‘People used to say that I was so difficult,’ says Courtney Love on the velvet chaise longue in her west London house. ‘They said I was disagreeable. Yes, I am completely disagreeable and I’m never going to apologise for that. I always wanted to be known as a bitch. Being liked was never my thing. Kurt wanted to be liked but not me. He was able to hide behind me, but then I got hated. Then Kurt died, and the hatred towards me reached a completely new level. I did not plan for that. I’m all for taking my wiener out on stage, like Jim Morrison did. If I had a wiener and I was drunk enough, I would have totally taken it out, just like Jim. I had a bitch capacity and I was cool with not being liked. I saw Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back and he didn’t want to be liked and I thought, yeah, I want to be like that.’
For the past five years, Love has been the Queen of London. She moved here in 2019 with her pack of pomeranians for a much-needed escape from Los Angeles, and based herself in an attic room in Chiltern Firehouse, the ridiculously hip hotel owned by her ex-boyfriend, André Balazs. She was sequestered there throughout lockdown before moving over to west London (obviously), where she quickly became the high priestess of afternoon tea, creating an ad hoc salon full of the great and the good that featured both Kate Moss and Laura Bailey. It was, frankly, the only game in town and if you weren’t invited to sup from her cup then who the hell were you anyway? She might swear more than Joe Kinnear and she might still be proud of her disrupter status, but Love is a lady.
