There’s a handful people throughout music history who are as equally hated as they are loved. One of these lucky few is 90s grunge icon Courtney Love. To some, she is the eccentric frontwoman of the Grammy nominated band Hole, with whom she undeniably influenced the development of the punk rock scene we know today. To others, she is the villain of her highly publicised romance with the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. But to our own Trinity College, she was very briefly a student. 

It all started in 1964 with the birth of Love Michelle Harrison, a little girl whose unstable upbringing would create the lovingly despised rockstar we know today. Passed between America and New Zealand, foster parents and step-parents, Love’s childhood was characterised by behavioural institutions, substance abuse, strip clubs and the desire to be adored. She struggled in school not academically but socially, being told by one institution that she was “a very intelligent young lady who tends to overextend herself as far as dealing with people… to the point of having or causing problems with the programme because of her boisterous behaviour”, according to Courtney Love: The Real Story by Poppy Z Brite. Dreaming of working with children, Love wrote in her diary that “I’m going to live in Ireland someday”. This seemed impossible until a small trust fund left by her grandparents allowed Love, at 17 years old, to visit her biological father in Ireland.

Love’s father claimed that he taught a course at Trinity which turned out to be a lie on Love’s arrival in 1981. In fact, he didn’t even live in Dublin but in Meath. However, this didn’t halt Love’s steely determination and she immediately started auditing a theology course at Trinity and continued to do so for 2 semesters. Although a very hazy and largely undocumented time, a few things can be strung together about Love’s experience in Dublin. Love recalls having “squatted in Stephens Green” and even wrote scraps of poetry in Bewley’s, one of which is featured in Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love. She enjoyed watching the rise of U2, dabbled in amateur photography and is said to have spent a night under the stars at the historic Knowth and Dowth tombs. But what about her classes?

It may be surprising that a grunge icon would choose such a philosophical class as theology, but if you look into her lyrics there’s a pattern of deep inquiry. She explores the significance of fame, oppression, mental health, personas and, of course, her husband’s suicide. In that light, why wouldn’t she study religious belief? And what better way to do that than by studying The Book of Kells, which Love clearly paid attention to. When asked her favourite painting in a Country Life interview, she chose the ‘Chi Ro’ page of the Book of Kells and explained how she sees it as a ‘sublime testimony to humanity in early life… the gears and codes and mechanisms like a great human engine’. To further cement her fascination with all things Irish, Love also included many Irish things in her diary’s carefully crafted lists of interests, including Celtic history, WB Yeats’s poetry, Christianity and Catholicism and even counties Meath and Cork. 

This trip was like a pilgrimage to Love, as by travelling to the land from which she suspected her ancestors came, she had the opportunity to find a new world for herself where her life had greater meaning. This is exactly what she did. It was in Dublin that she met Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes, a man who would become arguably her most influential mentor. He even invited her to his house in Liverpool where she was thrown into an entirely different musical realm than what she was raised on in the Pacific Northwest. Love tried and failed to be a musician time and time again over the coming months. She even convinced her mother to send her extra money, which she eventually used to start a band, by telling her that she was going to enrol back at Trinity the next semester. However, she eventually had to leave and go back home to Portland, enrolling for a short time in Portland State University and intending to major in Philosophy. It took a few more years of hard work until Love finally formed the band Hole and shot to stardom. She met Cobain soon after and the rest is history. 

This is not where Love’s ties with Trinity ended, however. In 2011, Trinity’s Philosophical society (the Phil) awarded Love with an Honorary Patronage. This award is ‘the highest award that the Society can bestow on a non-member’ and is awarded to people ‘whose contribution within their sphere is considered exceptional’. However, despite having made the decision to bestow this honour upon Love for her life and career, it seems that the audience of Love’s acceptance speech were rather shell shocked by her behaviour. The University Times described her as “baffling…ineloquent…tedious” and complained that she didn’t give straight answers to interview questions. One article had the title ‘Courtney Love confuses Dubliners’ while the Irish Examiner used this opportunity to discuss an incident the year before where Love allegedly forgot to return borrowed jewels from a charity event. The coverage of the event was disappointingly sparse altogether and bordering on insulting. Unfortunately, the media has never been kind to our sheep in wolf’s clothing.

It has almost become a rite of passage as a grunge fan to vilify Love just as it is customary for a fan of 60s music to parrot that ‘Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles’. Oftentimes, most can’t even articulate why they hate Love in the first place. It could be because she embodies that uncomfortable side of girlhood that we try to keep out of sight and out of mind. Or maybe it’s how her guttural scream carries messages of the fallen, the trampled and the tortured. But what is more admirable than risking hatred from the masses for the chance to stand up for the few? Clearly there’s way more to Love than meets the eye and as a fellow Trinity student, what better way is there to honour her contribution to society than looking for the woman behind the eye shadow and cigarette smoke. By looking into her diaries, it becomes blatantly obvious that this so-called incoherent and loud-mouthed persona is exactly that – a persona. Love dedicated her teenage years towards crafting an identity that would carry her to stardom through self-discipline and determination. So perhaps next time we boast to wide eyed tourists that they are walking in the footsteps of some great contributors to society such as the beloved Hozier (who also didn’t actually graduate with a degree from here, might I add), maybe we can also mention the most haunting phantom to pass over these cobblestones; Courtney Love.