Un-Hole-y Reunion

It’s not without reason that Courtney Love is having to defend releasing her forthcoming ‘Nobody’s Daughter’ LP under the Hole moniker in this week’s NME. Hole co-founder Eric Erlandson, who previously declared that there could be no Hole reunion without his say so, has been overruled, Melissa Auf Der Maur is busy putting the finishing touches on her second solo album, whilst Hole’s drummer role call is Spinal Tap-esque – a different stickswoman featuring on each record. Yep, the only member of Hole to play on the new Hole album is Love herself. 

It’s hard to think, then, how the new album won’t suck – in name, it’s no different to Love’s 2004 solo album ‘America’s Sweetheart’, which sucked massively. I can’t exactly see it being a decline that’s gonna be arrested by replacing Eric Erlandson with ex-Larrikin Love guitarist Micko Larkin, either. And that Courtney Love herself sees no reason why she can’t release ‘Nobody’s Daughter’ under the Hole name – her Pink Floydian “Everyone has good lawyers” justification underlining, perhaps, just how much the other members didn’t want to reform – might be something to do with her love/hate mentor Billy Corgan doing exactly the same with Smashing Pumpkins.

Corgan, too, released a piss-poor solo album before returning to his Pumpkins guise. Instead of doing it the Courtney way – through lawyers – though, he took out a full page ad in Chicago Sun-Times, announcing he planned to reform Smashing Pumpkins, but, durr, forgot to tell his bandmates. Only Jimmy Chamberlin replied, but he’s since left, leaving the Pumpkins line-up looking decidedly Corgan-centric which, on the basis of new song ‘A Song For A Son’, is bad, and on this story that suggests Corgan is now getting musically, as well as romantically, involved with Jessica Simpson, is an absolute fucking disaster. Pumpkins are an intergalactic universe away from their ‘Siamese Dream’/’Mellon Collie…’ heyday and Corgan, one of my heroes, has lost the plot. Similarly, one of the things that makes the possibility of Hole being a no-ink Xerox of themselves when they return next month so depressing is that, in their ‘Live Through This’ heyday, they were one of the most visceral, vicious rock bands on the planet, but the last time Love was involved with anything of note (albeit a larynx-shredding, drunken-sounding note) was on Hole’s half-baked ‘Celebrity Skin’ album, 12 years ago. I’d love to be proved wrong; Courtney Love provides colour to a genre that’s hardly holds a wealth of charismatic characters and ‘Nobody’s Daughter’ could be her last shot at delivering a great album. The odds are against it, but, hey, maybe that’s when Courtney Love comes up trumps…