Hole singer, Courtney Love, has told a British audience that she moved to Ireland for a time as a teenager and that Bono became her mentor. She also said that "watching quantum physics videos on You Tube" had affected her music.

"Quantum physics has done my band a world of good," she told the Oxford Union Debating society.

Love's father, writer Hank Harrison, lived in Ireland for many years, but father and daughter have had little contact.

She also said she doesn't do celebrity well: "I'm a very good rock musician. But when it comes to celebrity I don't have it quite right.

"I couldn't have a perfume. What would it be called?"

She said the only benefits of celebrity were ''free shoes and bags" however.

She said her drug addiction days were firmly behind her.

"When you're under 30, okay,'' she said. ''But after 40 it's just ugly." She said her daughter kept her going after Kurt Cobain's suicide, "What gave me strength was my daughter's life force."

"My daughter's the most important thing to me, in my life," she said.

She also said she disagreed with those who thought Kurt Cobain's suicide was cool. “‘God, Kurt was cool'. No, he wasn't.

"Not in the sense of that action. That action had a horrible effect on our family. It's not cool. It just wasn't cool.

"And that action was regretted the second it happened. I was expected by the zeitgeist to go with him or something.

"But I worked. I had to work to get money to feed my kid. I never expected I would be connected to the Alpha male as some kind of ancillary object and to this day it mystifies me.

"I'm a feminist and it's deeply ingrained so I just don't get it, and it shocks me."