No, that first part of the headline is not from The Onion: Courtney Love was invited to speak at Oxford University recently and that’s exactly what she did last night, discussing the much-publicized conflict with her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, suicide, and more for the Oxford Union, the school’s renown debating society.
“I’m having my Demeter and Persephone moment with my daughter,” BBC News quotes Love as saying. “My daughter’s the most important thing to me, in my life,” she added, insisting later that Frances Bean was the only thing keeping her going after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide. “What gave me strength was my daughter’s life force.”
[Cobain’s suicide] had a horrible effect on our family. It’s not cool. It just wasn’t cool… I was expected by the zeitgeist to go with him or something. But I worked. I had to work to get money to feed my kid.
The talk wasn’t all heavy stuff, as Love lambasted England for the manic spread of Crazy Frog: “Your country did a terrible thing in sending the singing frog into the charts,” NME reports her as saying.
But Love wasn’t only on campus last night – her filmed appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross aired as well, in which Love and Hole (sans original members) play “Samantha,” a song co-written by Linda Perry and Billy Corgan, saved for the first single from Love’s latest album, Nobody’s Daughter. Check out video of the performance below.