Happy Birthday

Musician and scandalmonger Courtney Love turns 60

Courtney Love, frontwoman of Hole and widow of Kurt Cobain, celebrates her 60th birthday today.

(Bild: AFP)

Courtney Love lives in London these days. "I am an Anglophile. I love London. It's my favorite city and the best place I've ever lived," said the grunge singer, who turns 60 today, July 9, in a newspaper interview. "Do I think I'm an English lady? Well, I have a gardener, so maybe I am."

However, Love has not been particularly ladylike in the past. "I'm completely unlikeable and I'll never apologize for that. I've always wanted to be perceived as a bitch, I've never wanted to be liked." In London, Love has worked as a DJ, on her autobiography, new solo music and film projects in recent years.

Also successful in film
Even if she is often perceived as such in public: Love was never just the wife and then widow of the far better-known Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. She has released numerous successful albums with her band Hole and solo, and has also appeared in numerous films. In 1996, she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in "Larry Flint - The Naked Truth".

Nevertheless, a fateful week in April 1994 still overshadows Love's life to this day: first her husband, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, took his own life. Four days later, "Live Through This" was released, Hole's second album, which was to be celebrated enthusiastically and help the band achieve a worldwide breakthrough. Love withdrew from the public eye and only appeared in tears at a concert four months later.

Never got over it
The memory of Cobain still dominates the singer's life to this day, and their relationship with their daughter Frances Bean, born in 1992, is considered complicated. "If he came back now, I would have to kill him for what he did to us." Her life has moved on, of course, but she never quite got over Cobain, says Love. "I've had great loves since Kurt. I probably should have remarried too. But I just couldn't put my little crown and my dress from back then in a box and become a Ms. Somebody-who-was-once-Courtney-Love," says the singer. "There's shock, lamentation, abandonment, remembrance, huge swings of emotion, fake smiles, ugly crying. I've felt like I've gotten over it several times, and then it came back a few years later. You're over it when you're over it, which is probably never."

Love was born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964 and spent most of her childhood in various homes. She also struggled with drugs and alcohol for a long time and spent a lot of time in rehab clinics. However, she is now clean, Love affirms. She still likes to rant and provoke - she recently lashed out again in an interview. "It's wonderful that there are so many successful women in the music industry, but many of them become clichés," she told the British newspaper "The Standard". She likes Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell, for example. She is not a fan of Beyoncé ("I don't like her music"), Taylor Swift ("not important" and "not interesting as an artist") or Madonna ("I don't like her and she doesn't like me").