It's the festive season - the time to spread great joy and happiness to all men and women - so Michael Bonner settles down to a hardcore Christmas with Hole...
Courtney Love hates Christmas.
"I hate Christmas."
Told you so.
"No, there is one thing I like about Christmas. Every year I go and see The Nutcracker. I love that."
This year, Courtney is planning to spend Christmas with her "only friend" in either Seattle or Vegas. Courtney, who could audition for the part of the Christmas Fairy if ever David Lynch turned his hand to Panto, remembers shaving all her hair off one Christmas when she was four. She saw a picture of herself afterwards wearing a velvet dress complete with a horrendous collar. Courtney has another photograph of herself as a child, sans hair, praying to the Nativity. The only Christmas present Courtney claims to have been pleased to have been given was a typewriter several years ago. Functional presents, she tells me, are alot better than dresses.
Eric, Hole's guitarist, has his birthday two weeks after Christmas. As a child he used to get cheap presents because his parents would be broke after spending all their money at Christmas. Eric also has a photograph taken on Christmas of himself dressed up as Santa throwing a toy onto the fireplace.
Jill, Hole's bass player, remembers playing poker every Christmas with her uncles, who would steadily get more and more drunk as the game progressed. Her uncles, she reflects, remind her of Matt from Mudhoney.
Caroline, who plays drums and has her lower lip and her tougue pierced - and has the studs in place to prove it - draws my attention to the fact that Santa is an anagram of Satan. "I remember getting really drunk on Burgundy one Christmas in New Zealand," says Courtney. "I'd been given green corduroy trousers for Christmas and my sister had got a canopy bed and a dress - look, all I had was corduroy trousers - and I was chasing my parents down the street. They were cowering in a corner somewhere, and I remember waking up in a sheep paddock the next morning. It was the worst Christmas ever."
You may gather from all this that Hole - or to be more precise, Courtney, do not retain a vast amount of affection for Christmas. Are you surprised? Are you really surprised that Courtney does not like Christmas? I guess that, to Courtney, Christmas is one gross falsehood, a day of contrived affections and the exploitation of innocence where every manufacturer and retailer ever to crawl from the corporate pits pulls out all the stops to persuade you, me, Courtney and the gang to buy presents for people we neither like nor really want to. For Courtney and Hole, you see, are immensely genuine and honest when expressing their feelings. They write about what they feel and what they, in all their wonderful, enticing brashness and fortitude, have to write about, just to exorcise their own demons; to - as Caroline puts it, - "shed their skins."
Jesus died for somebody's sins but not Hole's.
Courtney goes some way to explaining her dislike of Christmas by pointing out that most people have a Christmas where their father gets drunk and sets the tree on fire. Everyone, she reckons, has at least one horrible Christmas lurking somewhere in their past. She would, however, like to spend Christmas with Brian Wilson. New Year, though, is a different matter. Hole like New Year. We never get round to discussing what exactly it is that makes New Year a better bet in their books but Hole do, most definitely, like New Year. I don't because I had a horrific experience on New Year's Eve a couple of years back - but believe you me, you don't want to hear about my problems.
Every New Year, Courtney makes the same resolutions. They are: not to gossip, not to go into doughnut shops, to quit smoking, not to talk to much and not to be paranoid. She does, of course, manage to break them all. Well, doesn't everyone? 1991 was, Courtney informs me, the year music died. This is irrefutably true in a certain context, but 1991 was also the year in which Hole were catapulted from near-obscurity on the Sympathy label to planet-wide mega-stars (well, nearly). In the course of the last 12 months, Hole have taken the world by the scruff of its neck and hurled it through a plate glass window and now they're hanging around kicking the body. In a year when the British indie scene all but shot itself in the foot, all the reliable American favorites - Nirvana, Mudhoney, American Music Club, Fugazi, Thin White Rope and Neil Young - put out new albums and shifted the focus of attention away from the Thames Valley and across the Atlantic. And, as our glances fell once more on the shores of the good ol' US of A, someone spat in our eyes. It was a combined effort by Mercury Rev, Smashing Pumpkins and Hole. Each one - if there's any justice left in this world - is destined for the top, but it's Hole who look like they're going to get there first. And why? Because Mercury Rev, for all their thrilling and stupid gracefulness, are too arthouse for real success. Smashing Pumpkins, with their high octane guitar blitz, are still living in the shadow of Jane's Addiction in many people's opinions. So it's Hole - screwy, funny, sexy, dangerous and beautiful Hole - who are going to lead the new vanguard against the perils of crassness and normalcy. Hole's songs remind me of the fucked up romanticism that's found on songs like Patti Smith's Horses. That said, I firmly believe that Hole also have the capacity to write a song of the same poetic eloquence as Neil Young's Out On The Beach.
"It was the year the music died - AND ME AND MY FRIENDS KILLED IT!" shouts Courtney before suddenly lapsing back into a state of temporary quiescence. "Nah. I didn't mean that, I just don't know what I'm talking about," she admits almost sheepishly. Then she fixes me with those big, bad eyes of hers and says: "Hey - are you going to call me solemn in this interview?" Actually I was planning on calling you Courtney. "I don't want you to think that I'm being solemn. I'm trying not to be." Believe me, you're not. "Y'know I'm going to hang from an upside down cross? Let's burn the witch! Yeah, that's right - let's throw her in the water and see if she drowns! Is she orgasmic? Well I don't know, does she talk to the cows? She's 25 and she isn't married yet!" Uh. Eric - (oh, thank you God for Eric!) - suddenly interrupts Courtney. "Hey, you know what?" Nope, what? "I want to spend Christmas with the Witchfinder General." Oh. That's nice.
So, apart from the year the music died, what else happened in 1991 for Hole? "Is it the Year Of The Goat this year?" asks Courtney. "I'm going to buy a little house and then I'm going to start a zoo because I don't have any friends and so my pets will become my friends. They'll give me unconditional love. They'll love me no matter what I do to them. But, yeah. The music died this year." How? "I just don't want to wax on about it. I really don't know...I just think that all rock stars must die and that I'll kill them...I don't know...Axl donned a flannel this year. Axl was standing next to me at Nirvana doing that dance he did in the Sweet Child O' Mine video. He said to Kurt after the show "you're everything I could have been." Jesus, I really wanted him to come up to me and say that."
While on the subject of Guns 'N Roses, someone mentions Slash's performance on the new Michael Jackson single. "The song is horrid," mutters Courtney distastefully. "It's so insane and schizophrenic and nutty and gross and weird and fuckin' arcane and decadent and evil." You could say the same about Hole. "No you couldn't! You couldn't say that. How can you say that?" It's true. "We're dignified. We're not any of those things. Okay, sometimes we address evil. We address evil with a compassionate view. But that's a Nietzschaen thing, y'know?" What about lyrics like "I'll be the biggest dick that you've ever had," or "Hey daddy/Come over here/I got something for you/Dicknail"? They're insane, schizophrenic, nutty, gross, weird, fuckin' arcane, decadent and evil. "People - and I'm not saying this applies to you personally - can deal with post-punk intellectualism in males, but they can't in women. Okay, I don't overtly intellectualize anything in my songs, but alot of thought goes into what I write. Alot of it's narrative, alot of it's really personal, alot of it comes through all these weird, perverse filters that I have because my Christmases were so fucked up as a child.
"Women in rock have evolved slower than males because rock music has been predominatly a male domain, so women in rock tend to be more of a conceptual idea." Yes, but every American rock band with a strong female presence that I can think of - Hole, L7, Babes In Toyland, Dickless, Lunachicks - are incredibly confrontational and in your face. "I agree with what you're saying. I think it's part of the evolutionary process women in rock go through, though. You've got to prove what you've got to prove before you can do what you want to do. Maybe you're ghettoizing us, though." Not deliberately, it's just a fact. It's what I'm presented with: Dicknail, Shove, Babysitters On Acid. "Yeah, you're right. I think it's just the way it is. It's like guys from Manchester wear hoods, boys from Minneapolis wear flannel and girls from America make confrontational records. I don't think women are given the credit for good songwriting. Some journalist call us contrived. He called us contrived because he thought I was lying about my autobiographical past as it stands in the songs. Look, I'm just a song writer - what right does he have to make assumptions like that? All I want to do is take responsibility for good song writing."
Hole live in Los Angeles. Courtney says that she enjoys living in the vacuum that cocoons the city of angels. No one speaks to her, she can't drive and she claims to have no friends there. "LA's what you make of it. You know how you can be so cynical you become innocent? It's like alchemy, where you make that quantum leap from cynicism to a new innocence. LA's like that. It's so vile, though. I lived in Hollywood Boulevard for an age just out of desperation. Everyone wanted to be a star, y'know? You actually start believing that the sperm that makes it is the sperm that deserves it. It doesn't take away from personal compassion or anything like that - well, except for personal compassion for Heavy Metal guys." Hole defy ghettoization. Certainly, they share common ground with their female peers, but Hole are about something smarter and more challenging and spectacular and aggressive and mischievous than anyone else I can think of who is currently making music. By turns they manipulate my emotions; they gang rape my feelings; Hole make me want to take them away from all the bad things everywhere and just hold them and look after them - Hole drain me. And it's been a long time since anyone did that. It suddenly occurs to me that Courtney is like Alice, and for one fleeting moment I envisage Hole covering Jefferson Starship's White Rabbit. But there's a psychological theory I once heard, that due to trauma early in life, some people have no control over the sensory information they receive from the outside world, and resultantly the only way they can cope with this information is by going with the flow. Basically, they create themselves according to their situation which, in effect, Alice does as she's bombarded with an increasingly bizarre (to her at least) stream of information in Wonderland and Looking Glass House. Through all her time there, though, Alice never loses sight of her intrinsic values or - more importantly - her deepest, innermost innocence. But it would be churlish of me to apply this theory to either Hole as a band or Courtney as an individual (even though she is, most definitely, an individual). Perhaps it would be more accurate - and definitely more gracious - to say that Hole defy and transcend analysis. That Hole are like all those fairy tales - y'know, the real ones where Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf; that Hole have taken innocence to the extreme and the resulting gotterdammerung is actually a catharsis; indeed, maybe it's the only thing that can keep their sanity in one piece. But maybe they're all totally sane and we're all totally insane. But maybe it doesn't matter.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'
Have a nice Christmas.