"Dead man walking!" shouts the bouncer at the end of the corridor as he sees me approach. He thinks he's hilarious. I think I need to visit the bathroom one more time.
In my slightly shaking hand is a signed contract, standard to every media vulture who dares to brave the Love lair.
"During the course of the interview, I agree to refrain from initiating any discussion on the following topics," reads the crucial paragraph. "Kurt Cobain; The Nick Broomfield film Kurt and Courtney; Any band members private life and family; Hank Harrison (her father); Any half truths/rumours regarding Courtney Love and Hole pertaining to any connection with the above four topics as well as any half truths or rumours relating to the use of illegal substances etc..."
From my standpoint, it's a somewhat restrictive document. For Love it's a ticket to freedom, her only hope of transcending the nightmares of heroin, death and intrusion that have consumed so much of her past five years. Since her acclaimed Hollywood debut in The People Vs Larry Flynt in 1996, reinvention has been the former Grunge Goddess' salvation. It continues here and now with the long-awaited third Hole album, Celebrity Skin.
"We were never a punk band," Love says, piercing blue eyes daring me to suggest otherwise behind immaculate make up and careful blonde tresses tied with sequins. "For me, punk had its roots in a real male, Marxist, rite of passage ethos and I was always too ambitious for it. I didn't understand. There was no pop in it."
"I was never a discontent working-class lad. I was a guttersnipe who wanted to get the hell out of my town and to do something that girls didn't do and take over the world on my terms without having to make crap pop music and without having to twinkle and be pretty. I wanted to do it my way."
In the flesh, Love is beautiful, intense, powerful but not so scary. All smiles and sparkling clear eyes between Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and guitarist Eric Erlandson, she's no longer the unkempt and aggressive Grunge Grrrl, though there's no question who's in charge of the conversation.
For the most part, the unfeasible tall guitarist pretends not to be there at all. Auf Der Maur is more forthcoming on the subject of Hole's striking development form the punk attitude and raged aggro on 1994's Live Through This to the squeaky clean pop of Celebrity Skin.
"Remember when you were a kid? The innocence before your intellect starting asking what it was a bout music that made you want to play music? It was the stuff that sticks with you, sticks in your head over and over. Everyone should go through an intellectual phase, absolutely, of deconstructing everything and trying to get to your primal, personal root with it. But then there's the universal sound of quality constructed rock songs : pop songs."
"My daughter sees Grease and....You're The One That I Want!" Love sings with gay abandon. "This is her favourite song in the world! All she knows is that it makes her move. All I remember from boarding school in New Zealand is that I loved Dancing Queen. I didn't intellectualize it. Now what we have on this record is some really commercial stuff and some really dark stuff, but with a kind of intellectual lyrical bent. We're making that kind of art/commerce (union)."
Auf Der Maur concludes : :It's based on our own inner expectations of wanting to be bigger, better, smarter and more disciplined."
"That's why we went back and deconstructed classic rock records in order to just grow and become better musicians. You've gotta grow up at some point."
How true. Via the tabloids, the glossies and trash tv, we've watch Courtney love do just that in the past four years. Back in rock n roll mode, she prefers to play down her Versace/Hollywood make over, claiming she "went to three movie premieres in a year" and "wore an Armani suit maybe three times so studio executives would think I was normal." Her band mates are in similar denial as regards Love's public transformation.
"We couldn't see it and we were right here next to her," Auf Der Maur says. "When we did get to go to the Batman premiere or something, we'd be like 'Wow, this is the other side... don't go there full time please!'" It's so much more rewarding to play rock music in front of a bunch of enthusiastic young'uns, old'uns, everyone. Live music. You can't beat it."
Still, some of the more cynical moments on Celebrity Skin suggest Hole are not entirely thrilled with the way rock n roll - and specifically the 90s punk update we call grunge - was co-opted by the mainstream. There's a particular strong air of outrage in Playing Your Song, which describes the coporate acquisition of the grunge phenomenon.
"There's another song on the record called Awful which I think is even more so," Love counters. "There's two songs on the record which are kinda provocative, almost social comment as opposed to being deep and emotional."
"After those two songs I think it started to get much more deep and harrowing or whatever but I had to get that stuff out. I was pissed off and I am pissed off about it. Playing Your Song is the only cynical song on the record. It's the only song that doesn't offer any hope. If anybody has the license to write the last grunge song, it's us."
Apart from the thread of personal pain which remains, for the purposes of this interview, contractually unmentionable, Love has one more axe to grind on Celebrity Skin. It's right there in the title track : the outward ullison of celebrity and the vulnerability within. Is fame a curse?
"I don't know what else I would do," she says. "I'm good at it. Before I was famous tabloids would write about me. It's just something that seemed to happen to me. It's just like an architect - I want to impose my value system on the world."
"The downside is that you have a whole set of problems that nobody can understand : people dream about you, people obsess about you, people follow you, people write about you, people stalk you. If you don't get a more spiritual understanding and get more grounded you can become whatever cartoon you've been assigned that day : today you're a beautiful princess, today you're a deranged hag.."
"You just have to absolutely ignore it all and know who you are, and who your friends are, and what your life really is, and who your children really are, and who your lovers are, and who the people you protect are and that's it."
Courtney Love sighs and takes another cherry from a huge bowl. "Fame has a lot of problems that only weird sophisticated New York psychiatrists understand."