Ah, Courtney Love. One of the most divisive figures in modern music.
The Hole frontwoman tends to grace the headlines far more frequently for her entanglement in Kurt Cobain conspiracy theories, legal spats and familial dramas with daughter Frances Bean than for her actual music, so it’s refreshing to finally be able to report on C-Love doing the one thing that actually made her (at least at one point) a prominent and respected artist.
The singer has appeared onstage at a star-studded private party in Los Angeles to perform a cover of Radiohead’s 1993 hit, Creep, and the results are bound to elicit some strong opinions.
Consequence Of Sound, for instance, dubbed Love’s performance “remarkable” and “devastatingly great”, describing it as a “marvellous, hot-blooded rendition of a classic track”.
However, as much as I wanted to like it – and I really really did – I just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that I was watching someone’s drunk mum sing 2am karaoke with an especially poor sense of musical timing.
That said, Radiohead’s iconic lyrics of “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here” do take on a tragic kind of significance when applied to Love, who’s forged a career out of being a widely detested and vilified outsider.
And in that sense, her performance does feel very raw, real and honest, perhaps even uncomfortably so.
See what you make of it below.
Watch: Courtney Love – Creep Live (Radiohead Cover)
