Part 16 (1/2)

”Well, tell him h.e.l.lo,” he says, and leaves.

Courtney reappears.

”Was that Kurt?” she says.

ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, next to that stupid Chinese theatre thing that looks like a suburban Chinese takeaway that has been at the Chinese swimming team's medical kit, sad little men in sun visors sell maps of where the stars live. Barry and I buy one, determined that we cannot live another day without seeing Zsa Zsa Gabor's letterbox or the front gate of that bloke in Star Wars Star Wars who wasn't Harrison Ford, whatever his name was. Mark something, we think. who wasn't Harrison Ford, whatever his name was. Mark something, we think.

We spend an afternoon driving through pristine private suburbs with their own fences and police forces, filled with houses so big we wonder if the front and back porches have different postcodes or, in a couple of cases, if they're even in the same time zone.

Mostly, we wonder why anyone with enough money to buy one of these places would choose to live in Los Angeles.

COURTNEY CHOSE TO live in Los Angeles. It was convenient. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And anyway, to judge by her thus far modest but already riotously entertaining press file, she'd already lived everywhere else. The details vary according to Courtney's mood at the time and the imagination of whoever's writing it all down, but there're a few things we can be reasonably sure of.

She moved around a lot as a kid, even being dragged as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. She was the singer in an early lineup of Faith No More. She lived in England for a bit, where she appears to have done or said something to annoy Julian Cope, which is another entry on the credit side of her ledger. She has almost been a famous actress, having been considered for the starring roles in Sid And Nancy Sid And Nancy and and Last Exit To Brooklyn Last Exit To Brooklyn, though how seriously she was considered is open to argument. She very definitely made a brief appearance in Alex c.o.x's point-free spaghetti-western farce Straight To h.e.l.l Straight To h.e.l.l, about which she says, ”Yeah, well.”

Courtney Love, already, is a lot better known than what Courtney Love does.

”It's really weird,” she says. ”I mean, it's your life, and your life is being used to sell papers, or records, or . . .”

And that's just the stuff that's actually happened. Perhaps calling a song ”Teenage Wh.o.r.e” was asking for trouble.

”A lot of that is fictionalised. I mean, no offence to Everett, but . . .”

Everett True, the journalist that Kurt Cobain was asking about earlier, was the first to write about Courtney-or Kurt, for that matter-for a British paper. He may well have gotten a little carried away, but then he does.

”Well, you know, he just decided he was bored and that England needed a new American character. There's things he wrote that were true and things that were absolutely not true. Some of the quotes he attributed to me were just amazing.”

Anything in particular?

”Well, like that I had a profession based on a song I wrote, you know, a n.o.ble and ancient profession, but not one that I ever went to school for. I mean, when I read the last piece, I hit him.”

She did, as well. Poor old ET was eating junket through a straw for a week. People get the songwriter mixed up with the song, though. It happens.

”But it's . . . narrative. Neil Young writes narrative, and n.o.body thinks . . . you know what I mean. The songs still feel like catharsis, still feel like exorcism, still feel really good to sing, but on the other hand, a lot of it is narrative. I'm not a character actress. I'm a songwriter.”

It's only going to get worse.

”Oh, I know,” she sighs. ”I mean, I went to lunch with this corporate weasel from some major record company the other day, and he just said 'Courtney, what do you want to do?' Well, I told him I wanted to go and see Nirvana in Chicago, so he gave me a thousand dollars. I keep telling the other three they should be going out to lunch as well . . . I mean, we're talking here about restaurants I've never even seen the outside of. It's great. They buy me martinis and talk to me about money and it's, like, totally interesting . . .”

This is the first sarcasm I've heard since I arrived in California.

”We're just not ready,” she decides. ”For a band like us, with our ideology, the only reason to have a corporate label is better distribution. So if we sell enough records that we need that, then I'll think about it. They just want to buy something that they think is honest. But it's my life, you know?”

LATER THAT NIGHT, Hole open for Nirvana at the Palace. The crowd looks like a casting call for the next series of that MTV real-life soap where they stick six attractive young people in a house and see how long it takes for them all to wish each other dead. Axl Rose and Slash from Guns N' Roses are here, as is Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction. Everybody else here looks like they either want to be them, or be very good friends indeed with them. There are at least half a dozen women in here wearing bikinis.

When Hole take the stage, Perry Farrell charges down the front, and stands still in the middle of the moshpit, head and shoulders above the melee. ”Hey, b.i.t.c.h!” he calls between songs. ”Suck my f.u.c.kin' d.i.c.k!” Courtney, who appears to be in on whatever the joke is, smiles back. Perry's date for the evening has a disarming habit of unzipping the front of her dress at anyone she suspects of staring at them. Needless to say, she ends up doing quite a bit of this. Hole, meanwhile, are great, as noisy and chaotic as a train wreck but considerably more tuneful, and Courtney looks and plays like the lost lovechild of Angus Young and Kim Gordon.

After Hole have played, and after Nirvana have played, I experience the rare pleasure of strolling backstage past a purpling Axl Rose, who is getting the your-name's-not-down-you're-not-coming-in routine from bouncers. As I head for Hole's dressing room, I can hear his multi-platinum squawk squawking, ”Well, why has that motherf.u.c.ker got a laminate?” after me.

Courtney gives me a gla.s.s of wine, introduces me to someone to talk to and apologises, but she has to go and find another of her corporate weasels, to buy her drinks.

”The thing to remember,” she says before she vanishes, ”and this is important, is that I'm driven. I really am. I'm driven, for some reason. But I don't know where I'm going.”

21.

YEN WILL I BE FAMOUS?.

Alisha's Attic in j.a.pan OCTOBER 1996.

THE IDEA ANIMATING this story, originally written for The Independent The Independent, was to illuminate the reality of making a budding British pop group big in j.a.pan. The group in question, Alisha's Attic-a pair of genial sisters from Ess.e.x-ended up doing okay, in j.a.pan and elsewhere, without quite broaching the stratospheres. Which is to say they ended up doing a street better than 99 percent of pop groups ever founded. They packed it in shortly after the turn of the century and embarked on separate careers, Karen writing for The Sugababes and Kylie Minogue, among others, Sh.e.l.lie-who seems to have changed her name to Sh.e.l.ly-making solo records under her own name.

I can only hope now, as I could only hope then, that this story does, in some way, illuminate the reality of making a budding British pop group, etc., etc. Because I'm as certain as I can be that it illuminates absolutely nothing-beyond one hungover, food-poisoned hack's total bewilderment at his surroundings-about the nation in which it is set. I have, in the course of my journalistic peregrinations, dropped in on more than seventy countries. j.a.pan is the only one that I have left feeling absolutely none the wiser about for having visited it. Everywhere else I've been, however briefly, I've flown home feeling like I've acquired some idea of what gets the people there laughing, crying and generally out of bed in the morning. I spent a week and a bit in j.a.pan on this story, went to four cities, and met, I'm sure, dozens of local people. However, when I collected my thoughts as the homebound flight prepared for takeoff at Tokyo's Narita airport, I realised that they could, pretty much, be summarised thus: ”Huh?”

THE PROMOTIONAL TOUR is a peculiar ritual, in which rock'n'roll performers are coerced into performing in as un-rock'n'roll a manner as can be imagined. On a promotional tour, the workaday touring creeds of riotous excess, grand debauchery and glamorous disdain are sacrificed in favour of restraint, modesty and affability. To partic.i.p.ant and witness alike, the process is scarcely less disorienting than the prospect of senior members of the British royal family embarking on a vice-regal visit that saw them obliged to drive Rolls-Royces into swimming pools, cavort with ladies-in-waiting in baked-bean-filled gold bathtubs and heave bejewelled television sets out of palace windows.

Details of the promotional tour vary subtly according to local conditions, but the essential format is constant. The musicians are as pleasant as possible to as many as possible of the record company staff, disc jockeys and journalists upon whose favour future success may ultimately depend. The musicians will shake hands until they cramp, nod to the point of rheumatism and smile themselves halfway to permanent twitches. They must forgo the luxury of even the slightest lapse into sarcasm at what feels like the millionth introduction to someone called Hank Bucket of Plughole Records, apparently your licensee in Alaska, and his ugly, boring wife. They may not scream when asked, for the billionth time, where they got the name of their group from. Give any musician the option of going on a promotional tour or spending a week at home driving rivets into the roof of their mouth, and they will stride grimly but purposefully to the toolshed.

So it's a bit of a surprise to find the two members of Alisha's Attic in a highly chipper mood when we catch up with them in Polygram's offices in Osaka. Dagenham-born sisters Sh.e.l.lie and Karen Poole are new to all this-their debut alb.u.m, Alisha Rules the World Alisha Rules the World, has only been out in Britain a few weeks-and the excitement of visiting j.a.pan for the first time is having an obvious buoying effect, though they can't have seen much of it. They've only been in the country three days, but Sh.e.l.lie and Karen have already nodded and smiled their way through a heavy schedule in Tokyo and f.u.kuoka, and so far today they've met the staff at the Polygram sales office in Nagoya, visited the studios of ZIP-FM in the same city, caught the Hikari bullet train to Osaka, been interviewed by a local pop magazine and introduced themselves to the Polygram office. It's about three in the afternoon.

I'VE BEEN IN j.a.pan ever since this morning, arriving on an overnight flight from London with Alisha's Attic's press officer from Mercury Records, Susie Roberts. Even allowing for exhaustion and jetlag, it has been a strange day. It started at the hotel, with a series of hopeless, foggy-headed calculations with a pencil and beermat, trying to figure out if it was really possible that we'd just paid 120 for a taxi and 35 for four cups of coffee and a cake. We had. Even more disturbingly, we hadn't been ripped off. Those were the going rates. ”I hope,” said Susie, contemplating the wreckage of her expenses advance, ”you like living on noodles and water.”

It had gotten still stranger once they'd made our rooms up. My television wasn't capable of receiving anything but locally-produced hardcore p.o.r.nography, the f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o scenes in which made extensive use of an interesting cinematic innovation best described as k.n.o.b-Cam-all too literally, a j.a.p's eye view. There may be circ.u.mstances in which you want your television screen filled by a shot of the inside of someone's mouth going back and forth, but I can report that it's not just after you've got off a sleepless twelve-hour flight. She wants that filling looked at, I'd thought, trying to blink away ants-under-eyelids post-flight fatigue.

The bathroom didn't work, either. At least, I couldn't get it to work. After spending some minutes prodding uselessly at a console above the sink-it is possible to fly faster than sound in machines with less complex control panels-I rang reception. Someone came up, smiled and bowed a lot, and explained it all to me. I still couldn't see what was wrong with the hot tap/cold tap system. He smiled and bowed a bit more.

The digital bathroom is but one of thousands of symptoms of the technological psychosis that now grips j.a.pan. Since 1945, the j.a.panese have invented everything humanity is ever going to need, and so the admirably restless j.a.panese creative impulse now finds itself with nowhere left to go but haywire. Hence alternately frozen and scalded hotel guests jabbing keypads and swearing while they learn the hard way that 17 degrees is too b.l.o.o.d.y cold and 44 is too b.l.o.o.d.y hot. Hence the machine outside the hotel doors into which you shove your umbrella upon entering, to have it instantly and tightly wrapped in a drip-preventing clingfilm prophylactic. Hence the presence, in the cubicles in the public toilet in the hotel bar, of b.u.t.tons that produce a purely cosmetic flush, an ineffectual slos.h.i.+ng of water designed to spare the occupant of the next throne along the distress of listening to the splashes you're making for real. Hence, I guess, k.n.o.b-Cam.

Traumatised and confused, Susie and I headed for the aquarium. The Osaka aquarium is one of the best things in j.a.pan, and very possibly the world. It's eight storeys high, and is structured so that you walk in at the top, representing the surface of the ocean, and proceed in a descending spiral to the bottom, pa.s.sing as you go the various finned things that exist at different depths. So as you enter, you see lots of furry little otters cavorting cutely in the shallows, and just before you walk out, you are confronted with a tank full of giant spider crabs which are, indeed, enormous and do, indeed, combine all the most objectionable qualities of the two beasts they're named after-it's difficult to warm to a creature whose stomach is below its knees.

The real attraction is the central tank, as tall as the aquarium itself, and wide enough to comfortably accommodate dozens of sting rays, white pointers and hammerheads, schools of less excitingly dangerous fish and, most incredibly, two whale sharks. They swim slow laps of the tank, as vast and improbable and ridiculous yet strangely graceful as 747s circling a runway.

Back outside in the sun, we got mobbed. A shrieking posse of uniformed schoolgirls bore down on us, a white-socked lynch mob with instamatics, and took dozens of photos of each other standing next to me and Susie. The penny dropped on the train on the way back to the hotel: Susie has striped blonde and red hair. The Spice Girls were, or had just been, in Osaka. They thought she was Ginger Spice. What worried me-though it should worry the relevant Spice Girl more-was which one they thought I was.

SOMEONE FROM POLYGRAM Osaka produces their business card from a little silver business card holder, hands it over, smiles and bows. So does somebody else. And somebody else. I get my cards out of my wallet, hand them back, find myself involuntarily smiling and bowing, and suddenly wish I'd thought to have some cards printed especially for this trip, if only to find out whether or not anybody actually reads them (”Andrew Mueller, fully qualified bat-wrangler and moose surgeon: no job too small, childrens' parties a specialty, early closing Tuesdays and Hannukah”).

Alisha's Attic's debut single will be released in j.a.pan in a few months' time. They're here now to meet the people who will be running the campaign when they return to formally seek the office of Pop Star. Polygram's view is that Sh.e.l.lie and Karen could find a lucrative niche somewhere in the middle ground between The Spice Girls (popular, but perceived as a touch strident) and Shampoo (two squawking adolescents from Plumstead who remain the biggest-selling British act in j.a.panese history). This is why the people at Polygram listen, beaming rapturously, to Sh.e.l.lie and Karen's earnest, self-conscious speeches about their hopes for a harmonious working relations.h.i.+p and an exciting future. It's why they burst into thunderous applause when the pair trot out the few halting j.a.panese phrases they've picked up. It's why they queue up to pose for photographs, and proffer CD booklets for autographs. They're laying on the superstar treatment for two relative unknowns in the hope that it will prove a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After a bit more bowing, smiling and distribution of business cards, a small swarm of Polygram employees, each wearing bomber jackets embossed with the company logo, organise us across town to the studios of FM802 and FM Osaka. At both stations, Sh.e.l.lie and Karen wander about introducing themselves to everyone, while the Polygram entourage scuttle around them with a ghetto blaster playing the first Alisha's Attic single, ”I Am, I Feel,” on an endless loop, and a cardboard sign bearing the j.a.panese for ”I swear to support Alisha's Attic” to use as a prop in yet more souvenir photographs. Tottering a few steps behind, feeling my way through another blizzard of business cards, I think I can see where this particular j.a.pe is heading: ”What do you mean, you won't play it? You swore that you would. We have the negatives.”

Another logo-spangled Polygram minion is toting several plastic carrier bags full of sponge cakes in pretty purple boxes. The cakes, each decorated with another pro-Alisha's Attic diktat, are an expression of the ancient and n.o.ble j.a.panese custom of gift-giving. Whenever someone sufficiently ancient or n.o.ble hands over their business card, a cake is silently, anciently and n.o.bly produced from one of the bags and handed to either Sh.e.l.lie or Karen, who pa.s.s it anciently and n.o.bly onto the recipient, who responds with perfectly genuine-looking expressions of surprise and delight (and who then, doubtless, picks all the writing off the top, takes it home to his wife and says, ”Darling! I've got a surprise for you!” To which she replies, ”It's not another b.l.o.o.d.y cake, is it?”).