She lived here for a while, with Julian Cope and Pete De Freitas at the start of the 80's. I was born and brought up 6 doors down.

Have to say, I would grow up to be a big fan of her music and the whole Nirvana story, and I quite dig the idea that we shared the same park, Princes Park.

I was an infant so I wouldn't have had a clue who she was, well she wasn't yet anybody at that stage of her life. I think she came here when she was 20. Can anyone confirm this? How long did she stay?

Musical area. Chris out of the Pet Shop Boys also stayed for a while on Devonshire, Ringo was born two streets away, and The Real Thing momnetarily burst out of the Avenue.

Can you feel the force kidda?

Check out the music quiz

The story is true, that she did live in Liverpool.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3569027.stm

I am a MASSIVE Hole & Courtney fan. I have a biography of hers which includes photographs including one of her in liverpool.

She was about 16.

When she's on telly and she does a "British" accent she always does a scouser.:)

Can you feel the force kidda?




:celb (23):

Were's our original thread?

Anyway - LONG before Kurt Cobain, but soon after juvenile detention, a dishevelled teenager arrived off the train at Lime Street Station and installed herself in a bedroom on Devonshire Road.

Brash, loud and full of confidence, Courtney Love was a complete contrast to the women her housemates - Echo & the Bunnymen drummer Pete DeFreitas and Paul Simpson, of the Wild Swans - were used to.

Yet Liverpool and the people she met here in 1982 had a profound influence on the girl who would go on to marry one of history's most tortured musicians and become a wild woman of rock 'n' roll.

"Before Liverpool," she is reported as saying, "my life doesn't count."

Love's teenage time in the city features strongly in her newly published diaries, Dirty Blonde - a collection of torn-out pages, postcards and photographs reproduced in hardback.

"You should see it when an early Clash song comes on in a Liverpool pub," writes Love in one journal. "All the lads are falling all over themselves yelling ‘we were there, at Eric's, the Riots, the Pistols. We were THERE...' The only thing that outdoes that is when a Doors song comes on."

In the early 1980s, against a backdrop of failing industry and growing unemployment, music was one of the few rays of hope left in Liverpool.

Merseybeat had died before John Lennon, Punk was nearing its sell-by date, and the city's bars and pubs were filled with bands hoping their carefully penned lyrics would reach the ears of fat cat record producers and make their toes tap.

It was into this atmosphere that San Francisco-born Love walked, fresh from two years in a correctional facility in Oregon for shoplifting and a couple more travelling around Europe and Japan.

She was visiting Dublin with a friend when she met Julian Cope, of the Teardrop Explodes, who recommended she try out the Liverpool music scene. As he was living in London at the time, Cope offered the girls his bedroom at the back of his shared house in Toxteth. continues (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpooldailypost/news/regionalnews/tm_headline=love-and-liverpool%26method=full%26objectid=18286149%26page =2%26siteid=50061-name_page.html)....

"Before Liverpool," she is reported as saying, "my life doesn't count."

"Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope taught me a great deal," she has since commented."I owe them a lot. Listen to the way I write and sing. Liverpool had been a great school to become a rock star."


I love it!:celb (23):

Love and Liverpool


Laura Davis reports on the little-known city life of rock 'n' roll's wildest woman

LONG before Kurt Cobain, but soon after juvenile detention, a dishevelled teenager arrived off the train at Lime Street Station and installed herself in a bedroom on Devonshire Road.

Brash, loud and full of confidence, Courtney Love was a complete contrast to the women her housemates - Echo & the Bunnymen drummer Pete DeFreitas and Paul Simpson, of the Wild Swans - were used to.

Yet Liverpool and the people she met here in 1982 had a profound influence on the girl who would go on to marry one of history's most tortured musicians and become a wild woman of rock 'n' roll.

"Before Liverpool," she is reported as saying, "my life doesn't count."

Love's teenage time in the city features strongly in her newly published diaries, Dirty Blonde - a collection of torn-out pages, postcards and photographs reproduced in hardback.

"You should see it when an early Clash song comes on in a Liverpool pub," writes Love in one journal. "All the lads are falling all over themselves yelling ‘we were there, at Eric's, the Riots, the Pistols. We were THERE...' The only thing that outdoes that is when a Doors song comes on."

In the early 1980s, against a backdrop of failing industry and growing unemployment, music was one of the few rays of hope left in Liverpool.

Merseybeat had died before John Lennon, Punk was nearing its sell-by date, and the city's bars and pubs were filled with bands hoping their carefully penned lyrics would reach the ears of fat cat record producers and make their toes tap.

It was into this atmosphere that San Francisco-born Love walked, fresh from two years in a correctional facility in Oregon for shoplifting and a couple more travelling around Europe and Japan.

She was visiting Dublin with a friend when she met Julian Cope, of the Teardrop Explodes, who recommended she try out the Liverpool music scene. As he was living in London at the time, Cope offered the girls his bedroom at the back of his shared house in Toxteth.


"From nowhere, this loud-mouthed American punkette with bleached hair turned up," wrote Bill Drummond, founder of dance outfit the KLF, in his book 45.

"She seemed to love everybody and she'd got LSD... (We were) a generation that had never been into drugs, we were quite happy with our pints of mild and our rum-and-blacks."

When she wasn't in the house on Devonshire Road or in the pub, Love would walk to nearby Sefton Park. Dirty Blonde includes a photograph of her there hiding behind a tree, as well as a postcard of Arthur Dooley's Beatles' sculpture on Mathew Street.

But her real passion was music, which she indulged by following Echo and the Bunnymen to gigs. She was obviously impressed by what she heard.

"I love (pure personal level) Bunnymen because it's grown on me," she confesses Dear Diary-style. "I love Teardrop because of obvious but I've come to appreciate both entities products in new wierd (sic) ways like on an artistic plane instead of personalized."

Pete Wylie, frontman of Liverpool band the Mighty Wah!, remembers her as "a monster".

"She was in the rival camp - Teardrop and Bunnymen - and that was catastrophic to our relationship," he explains.

"She was obnoxious, attention seeking, peroxide. She was full on and she thought she was big time. She was a monster, but if she had been a monster in my camp I would have defended her to the hilt.

"In those days we would all be a bit surly with one another but she's the only person I said ‘I hate you' to."

Wylie, who was 23 at the time, met Love years later at a film premiere for Liverpool-based film director Alex Cox's Sid Vicious bio-pic, Sid and Nancy, in which she had a small role.

This time, he was surprised to immediately warm to her and has since kept in touch.

"We went out for dinner and I was expecting her to be really horrible but she was fantastic. I last saw her two years ago at a party held by Alan McGee (Creation Records label founder).

"Now that I know more about her life, I understand completely why she was like she was in Liverpool. I follow her adventures and sometimes she is fantastic and other times I am terrified for her."

It's not clear exactly how long Love spent in Liverpool - she has recently said two years, while her diary suggests it was at least half that.

After some months of living in Devonshire Road, Love and her friend were forced to leave. Sick of waiting for them to find a flat, their housemates decided to evict them.

"With no signs of our American friends leaving, we had recourse to throwing their suitcases down the stairwell," recalled Paul Simpson years later.

Sitting in Heathrow Airport, Love (who would later marry Kurt Cobain, of Nirvana, assuring herself icon status by proxy ) recorded her departure in her diary as "sweeping away 8 Liverpool chapters". Although she seems to have been glad to leave, the city evidently had a great influence on her.

More than 12 years later, on December 15, 1997, she stuck in her journal a picture of former housemate, Pete DeFreitas (who died in a motorbike accident in 1989), noting "Looking at pictures from Liverpool. How sad it makes me seeing this old Bunnymen book. Pete DeFreitas RIP."

Coming at a time when she had escaped her broken family and was trying to discover what she wanted from life, Love, now 42, admits her months in Liverpool changed her.

"Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope taught me a great deal," she has since commented."I owe them a lot. Listen to the way I write and sing. Liverpool had been a great school to become a rock star."

Wylie agrees she finds it difficult to forget her stay in Merseyside: "I think in her mind Courtney is still in Liverpool and still 15-years-old."

sorry lads just repeated it under my original header..didn't notice this one, oops.

oh well you can't have too much love can yer?

Are you Villiers Terrace over there as well?

Shhh!

I've just merged the posts, many thanks :). I'm sort of glad the thread was started here first! Maybe the echo read this site :)