Their relationship broke down and she started living in a squat and began to frequent clubs and bars in Dublin. Prior to Liverpool, Love had crossed the Atlantic in 1981 to stay with her biological father, who was then living in Dublin. “I think she began to see rock ’n’ roll as a means of self-expression and a means of escape and being in Liverpool reinforced that for her.” They became, in a way, her substitute family, and music became, because of that, an even more important thing to her. She never had a father figure, and also was moved to so many different places that she never had a network of friends until she was about 17 and going out in Portland, Oregon, meeting people in clubs and bars. “She was a young woman who was rejected in many ways by her mother and never had a stable relationship with her father. “One of the things that struck me was how no-one seemed to care about her, no-one gave her a voice, no-one listened to her. “I didn’t realise until I began to research the book just how chaotic and dysfunctional and alienating it must have been,” he says. Haslam believes Love’s self-mythologizing might in part have been a means of escape from a highly unconventional upbringing in the US. The passing of time, I think, has done something very interesting to how we remember that era.” Especially as we’re all now in our late 50s and early 60s, all the protagonists that were then practically teenagers. That became something that really began to interest me. Cities and countries create a past, or at least adjust our memories in order to understand who we are. Not just Courtney, but all the people that met her. Instead of being a factual truth, to try and find out something about the truth of human nature, and how on the one hand young people can be energised by an experience like that, at a stage when you’re particularly porous and impressionable in your formative years, and also the truth about how we remember our past. “So I decided that I should put my cultural historian head to one side and instead in a way search for a different kind of truth.
Courtney also talks about being in a band while she was in Liverpool that, as I researched, became lots of great stories but not necessarily stories that didn’t contradict themselves, and there were one or two stories that I felt were a bit unbelievable, not from Courtney always but from some of the people that I was talking to. “Courtney talks, for example, about losing her virginity in Liverpool and the young man that she says was there denies knowledge of that. He says: “With my slightly nerdy cultural historian head on, I thought if I investigated enough I’d be able to find the truth and be able to create a timeline of events of everything that happened, but I began to realise that I was never going to know the details. Love’s Merseyside sojourn has been the subject of much mythologizing Haslam aimed to get as close to the truth as he could about the period. I thought there was a lot to investigate.” “Obviously we know what we know now about Courtney and I became interested in understanding why it had such an impact that she ended up saying that it was one of the most important periods of her life and that she learned everything that she needed to know about being a rock star while in Liverpool for five months. “Then I became aware probably about ten or fifteen years ago from a few mentions in Courtney Love’s book Dirty Blonde, which was a scrapbook of her diaries and notes through her life, of her being in Liverpool and that was what first sparked my interest – the idea of that scene in Liverpool, that I remember being so exciting and so fertile, and Courtney as a seventeen-year-old engaging with that world. That era was the beginning of The Pale Fountains, for example, who I really loved, and I met Jayne Casey from Pink Industry, and I found it very inspiring city. I got to know Pete Wylie and went to see the bands that were around. “81–82 was when I first started going over there from Manchester. “I’ve always been a big fan of the Liverpool music scene of that era,” says the author. The chapter would inspire her later musical career with bands such as Faith No More and Hole, and as a solo artist.
His new book, Searching For Love, however, is set thirty miles away, and traces the experiences of Courtney Love, then an aspiring seventeen-year-old musician, who spent five key months in her life in Liverpool in 1982. His strong ties with Manchester were formed 40 years ago when he moved to the city as an undergraduate, and he would go on to DJ more than 450 times at the Hacienda nightclub, write for the NME, found the record label Play Hard and later chronicle the city’s musical history in his book Manchester, England.
As a DJ, promoter, music writer and university lecturer, Dave Haslam has a long association with the North West of England.