LIVE!

HEART AND HOLE
Melody Maker April 3, 1993

HOLE / HUGGY BEAR
Subterrania, London

THE next time anyone stages an all-girl event, they might have the decency to do it an area where I don't feel I need an armoured car to drop me off at the venue's door.  We're girls, remember?  We don't like dark streets and clubs tucked away under highways - they give us the heebie-jeebies.

Which might explain why, inside, the club is half-empty.  Where are all the girls?  The fanzines (from the US) are sitting neatly on a table by the door.  But the swell of support, the grassroots movement - does it not have permission to go out on a Wednesday night?  I think if there was something going on, young girls becoming aware of their identity as a group that was mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore, we transformed it.

We splashed it on covers and turned it into a phenomenon, a debate-of-the-mouth, a hip hype.  News.  Tonight, the place is crawling with press - the music papers, I-D, the nefarious Linda Duff from The Daily Star (though she will get her comeuppance, as you shall see) - all sniffing out an angle, all here to report on- what?  Surely not the spunky but incidental performance by Huggy Bear? 

So, I've finally seen them, and they were... cute.  They can play too, as it happens.  Niki, wearing a headscarf that makes her look like a washerwoman, yells lustily, miming bits out in a sarky schoolgirl way.  She's endearingly feisty, unfazed by the irritating spazz on her right (my advice, honey, is get rid of that ghastly Paul Weller-alike, today!), and they make a raucous, jolly noise.

But I don't see what the big deal is.  Someone tells me they are inspiring girls to start bands, write their own fanzines.  That's very nice.  Unfortunately, it's being treated with excessive gravitas, because revolution is a serious business.  "This is happening without your permission!"  Some people believe this is a serious statement of intent.  For f***'s sake.  You don't need "permission".  You wanna play a gig?  You show up, you plug in, you play.

End of story.

Except it doesn't work like that, because agit-propists are so paranoid.  They see censorship and dissent and betrayal everywhere they look.  They need to feel they are dangerous, radical, bucking a system that has their phone lines tapped by the thought police.  They would be crushed to discover that the system is too busy clipping its toenails to bother about them.  Nothing is so self-dramatising as a young girl. 

It really is an age thing.  I have a heart, I can still remember myself 10 years ago.  We do need our revolutions, our quiet riots, some kind of upheaval to establish who we are.  Once you've done that, you don't need it anymore.  Enjoy the revolution without me - you have my permission. 

Hole are superb.  The sheer force of Courtney Love's personality heats the half-empty room, shredding right-on, received ideas like so much confetti.  Because the po-faced, PC, feminist contingent mistrusts her, her waywardness, her dangerous charisma.  All evening, I hear dig-like remarks around me.  Can she play without a contingent of spotty boys drooling over her? Will she bother wearing makeup?  Will she bother, it is implied, to put on a real performance "only" for girls?  There's an uneasy relationship between a loosely feminist audience and a female performer who doesn't check her sexuality at the door, and those censorious comments emanate from that.

But rock, in its purest, most visceral state, doesn't worry about such niceties.  Courtney Love - the woman is sex.  Carnality incarnate.  And all the passion and contempt, anger and tenderness is raging tonight.  Hole, having shed their sludginess, are revealed (as if I didn't know already, though I never thought it could be this good) as a great rock band.

They're still low-slung and ominous, but they sound fleeter, more purposeful.  Courtney's throaty holler, her kind of weary, deadpan vulnerability when her voice softens, aren't just brow beating devices.  They communicate.  "Pretty On The Inside" makes the hair on my arms stand up. 

She's funny too.  When she first stalks on, like a witch at the teddy bear's picnic, she spits the words "Linda Duff!" into the microphone.  There is a surprised silence.  "Linda Duff from the Daily Star," she continues, cruelly.  "She's fat, and she has a blonde crew cut.  If you see her, do something with her."  Duff makes a sharp exit.  I'm impressed.  The metabolically-challenged concern action group is not. 

Heckle, heckle: "What's wrong with being fat?"

Courtney thinks about it - and then she explains that she called the woman fat because she hates her.

Heckle, heckle: "That doesn't make it all right."

Courtney: "Oh, f*** off.  If you want politically correct go to Olympia."  Ba-boom. 

A year and a half ago, Courtney was enthusing about the then-unknown Bikini Kill.  Now she has written a song wickedly lampooning the grrrls, called "Olympia".  She's a masterful agent provocateur.  But it might be something deeper.  While the grrrls have been getting angry about the slights and humiliations of daily life (and they are not inconsiderable), Courtney has been publicly vilified and dragged through the mud.  Nothing of hers was spared from attack - not her child, her husband, her career or her character. 

She does attract trouble wherever she goes, but on this scale?  With that amount of venom?  No wonder she doesn't need to cosy up to the revolutionaries - they can't help her, they can have no idea.

That she is not determined, that she can transform her fury into a cathartic, uplifting savagery onstage, is all the evidence of strength I need. 

More than anyone else, she proves that girls can do anything.


CAREN MYERS

Thank you to Tyler for this review.