and optimism. "It was through Jungian ideas and the Jungian archetypes that I started to realise that - even if Jung was a bit of a fascist and a sexist - the sentence isn’t ‘God is dead’ but ‘God is dead, comma, because man is alive.’ And then I started to see divinity in things through archetypes and symbolism and my own participation in a cultural myth." You say it’s easy to sort out your dependencies when you’re ready. But you’ve always seemed to be one of the very few people who could really cope with drugs. Use them, not let them use you. "Yeah, but I got ensnared into my own archetype, so at a certain point I became a slave. Who I hung out with very, very much influenced me because I’m such a girl about stuff a lot of the time. I thought Nick Cave and Johnny Thunders and Keith Richards were so fucking cool. Whatever. Change your lifestyle. It doesn’t mean you have to get on a stump and start whining about other people’s experience. Part of growing up and being disaffected and being youthful and being tortured is having a drug experience. "But I’ve never spoken out about this because that’s what people like Steven Tyler [Aerosmith’s frontman] do when they give public service announcements like: ‘Oh, don’t do drugs, kids, even though I did them for 40 years and had a fucking great time.’ That’s fucking absurd." Next Page - - - - - - - - - - - - - |