Juice April '95

HOLE live
Selinas, Sydney
Saturday 14th January



And we all watched.  Shane McGowan recently said that when he saw Joy Division prior to vocalist Ian Curtis' suicide, he was scared to take his eyes off the stage, such was the riveting spectacle unfolding before him.  I understand what he meant after watching Courtney Love and Hole give such a depressing show. 


Rarely has celebrity in the modern media age done such a complete number on someone as it's wreaked on Courtney Love.  When the photographer's flashbulbs explode as she walks on stage, it seems completely natural.  We know her for her husband's suicide, her frank admissions of drug problems, and the slew of rumours which trail in her wake like an oil slick on a tropical beach.  Fame eats the weak and unprepared and spits them out, and right now it's chewing up Courtney Love.


Somewhere in there there's a talent for songwriting, enough talent to make the visceral Live Through This, one of the great albums of 1994.  This year's model places the songs second.  As soon as the rumbling buzz of "Plump" ends, the stagetalk starts.  Depending on who you listen to she was stoned, or drunk, or high, but it doesn't really matter, she shot her mouth off and we lapped it up.  At first there was an amusing edge, riffing about why Pearl Jam are the Bryan Adams of alternarock.  Then it got uneasy: "Doesn't that boy from Silverchair look just like my husband?" 


Everytime Hole would carve into a song, powered by the compact velocity of crack drummer Patty Schemel, they were raw and hard, even if they lacked the intuitive dynamic of supports Magic Dirt.  "My Beautiful Son" and "Credit In The Straight World" were cathartic blasts, Love's voice even more forceful and emotive than on record, with strong harmonies from new bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and stinging punctuations from guitarist Eric Erlandson. 


But they couldn't string more than two songs together.  Love would throw dolls into the audience and speculate on who their father was ("Stipe, Dando, Reznor...").  Halfway through the set, matters collapsed.  Love traded banter and insults with the audience, then she started to climb the speaker stack, staggering up to the first floor stage, a trail of desperate roadies behind her. 


For two agonising minutes she swayed back and forth, some audience members urging her to jump.  When she started to swing back and forth on a roof-mounted rail, disaster loomed.  Love was coaxed halfway down before she suddenly threw herself into the sea of fans, emerging in a bouncer's arms with her black dress severely ripped. 


She'd also lost a shoe.  "Give me my fucking shoe back," she screamed repeatedly.  It whizzed through the air, missing Love and grazing Auf der Maur, who then left the stage, never to return.  Erlandson played a solo version of Leadbelly's "In The Pines," covered by Nirvana on MTV Unplugged as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night."  Love sat on the monitor, singing in a voice situated between a damaged diva and Harvey Keitel's howl for redemption in The Bad Lieutenant. 


Schemel returned and they played, bassless.  "Just be fucking punk rock," Love yelled at Erlandson when he objected.  But by now it wasn't a concert, it was an endurance test.  Would Love break down - "I'm not going to be on this planet in 24 hours," she said at one point - or would the audience break away? 


Love finished the set solo, playing a slow, despondent version of "Doll Parts," which, if there was connection left between the audience and performance other than as an atrocity exhibition, might have been a fitting end.  What was fitting, was Love finishing the song and then suddenly swinging her guitar around.  For a moment it looked like she was going to fling it into the moshpit, hundreds of fans threw their hands up instinctively, but it flew across the stage.  She stalked off, roadcrew in pursuit. 


To my left, a Courtney clone quietly looked down at her feet, her idol not so much fallen as imploded.  The crew set up for an encore, but then it was announced that Auf der Maur had gone to the hospital and the show was over.


In the cab home afterwards, a classic hits station plays.  The song is "Fame," the TV show theme: "Fame, I'm gonna live forever, light up the sky with my name.  Fame, I'm feeling stronger than ever, people will see me and cry: Remember my name, remember, remember, remember..."  I ask the cabdriver to turn it off.