- Music
- 09 Jul 24
As Courtney Love turns 60, we're revisiting reflections on the trailblazing artist from the Hot Press archives – selected from interviews with Florence + The Machine, Tove Lo, Fatboy Slim, Pixie Geldof and former Hole member Melissa Auf der Maur.
Florence Welch:
“I was probably a pre-teen when I heard Pretty On The Inside and Live Through This for the first time – what great, great records! There’s obviously a huge amount of baggage that comes with her, but she’s really charming, charismatic and strong-willed. The first time we met was two years ago when Courtney was doing her own stuff in Bush Hall, and asked me to support her. I kept things very simple with just my friend Mike on guitar, and despite being the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life it went brilliantly. Since then she’s said how much she loves Florence + The Machine in interviews and at the NME awards, which is very surreal, given how I used to chain-listen to her records in my bedroom!” (2010)
Tove Lo:
"When I started buying albums myself, it was stuff like Hole and Nirvana and Silverchair... Being a girl amongst all those boys, I really related to Courtney…
"If a 13-year-old gets from my music even a fraction of what I got from Hole and Nirvana, I'd be blown away." (2015)
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![](https://media.hotpress.com/uploads/2024/07/09150409/Courtney_Love_1995_by_Andrzej_Liguz.jpeg)
Courtney Love performing with Hole in 1995. Credit: Andrzej Liguz
Fatboy Slim:
"It's bizarre but I've been getting on really well with Courtney Love and Hole. I did a tour with them in Australia, the Big Day Out, which is like their Lollapalooza. They were on just before me on the main stage, so every night after they'd finished they'd hang around for my stuff. So we started to become good friends, hanging out together and being pen pals. I saw them at Glastonbury and they were hinting that it'd be fun to do something together. I'd go bonkers, though, working for three months in a studio with a band. Being the diplomat. Half of the work of a producer is to stop the different band members from killing each other." (1999)
Pixie Geldof:
Did Courtney impart any words of advice, when Pixie (who named her band Violet after the Hole song) met her?
“No, she didn’t, actually. But she did give me a dress, and I still have it, of course, and I’m not getting rid of that anytime soon. It was very cool. She IS Courtney Love. When you meet someone who excites you, it’s disappointing if they’re not that person. There’s a lot of people that I do like that I know not to meet because I know in my mind that they won’t be that person. She is the antithesis of that, and it’s great. She’s a whirlwind of a human being.” (2016)
Melissa Auf der Maur:
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On becoming a member of Hole, and playing on 1998's Celebrity Skin:
"I’m very thankful that [Courtney] took a chance on me, an unknown person, and really created a space for me in her band in a very real way. There was no real reason why she had to create this big space to her right of the stage, and I felt very proud to be her team member on her one particular mission, which was putting a female face on a male dominated landscape...
“I’m so proud of [Celebrity Skin]. I worked harder on that record, maybe even harder than my own record to be quite honest. It was two and a half years, and I was there for every single minute of it and put in everything I could as a co-writer, bass player, melody maker and background vocalist, and I’m so proud of my work and Courtney’s and Eric’s. And y’know, Michael Beinhorn was a totally different kind of producer than Chris Goss but a real teacher and a real perfectionist, and it is amazing, I just saw that today or yesterday, about how it’s her masterpiece. Of course it was, listen to it.” (2004)