The dingy London venue where Courtney Love uncovered the next big rock group
They say that London is not a city to be looked at from above; pay the extortionate fees for a ride on the London Eye, and you’ll be greeted not with a dazzling metropolis but a sprawling mess, like looking inside the mouth of a teen who has just gotten their first set of braces.
You mightn’t need to look at London from above, but you also needn’t look at London from eye level, either: in Soho, Covent Garden, and Marylebone, the shop faces are carbon copies of any other high-end brands you’d find in any other Western city.
Follow your nose around the British capital, and you’ll find yourself in a labyrinth of capitalist simulacra, so if you ask what the best way is to discover London, then I’d tell you it’s the underground, of course. Forget the tube, I mean poky wine bars on the edge of Leicester Square, or a dingy pub on an unsuspecting corner of Soho that, legend has it, has been run by a family of vampires for over a century. You want to feel hemmed in, trapped in an ideal where anything is truly possible.
As a London resident for most of a half a decade, I’d like to think I know a thing or two about these kinds of spectacular, albeit somewhat seedy venues, like finding a backroom on a submarine. And the best of London’s offering of this underground, shimmering subculture vibe isn’t quite what, or where, you might expect.
You might’ve heard of Brixton’s Windmill, not an underground bunker but a pub at the end of an unsuspecting road in which any band with something to say once played when they were small fry. The Windmill might as well be buried six feet deep, because inside, you are removed from the chaos of the city and plunged into a damp-smelling haven of new music and fizzing, glimmering lights, and it was here, in this scuzzy, sticky space, that Courtney Love found herself watching the sixth-ever show of the up-and-coming rock band, Picture Parlour.
In March 2023, the Hole vocalist found herself in the swamp-like belly of the beast, in which you can see nothing but dark walls and bobbing heads from most vantage points.
No matter the location, Love was blown away by the group, writing on social media, “There’s no more mojo to go around. It’s all gone. I know it when I hear and see it, and MAN, it’s been a minute”.
What more could you want, a seminal taste-maker of our times branding you with a stamp that reads ‘The Next Big Thing’? It was a surreal time for the small group with big voices and even bigger guitar riffs, but one that turned the fist-bumping crowd into a gaggle of pitchfork-wielders, throwing all sorts of accusations toward the group, finding it hard to believe that Love might just be celebrating the group of her own volition and not because she was a secret aunt.
Still, Picture Parlour carried on with what they knew best, back-to-basic rock songs, cemented in their 2025 debut album, The Parlour, stuffed with catchy rock songs and slacker-pop sensibility. Everyone, say thank you, old-school boozers, and thank you, Courtney Love.
