Harriet Burgess
Staff Writer
Courtney Love, what does one even begin to think after spending two privileged hours in her baffling presence? In case you guys have been living under a rock, Courtney graced the Phil this Tuesday evening and was awarded the honorary patronage of the society, for all that she has contributed musically to the world. Courtney sashayed into the room, tottering on her Louboutins like a delicate doll. She flung her fluffy opulent coat onto a chair, Brown Thomas tags still attached. She represents a woman who truly has come full circle, her humble origins featuring in her refreshingly honest recount of her life: ‘I came from a tent. If even a tent’. That’s the impression one undeniably received in the Phil chamber tonight: here is a woman, however ineloquent she may seem and however tedious her ramblings, who is blantantly and irrevocably honest.
Trinity Students, if anything, we have learned this from tonight, the Queen of Grunge was once in our midst. Yes, believe it or not, Courtney spent two semesters in TCD studying theology. The time of this is unclear, as she struggled to remember precise dates ‘It was ’81 and I’m 47… You do the math’. (This would have made her a sweet 16 traversing the trinity cobblestones). Courtney recalled upon her time spent in Ireland as a youth, before jumping across the pond to Liverpool, then to Malibu and beyond, ‘I squatted in Stephens Green. Can you believe that?’
What was struck me about Courtney’s general stream of consciousness, as thats possibly the only way to describe it, was her constant switches between the mundane tales of her youth and her astonishing celebrity affairs. She was surprisingly relatable to for fleeting moments, like her endearing account of that familiar feeling of protectiveness we all have felt when our favourite seemingly inconspicous band begin their ascent ot stardom “U2 were my band. You must all know… That dark transition between non commercial and commercial”. This endearing recount was shortly followed by stories of visiting the Sheens, where a young Charlie was playing basketball on the courts, and nobody was paying attention to the buck-toothed kid Tom ‘from Jersey’ Cruise. It was this ranting that made Courtney difficult to follow. Caught up in her past, she confused us and failed to give direct answers for many of the questions posed to her. A shame really, for someone who has expreienced so much in life, to be somewhat incapable of answering simple questions.
Nevertheless, die hard Courtney fans continued with their interviewing of their idol. We heard from fans who had travelled from London to inform her of the constant source of inspiration she was to them, fans who made her puppets and posted them to her Twitter site, and one guy who had dreamed a dream of the Rock Goddess… his question was simple: What is your favourite flavour of ice-cream? To this we received perhaps the only straight answer from Ms Love of the evening: ‘Pistachio’.
An overall impression of Courtney? A person who it has to be said has conspicuolsly suffered a great deal of love and loss ‘I’ve been to the top of Everest, to rapture, and to hell. HELL’. An artist, who knows her happy place ‘A great melody makes me feel in the moment now’. Lastly, Courtney is, if anything, brutally honest and fearless in her narrative. When questioned about whether playing massive arenas takes away from the intimacy of music, she exhibited her self acclaimed ‘healthy ego’- ‘I like it. I like to feel like God’. And all this without even the mention of the name Kurt Cobain. Tonight I learned about a woman who was so much more than her husband’s widow.
