There’s a simple formula to The First Time With … (BBC Radio 6): ask a musician about the first record they bought, the first gig they went to etc. They’re basically the kind of questions the staff in the High Fidelity record shop would give massive side-eye to when faced with the answers. This week’s guest is Courtney Love, a deeply polarising figure, partly because of the poetic, ugly truths revealed in her songs and partly due to her public persona, which has seen her painted as King Herod’s meaner, more self-serving younger sister.

On the show she is forthcoming, perhaps surprisingly so for someone whose obituary will probably feature the line, “I fake it so real I am beyond fake” (from Hole’s Doll Parts). We find out that the first record Love had – nicked from her mother – was Leonard Cohen’s debut (“I was a pretty morbid kid and there was real angst on it,” she says. We’ll forgive her for the way she pronounces “angst” as “unkst”, which is possibly the name of a minor character in The Killing). The first record she bought was ELO’s Evil Woman (her detractors will probably whoop with the apparent irony of this). Matt Everitt is a pally, intuitive interviewer who pushes Love a bit. Not that she needs much pushing; her storied life (working as a stripper to fund early Hole rehearsals, for example) and her habit of dropping names like cigarette butts makes her a compelling guest.

Best anecdotes, then: the time she attempted to write a Christmas song (Just imagine Love with a bauble!), her reaction when her husband Kurt Cobain rebelled against being thought of as good looking (“He dyed his hair red. I was like, ‘Where did the blue-eyed boy with the nice sweater go?’”) and the “fact” she inspired most of the best Smashing Pumpkins songs (“When [Billy Corgan] stopped writing about me they stopped having hits. I don’t know what that’s about”). It’s all so gloriously 90s, you’ll want to part your hair down the middle, wear a three-quarter-length combat trouser and stick on Live Through This after listening.