Suki Waterhouse wears Jacket, Tank Top, Bikini, and Necklace Versace.
Suki Waterhouse is in need of an adversary, at least according to Courtney Love. And while the “Good Looking” singer agrees, she also says she’s already had quite a few naysayers cast doubt on her. Waterhouse began her career as a high-fashion model before making her foray on the silver screen. But the echoes of recording studio amps and arenas of screaming fans lured her like a siren song into the life of a musician. Needless to say, that pivot was met with skepticism from those who were eager to criticize her artistry. From judgmental whispers questioning her bringing her daughter on tour to scathing reviews in the British press early on in her music ventures, she’s heard it all. But now, with a slew of splashy fashion campaigns, a successful acting career, and three albums under her belt, she’s learned to chew up and spit out the haters.
Rock legend Courtney Love knows a thing or two about public scrutiny as well. She spent the ’90s being crucified for breathing and still lived to tell the tale. “I’m shocked I don’t have scars,” she confided to Waterhouse on a call earlier this month. This summer, Waterhouse released her third studio album Loveland, an electric and indulgent record of romance, fantasy, and unbridled desire. Now, she’s taking the ferociously psychedelic record on the road through the fall so everyone can live out their ’70s rock and roll dreams. While on break, the multi-hyphenate called up her new friend Love to talk Mick Fleetwood, “bad mom” behavior, and what kind of things get a poor soul kicked out of Loveland.
FRIDAY 9PM SEPTEMBER 4, 2026 LONDON
———
COURTNEY LOVE: Hi, Suki.
SUKI WATERHOUSE: Hello. Did you get a bagel?
LOVE: I did get my schmear and some fresh onion, tomatoes, capers, and shit.
WATERHOUSE: Heaven.
LOVE: I have been listening to your different playlists over the years that you put up on Spotify.
WATERHOUSE: I know. You were texting me about that last night. I’m like, “Which playlist?”
LOVE: There’s two that I was really impressed by over the years. I was like, “She’s got taste.” It would start with something that we all love like “Bittersweet Symphony,” and then it would go to, “What the fuck is this? This is so good.” And then the other song I had to go listen to was “Good Looking” because it’s the billion-stream one. Did they give you a watch?
WATERHOUSE: I don’t think you even get sent anything. You have to buy something from the label.
LOVE: Oh, same with gold records, you have to pay $10,000 to get the nice ones.
WATERHOUSE: Which is kind of a lot.
LOVE: All right, let’s go. “Women are always asked to kill off one version of themselves so the next one looks respectable. You do not do that here. Was that deliberate or did the songs refuse?” That’s so Guardian writing, no offense [to The Guardian].
WATERHOUSE: Isn’t it crazy the questions that women get asked? I was looking at these last night and I was like, “Damn, the questions women get asked are fucking impossible.”
LOVE: Poetically written. You told me you started modeling, you really wanted to do music, but you didn’t know if anyone would take you seriously. Then you acted, but I don’t know that you had to kill each one of these to be respected. So was the music enough in you that you were like, “Yeah, fuck it. I’m going for it”?
WATERHOUSE: Well, I guess you’re never killing off any version of yourself. If anything, every single life experience guides you to the next thing, doesn’t it?
LOVE: Yeah, it might be easier to play the game now. I saw Ewan McGregor’s daughter, and she’s got a knitting collective, a band, a poetry reading thing. There’s hyphenates everywhere, and they’re doing well at all of them. It makes it so people don’t fight as much, because it’s not like, “Oh, there’s only room for one Bangles, and there’s only room for one Go-Gos, and the rest of them, fuck off.”
WATERHOUSE: That was actually something I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been listening to interviews of yours, and just reflecting on that the last couple of days. It’s like, “Wow, the girls don’t have to be out here fighting.”
LOVE: I know some of y’all hate each other’s guts, but you don’t show it in public.
WATERHOUSE: No, it’s pretty buttoned up like that.
Top, Skirt, Tights, and Shoes Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.
LOVE: It’s cooler because it’s more supportive, and that’s a better way to be. Which Suki gets the last word?
WATERHOUSE: The last word is me on an Ambien at the end of the night.
LOVE: Try getting an Ambien from the Chateau Marmont doctor. He’ll tell you to fuck off. Maybe it’s just because it’s me. He’s like, “I’m not giving you a thyroid pill, lady.” [Laughs] What became non-negotiable about having your child, and what got sharper in your writing?
WATERHOUSE: I went straight into writing the record a couple of weeks after she was born. Everything at the beginning that I was writing was kind of depressing, and I definitely wasn’t going to put it on the record. So much changed with the album from its inception.
LOVE: I love the photo that was almost the album cover. When I saw you at Hollywood Forever [Cemetery], it was like, “She’s being sexy, and she’s had a baby, fuck yeah.” Five years ago, you couldn’t have done that, Suki. You’d be a bad mom.
WATERHOUSE: You can feel everyone around you sometimes is like, “Oh, you’re taking a baby on tour” or “You’re working all the time.’’ But you were also doing that.
LOVE: Yes, but I was also hung upside down on a cross and burned, metaphorically speaking, and I’m shocked I don’t have scars. So that’s a whole different couple decades ago. This is a new era, and I’m digging it a lot.
WATERHOUSE: You’re making me think of that unreleased song of yours you sent me last night.
LOVE: What was the song?
WATERHOUSE: “7-Eleven.” It’s insane how much truth you spit into that song.
LOVE: There’s a great lyric: “I’m orgasmic, hysteric. I get fucked in a red dress, ’90s tabloid aesthetic.”
WATERHOUSE: That song has to be your lead single. The witches need it. And I’ve spent enough time in America to have an affinity towards 7/11.
LOVE: I love a place song. I love “Hotel California,” “Desperados Under the Eaves,” “Venice Bitch.” But London songs are hard. That’s why I love your song “Notting Hill.” Starting that line at, “Notting Hill on Sunday morning, I feel so famous…got my picture in the morning papers,” it’s like, “It might be a shitty picture with my mouth open, but who gives a fuck.” It’s a very sexy song, and it’s a song that’s not been written about.
WATERHOUSE: My first real apartment was in Notting Hill, just me and my Wurlitzer. That apartment was my girlhood to womanhood place. To walk around Portobello now with my daughter is so surreal.
fLOVE: Do women still have to defend desire once they become mothers? I would say the answer is a resounding fuck no. 2026, get over yourselves.
WATERHOUSE: Did I have a fear that I’d become a ghost? I definitely did fear that, and I think that’s why I fucking got on stage five weeks later and just got back into it so quickly because I was afraid of all of that.
LOVE: Oh, wow. I’m glad that impetus paid off. It’s incredible. You call “Back In Love” the glue of the record. What was broken before the song arrived?
WATERHOUSE: I can sometimes be scratching at the walls for tension, or friction, and having a lot of fucking conflicts, or craving something new and not feeling like that is an option. It’s probably the glue because it was the last.
Bra and Skirt Gucci.
LOVE: On “Seasons,” you kept the vocal from when you were ill because it was the honest one. Perfect vocals often lie. What was it in that rough take that disappeared when you sang it properly? And what else did you leave rough because it was true? I like that.
WATERHOUSE: I don’t think it’s that radical to leave in shit that is rougher. The way I like hearing myself is rough and a bit out of time.
LOVE: Yeah, you got a grit in your voice. It’s pretty, and then it gets gritty, and that’s what really attracted me to you. Tell me more about “Seasons.”
WATERHOUSE: That’s the one that I did with [Aaron] Dessner. That was the first time I met him, and I’d just blown up my life a little bit and left my managers. Wait, so on your record, you’re working with Ian [McCulloch] from Echo & the Bunnymen, right?
LOVE: No, Will Sargent, who I met in 1981. I just turned 16. He never seemed to like me, or talk to me. He’s never played with anybody else, and he just said yes. I was like, “What the fuck?” But the other thing is I was making it as though it might be my last record. Lana Del Rey was playing the Hollywood Bowl a year from when we’d played. I was like, “L.A.’s in good hands,” because I’m that pretentious and she’s got six albums out. I’m like, “You know what, JD? This is not my last record. I’m just going to keep writing.” Yesterday, I wrote all day in the studio.
WATERHOUSE: We need this record soon, Courtney. I heard that you wanted to make a movie about your time in Liverpool.
LOVE: Oh, I desperately do because me and my girlfriend Robin [Barbur], we were these two girls from Portland. Nobody goes to Liverpool, and Julian Cope from this band, Teardrop Explodes, brought us there. Completely celibate, this was all wholesome, in their house above Pete Burns, who would say things like, “Hey, it’s the ugly Americans.” I mean, I still fall for a Scouse accent all the time.
WATERHOUSE: I bet the way they said ‘ugly Americans’ sounded so charming. Wait, how long were you there for?
LOVE: Six months till I got chased out.
WATERHOUSE: That’s a long time. Why did you get chased out?
LOVE: I used to move around a lot and then they put my fucking picture up at the post office for stealing someone’s boyfriend, or running up their phone bill, or some shit.
WATERHOUSE: Right, so you had to leave. This is random but did you ever meet Marc Bolan?
Bra, Skirt, Bracelet, and Shoes Gucci.
LOVE: I’m too young for that one. There’s a few things–
WATERHOUSE: That you never got to do.
LOVE: I met Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol stuck me in this magazine in November of ’86, and died.
WATERHOUSE: Did you do an interview with him?
LOVE: No, I stalked him, and then I got on Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. I had one line. I don’t know how I bagged that shit. The Stone Roses, Polly Jean Harvey, The Replacements, I love that you love Let It Be. That was my savior record. Do you have PJ on this record?
WATERHOUSE: No, I don’t have PJ on this record. I would love that. She’s one of your number ones, right?
LOVE: She is my number one. I think that Rid of Me is more important than Nevermind. I think Kurt [Cobain] agreed. What did Mick [Fleetwood] do to “Morals” that nobody else could? Did you boss him around? Bossing Mick Fleetwood around sounds like a fun time for me.
WATERHOUSE: No, I didn’t boss him around. I actually haven’t met him. We did everything over Zoom because he lives in Hawaii, but I did give him a crazy healer that I know of down there. So maybe, I don’t know what happened with that.
LOVE: Okay, so this thing about being famous and just the impetus, I didn’t have the guts for it. I didn’t have the social skills or the infrastructure. I hadn’t gone to school, I didn’t know how to make friends with people very well. I’d been around men the whole time, and just the crazy internal misogyny that we talked about yesterday. What you said to me yesterday about modeling and feeling like “I can’t put out an EP because I’m a model,” that’s a great force of will.
WATERHOUSE: I remember when I first put out my first song and there were all these articles that it failed to chart, and then I did a show, and someone came to the show and wrote that there’d been two false starts and it was the worst show ever and a failure. I remember that shit really bumming me out. It doesn’t stop you, but I did have that feeling for a long time. When you’re younger and you’re trying to change a path, or the way that people see you, and now I feel like I’m broken through on the other side of that in a way.
LOVE: Well, there are mean people and there are kind people. And kindness always just comes through at some point.
WATERHOUSE: Yeah, at the end of the day, it was just me that had to start actually waking up.
LOVE: “Good Looking” went to nearly a billion streams, and now you have more than 1.75 billion overall. What the fuck? All right, BTS. Is that weird?
WATERHOUSE: I believe that everything happens in these seven-year cycles, so it was weird that it happened seven years after I put it out. I told you I was signed to Sub Pop–
LOVE: Oh, my god, that’s right. Genius. I love that Sub Pop’s money after post-grunge went to Band of Horses and you.
WATERHOUSE: Yeah. Keeping the indie rock dreams alive for the youths.
LOVE: My official feeling is that Loveland, after I saw Hollywood Forever, I’m like, “While I was in the hospital, they invented the fucking light bulb. There’s music directors now. You can sound good live. What’s going on?” My mind was blown. And then I said to JD, “I think my goal is I want Suki’s career.” It sounded so fucking good. And then, they found out it was a music director and that these things aren’t sins anymore.
WATERHOUSE: What was it like touring in the ’90s?
Dress, Bag, and Shoes Balmain.
LOVE: Lots of steroid shots to keep my voice going.
WATERHOUSE: Would you get label support, or would you pay for the tour yourself?
LOVE: If you were pop, you’d get support. If you weren’t, it was on merch. And I was like, “Could you please make tiaras? Could you please make barrettes?” The ones that I paid for myself that I had made in China, they’re now, like, 400 bucks on eBay. Because I was right, and they were wrong, and I’m glad that today I’m around to tell the tale. But I’m so glad that you made Loveland because you get to do all these things. There’s so much to go around now.
WATERHOUSE: Well, I would love to set you up with my MD.
LOVE: I would love that. “When I Get Drunk (I Want You Boy)” is an excellent title because it refuses euphemism. Is desire easier to sing than to admit in daylight?
WATERHOUSE: I can be pretty honest about things in daylight.
LOVE: You say the studio makes you feel like a scared, fragile animal because anything can happen. What has to leave the room before a song will come in? For me, it’s always been like, “Make me Christ. I want to be as vulnerable as Christ. Let me serve god with this.”
WATERHOUSE: That’s “7-Eleven.” When I heard that last night, I was laid on my bed staring at the ceiling and I felt god. Do you feel like you find it hard to pick the songs?
LOVE: No, but because by removing all these really very—I had written a very British song, and I made it much more like sunset sound, boys are wearing cowboy hats.
WATERHOUSE: But there was a reason why you went back to it.
LOVE: Yeah, because there’s a story to it. I have this song, “Swans” now, which is kind of my British adversary album song. I like an adversary. Kill me.
WATERHOUSE: This is good. That’s going to be my takeaway from this interview—more adversaries!
LOVE: With the pop girlies—I hate that fucking title, but—I don’t get this idea of not writing songs that are specific because you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. What the fuck is this postmodern, “I’m going to mine my lore entirely, and you’re just going to hear tabloids about me”? That’s not poetry. Write a good lyric. It’s for you. It’s serving god, not offending anybody.
WATERHOUSE: I’m glad we get along.
LOVE: Well, if I didn’t like you, I’d have to talk all this shit around you and make things up.
WATERHOUSE: I love you so much.
LOVE: I love you too, honey. It’s hard for me to make friends in this game, and I really like you a lot.
WATERHOUSE: Well, I want to be your friend.
LOVE: If Loveland is a country and you’re the queen to make all the laws, what gets you thrown out of Loveland? I would say dressing badly.
WATERHOUSE: If you’re coming to Loveland there’s only one law: Be authentic. You’d be fine. The idea of life and love being something aimed towards perfection is impossible. And without shame, Loveland becomes a place of an attitude or a freedom.
LOVE: Part of what you’re saying there is quite Buddhistic. I’m a Buddhist, but I’m going to say it again: it’s about serving god. If I’m not serving god, if I’m not serving music, what the fuck am I?
WATERHOUSE: What the fuck are we doing?
———
Hair: Jacob Rozenberg using K18 Hair at A-Frame Agency.
Makeup: Benjamin Puckey at the Wall Group.
Photo Assistant: Cecilie Mengel.
Styling Assistant: Adlet Bermukhamedov.
Production Director: Alexandra Weiss.
Photo Producer: Georgia Ford.
On-set Producer: Giselle Quinones.
