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ONE PERSON who hardly ever gets mentioned in a Courtney Love - sorry, Hole
(remember the old Blondie campaign: "Blondie is a band, not a person"? That’s how Hole are
being marketed now) - interview, is her guitarist Eric Erlandson. Yet without him, the band
wouldn’t exist. He was the one who ‘discovered’ Courtney, back in 1989 when he was a shy record company worker. He was the one who dated her and lent her money for her nose job and gave her support through all the various incarnations of Hole. He’s the one who discovered the body of ex-Hole bassist (and former lover) Kristen Pfaff when she OD-ed in her bath in Seattle, a few short months after Kurt’s death. Self-effacing, gangly, almost painfully sweet, no one who meets him can quite believe he’s so nice. He’s also a very talented musician. If ‘Celebrity Skin’ does amount to anything, it’ll be down to Eric’s determination that the band should not split up after all they’ve suffered. He’s the glue which binds it together. He’s also something of a hit with the ladies - as evinced by his role as Most Envied Man In The World - Official, having dated Drew Barrymore for three years (between 1994 and 1996) - but you wouldn’t know it to talk to him... What kind of girls do you like, Eric? "Don’t make me answer for you," Courtney interrupts her guitarist before he’s even had a chance to draw breath, "because you know I’m better for a soundbite. Come on. Well, Eric goes out with me for two years and Drew for three - so what’s he looking for? Someone he can fix, but post-Drew he wants them under 20. So he has this wonderful woman who’s in love with him, totally gorgeous, but instead he goes for 20-year-old strippers who aren’t me and aren’t Drew. THERE’S ONLY ONE ME AND THERE’S ONLY ONE DREW BARRYMORE AND THAT’S IT! Deal with it. You don’t want that any more. You need a woman who’s as smart as you, who’s as brilliant and deep and wonderful and spiritual as you, and just because she might be 30, I don’t see that’s a problem. You need to find a woman. She can bikini-wax, I’m not saying a woman with pubic hair down to her knees, I’m saying a feminine beautiful woman who can take you on your level. You pander, you go down in the gutter... "You’re too old to hang out with Marilyn Manson and Billy and pick up those fucking supermodels," Courtney snaps at him. "Who’s getting supermodels?" counters Eric, clearly confused. "Eric," his singer states firmly. "I’m not naming names and you know I’m not. Did you make out with Amber Valetta, is that what we’re saying? If I can make out with supermodels then you certainly can. Remember how anti-model I used to be?" No. "There was a point when I was really anti-model. And then one day... I’m not gay, as you know..." OK. IT’S time to hand the rest of this article over to Courtney. Ready? "I like men. I don’t really like boys or boyish men and it’s pathetic that - apart from having to suffer from my own archetype - other people who have been associated with me have had to be emasculated when in fact they were the butchest fools around. That was the real tragedy. They had to become enfeebled, emasculated, mother-fixated children in order for it to be comprehended, rather than people who could actually throw you up against the wall, fuck your brains out and slap you around once in a fucking while and go out hunting. I like men. I don’t hate men. I just wish I didn’t have to work with them. I’d like to fuck them, have their children, marry them, have more children. I love my femininity, I don’t want to be a man, but I need the world to be populated with more technichians and artsans and craftspeople of my own gender... "One of the reasons I loved working with Milos Forman [director of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Larry Flynt] - and I Larry Flynt as an album, because I was in a band, I was in a band with Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton and Milos - was because I’d never been in a band with boys before so it made me love men in a way I never had. Those men treated me with such incredible generosity... "I have a feeling that Sinéad O’Connor would probably make an amazing actress, even to Streep-like proportions if she’s a good mimic, because she’s psychially protected by that lens. My mother said about me too. When I’m protected by that layer of film and by another character, my art can actually come out. It’s that thing Dylan said about withholding. On this record I consciously am not telling you everything, I’m not getting into some of the stuff people want me to exploit, I’m not going to cheapen that, because what I give is already much, much better than the guy across the street... "So you can choose to live your life that way or you can be Judy Garland and die in front of a thousand clowns. Fuck that! We’ve seen that. What does that yield? Fuck it, it’s ridiculous. I don’t need the money, I don’t need the fucking attention. OK, sometimes I’m in vain and I dress up like fucking Pamela Anderson and get on the cover of US magazine with my tits out and it’s stupid and I probably won’t ever do it again, but I had to learn..." She sighs heavily. "When you’re vain and you’re female, it can lead you into alot of stupid situations. You’ve seen me onstage. You saw me onstage, four months after it was cathartic for me. In some ways I wished someone had just locked me up in my house instead of being so eager to exploit me, and me being so crazed that I allowed it. On the other hand, it really worked out alot of my problems. "There’s a Yeats poem called ‘Ode To A Crazy Girl’ and it talk about the girl with the scarred knees. My knees, each of them, have had 28 stitches. It’s ridiculous. I look around at these other actresses and most of them come from these pampered upper-middle-class homes which have never encountered darkness. A lot of them are just ponces and they get stuck playing the girlfriend role and then they’re disposable. The Joan Crawford tradition of coming from dirt is a great thing - but I want to take care of myself now and I want my daughter to be..." She almost whispers the final three words. "Proud of me." - Jerry Thackray, VOX, June, 1998 
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