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 Christams 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 a lot 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 one 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 tongue 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 pit 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. 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 too 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 the 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 favourites - 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 the world - is destined for the top, but it's Hole who look like they are going to get their first. And why? Because Mercury Rev, for all their thrilling and stupid gracefulness, are too arthouse for real success. Smashing Pumpkins, with their 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 is 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 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 I'm being solemn. I'm trying not to be."
Believe me, you're not.
"Y'know I'm going to hang from and 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 cows? She's 25 and she isn't married yet!"
Uh.
Eric - (oh thank 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've 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 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 Nietzschean thing, you 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 intellectualise anything in my songs, but a lot of thought goes into what I write. A lot of it's narrative, a lot of it's really personal, a lot 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 predominately 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.