Courtney Love announced earlier this month that she plans to make the United Kingdom her new home, as the rock icon and actor criticized President Donald Trump and took aim at what his administration is up to back home, referring to the president and his cronies as “emperor-core.”
Love, 60, has lived in London for five years and plans to commit to life in Blighty, she told the crowd on March 4 at an event at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The rocker is applying for British citizenship and should be an official ex-patriot by the end of 2025, Love told the crowd, who applauded the news.
“I’m really glad I’m here,” she said at the event. “It’s so great to live here. I’m finally getting my British citizenship in six months. I get to be a citizen. I’m applying, man! Can’t get rid of me!”
At the event, Love appeared in conversation with playwright Todd Almond and performed a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Love, the one-time enfant terrible of the ’90s alt-rock scene, has earned a reputation for being unabashedly forthright about her opinions over her four decades in the spotlight. At the event, she tore into the Trump administration, criticizing the new U.S. leader, his staff and cabinet appointees as elitist, imperial and a form of “cyanide.”
“In terms of Trump and particularly this group…it’s like emperor-core. Like, [they’re] wearing million-dollar watches,” she said. “Emperor-core is going on at Mar-a-Lago. It’s frightening now. It’s like cyanide now.”
Love did not draw a straight line between the new administration and her move as a reason for her decision and has previously said that the more stringent privacy laws in the U.K. have made it attractive to her as a home.
Love rose to fame with her alternative rock group Hole and simultaneously as the wife and muse to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who she married in 1992. The couple had one child, Frances Bean Cobain, before his death by suicide in 1994 following multiple heroin overdoses. She lived in Los Angeles, where Hole formed in 1991, for decades but in 2019 moved across the pond and settled in The Big Smoke. In the years ahead of her move, Love was struggling with opioid addiction but had been sober for a year when she left the country.
Now a sexagenarian, the once ferocious queen of grunge rock has recently become a grandmother. In September. Frances Bean Cobain and her partner, Riley Hawk, the son of pro-skateboarder Tony Hawk, welcomed a baby boy, Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk. The couple married in L.A. in October with R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe, a friend of Kurt Cobain who was the bride’s godfather, officiating the ceremony.
Love is just one of a handful of celebrities who have abandoned the U.S. and fled to the U.K. or rooted further in foreign countries as the second Trump administration goes into full swing. Rosie O’Donnell, a longtime foe of the president, moved to Ireland with her 12-year-old daughter following Trump’s inauguration.
“When you know it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America, that’s when we will consider coming back,” O’Donnell said on TikTok.
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