It was a rare, expansive summer in the city – one when your friends were always available, you felt charming, and everyone was attractive. Daisy and I sat outside Itsu and drained cans of JD and coke. We kept bursting into hysterics. Courtney Love was DJing around the corner, but we weren’t invited. And yet, we knew we’d get in. This lucky energy was something we’d recognised about us recently. It couldn’t not happen. I thought for the 10,000th time in my life: what would Courtney do?
There were previous occasions I’d almost met her: in New York, her striding about in a fur coat like a wildebeest, while I dropped a gobful of Diet Coke on to the pavement. The planned time we – fans – hung back as she launched herself from an especially loathed interview to a waiting car. And when she sat a few feet away, in oil-painting beauty, at an event, and stared vacantly back into my eyes for a moment like I was the help. Blissful.
When you’re a fan, the highest achievement ends up being seeing by them in the flesh. Once you know everything about someone, what else is there?
We charged through the entrance. The woman on the desk barked! I held my hand to my chest and looked appalled. We were staying in the hotel, we said. She looked at my cheap red pleather skirt and ripe netted top I’d been wearing all day. “No,” she said.
Back outside, we concocted another plan. We emailed the club, hilariously keen – might we look around? We ran back and waved around proposals about joining. After a pause, during which the receptionist calculated the extent of our bullshit, she shook her head again.
And then we remembered. Courtney had recently followed Daisy on Twitter, meaning that, technically, she could direct message her. Daisy pressed send, and we held our breaths. Drunk and clammy, we returned to the entrance and I put my hands on the front desk and said: “We’re guests of Ms Love.” When confirmation came, the woman, confused, silently nodded us inwards. When the lift doors closed, we started howling.
Hours later, when Courtney stepped on to the tiny dancefloor, I didn’t notice. Daisy shoved me and laughed: “Hannah, look!” There was Courtney – larger than life. There’s a video of me singing along that night, so elated I forgot the words.
That lucky summer feeling is the precise serendipity of participating in fandom. You will spend a lot of time misbehaving to find yourself in situations that should feasibly never happen. You will do things so obnoxious, even in your mid-20s, that no one would look at you and believe it could be true.
It began with a photo. The music and politics of Courtney Love and her 90s feminist punk rock band Hole would come later, but for me, at the age of 11, there was the feeling from looking at her that this was my person.
Interviewing girls and women about why they were fans (or to use recent parlance a “stan” – stalker-fan), I realise now they couldn’t say why or what happened. They could describe why they loved the person perfectly, but that moment of conception was built from shrugs and clichés. They were talking about the hormonal sensation of falling in love – but for the long-term.
One fan, Sam, told me that one of Courtney’s vintage cami dresses was for sale while she was unemployed, so she stole a boyfriend’s car to sell it for scrap. “It was me and her, even to the point where I want to put her camisole dress in the coffin with me,” she tells me, over the phone, nearing her 40th birthday. “Unless I find an absolute diehard fan to leave it to, it goes in the ground with me.”
It was never just about the music, but the whole package of the person making it. Girls choose idols for two reasons: they feel an unmatched affinity with the subject of their love, as though this person was an older sister; or that person possesses the strong qualities they perceive themselves as lacking.
To my mind, I looked a bit like a teenage Courtney: big eyes, big nose, mouth and chin, almost pretty but too much to fit on one face. I also had a little pot belly and an insatiable hunger for everything. I was frequently told off for being greedy. I cared deeply about these supposed faults – but Courtney didn’t. She didn’t seem to let anything slow her down.
Even for girls in vastly different fandoms (Directioners dreaming of being Harry Styles’s girlfriend, BTS fans writing fan fiction about their favourite boys), it’s about wanting what the artist has – their confidence, their freedoms, their world. But with a woman musician who did everything regardless of gender, I felt like I had the full fandom package.
My childhood world was a quiet one. I grew up in the middle of the countryside. Everyone was off tending to their own problems – emotional, financial, interpersonal. Courtney’s attitude suggested to me that if I shouted loudly enough, someone would have to hear.
Every person has to create themselves. But it’s difficult to make yourself without having a stab at being another person first. I bought bleach from the chemist and, with each box, I’d get more bottle blonde. I’d ignore the nausea from cigarettes and march around the fields at the back of our house practising throaty swear words. I saved every £1 from my weekend jobs to buy an electric guitar. I’d sit in front of the family computer with my guitar unplugged and play. I remember turning around to see my little sister smirking and mouthing, “You… suck!”
Becoming carefully belligerent, I could test limits, and when I did I was thinking of Courtney Love. Telling a lecherous family friend where to go: “Fuck you!” Taking another four slices of bread from the tin: “Fuck you!” Running through the house with my sister’s TV and tossing it through an open window: “Fuck you!” The beginner guitar player has to start somewhere… When someone gives you the gift of yourself? Well, you simply have to become a stan.
You are never someone’s “biggest” fan. I realised this at Halloween last year when I was wondering if I’d get arrested for breaking and entering with two other middle-aged Courtney fans. There is a renovated industrial factory on the banks of the Hudson River called the Basilica Hudson. The venue was closed as it was the night before a big event – a celebration of Courtney Love held by her old Hole bandmate Melissa Auf der Maur. My friends Jennifer and Tracy had picked me up in their car – their idea, all theirs – to look for clues about what would happen the following night. Real fans will never be satisfied with what they’re given. Give us a special night curated to our interests and we’ll invade a day early and make a holiday of it.
Inside, a local teen-girl band were playing Miss World by Hole. I was sweating from the thrill of misbehaving and the fear of getting caught. Then, from her spot behind me, Tracy saw her – Courtney, in 3D.
But then another woman burst through the venue doors. She told us to leave, immediately. Jennifer blinked blankly. When the woman had gone, she held her phone to the window, to live report to others in our Facebook fan group. No one else but us had this night. The three of us fled, half-sprinting across the gravel.
Jennifer exhaled and solemnly called me their good luck charm. Most women fans had turned fandom inwards, but these two had hit the golden jackpot, I thought, feeling nauseous with adrenaline.
The following night, during the celebration, Melissa made a speech to Courtney and thanked her for changing her life, but she extended it to the fans in the room as well. “The lives you really changed were those in the front row, at home in their bedrooms, holding on to every word and every scream… You made a safe space for them to be angry, to be beautiful, to be heard and understood.”
I looked about to see hundreds of women who I knew had lived a 1,000 difficult lives. Many had turned their backs on the idea of children and husbands, or lived on the outskirts of wilderness. They were individual characters who operated on impulse. Being around them gave me a possible window to my future, as well as glimpses of my younger selves.
When I tell people that I will always be a fan, this is how I know. Being a fan means you don’t have to be the person you are in this moment, restricted by time, space and circumstance. You can hear a song and relive your teenage self and all the others you’ve been.
Post-event, fans gathered around the stage. The night was intended to canonise Courtney’s contributions to rock and feminism, but we’d always seen the artist clearly, something fans are rarely given credit for. Half an hour later, a woman in a Hole T-shirt ran back and said: “She’s gone!” Everyone felt deflated. I didn’t mind. At a less critical moment, any of these women would tell you it’s all about the camaraderie of trying, transcending the everyday, the magic. That said, it all begins in a teenage bedroom – when it is just the pair of you, and it will always be the pair of you.
“You got to meet her anyway,” someone said to one of the oldest among us. But I’d been at the venue hours before it had opened and Courtney had been inaccessible. How had she done it, right under our noses? “Oh, yeah, I met her earlier,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “After all these years, you learn a thing or two.”
Fangirls is published by Quadrille at £14.99. To order a copy for £13.19, go to guardianbookshop.com
