Date: March 2003
Country: UK
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Courtney Love went mad in London before Christmas.  During a bizarre photo shoot with Q on 23 December, she poured champagne over her head, stripped naked and spent the early hours of Christmas Eve streaking around the upmarket Park Lane area.

Love was officially in London to relax and prepare herself for her film role as Lady Macbeth in Fifth Element director Luc Besson's forthcoming Shakespeare adaptation, Miss June.  She is also attempting to revive her music career and set up a shoot with Q to herald her return to the rock n' roll fray.

Arriving at her suite at the chic Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner at 8pm, Q's team were greeted by the sight of Love having a bikini line wax, involving the removal of all her pubic hair.  "Wax my anus!" she screamed at her beautician.

Tired and emotional, having learned of former movie co-star Joe Strummer's death earlier that day (the two had appeared together in Alex Cox's 1987 movie Straight To Hell), Love then paraded around the room in just a pair of knee-length leather boots.  "Do you think I look good for my age?" the 38-year-old asked the assembled group of PRs and assistants.

The increasingly agitated Love had earlier spent three hours in hair and make-up preparing for the photo shoot, only to re-emerge and immediately pour a bottle of vintage champagne over her head.  She also acidentally torched an £800 basque by dropping it on a pair of heated tongs.

Throughout the ensuing session, Love blasted out the demos of her new songs on a silver boombox.  Currently without a label following her departure from Universal, Love has written almost an album's worth of material.  Pink/Christina Aquilera collaborator Linda Perry has co-penned several of the new songs with Love.  Ex-Hole drummer Patty Schemel, Babes In Toyland's Kat Bjelland and Brody Armstrong - frontwoman with Californian punk outfit The Distillers - all perform on various tracks.

Mining a no-frills, garage rock stream, the new material is a world away from Hole's last album, 1998's overly polished Celebrity Skin.  Mono is a caustic anti-nu-metal rant built around an atonal riff.  The Strokes-inspired But Julian, I'm A Little Older Than You features the couplet: "I've seen Paris, I've seen France/I can see your underpants".  Julian Casablancas has yet to comment on this piece of information.

Having strewn more than 200 items of designer clothing around her suite, Love eventually decided to head out into the London streets at 3am on Christmas Eve.  Removing nearly all of her clothes, she ran down the middle of the road, halting the early morning traffic.  Blocking a fleet of drivers, she then rolled around on the road before briefly clambering into the back of a bemused cabbie's taxi.  In typically perverse style, Love concluded proceedings by serving tea and cake in her suite.

At the time of going to press, Courtney Love is still without a record deal.