Hole at Reading, 1994: Courtney Love’s grief-laden blitzkrieg
“Oh yeah, I’m so goddam brave,” Courtney Love said into the mic at Reading Festival, and it was more than an understatement. This was August 1994. Kurt Cobain had died in April.
It’s in moments like these where things become make-or-break—and I’m not saying that about a career. That would be crass. No one would dare turn to a grieving widow and say, ‘Well, what are you going to do? Perform or quit?’ as if that were the more essential thing to be facing in the moment.
But five months on from the tragic loss of Cobain, this performance, mid-afternoon on a sunny summer’s day, was make or break in a more spiritual way. “I’m so goddamn brave,” Love said, because she decided to be.
This was the first time anyone had even seen her since the death, and since the insane media onslaught was unleashed against her. Everyone knows the vicious rumours that attacked her immediately and stick around to this day, blaming her for Cobain’s death or even daring to suggest that she killed him. None of us can understand how awful that must have been and how terrifying the prospect of returning to public life must have been, let alone returning to the stage.
She did it, though. Due to morbid reasons, the crowd was far bigger than the band typically played to, and you can hear them in even the worst recordings of that set. Throughout the entire set, the sea of people was divided between fans supporting the singer and a mass of people hurling vitriol at her. But Love was a woman on a mission, and the mission was to not just make it through but absolutely kill this set.
That’s what the band did. That 1994 set was a power lap as they raged through their biggest songs, performed some new songs for the first time and gave each second of the show all-out passion that was undeniably driven by grief and the way an experience like that can morph into a kind of hyperfocus. It wasn’t just Love feeling it either, as it wasn’t just the loss of Cobain that they were mourning here. Two months before this show, the band had faced another collective loss as their bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose.
It’s not that the set ignored what was going on, though. “Yeah, sure. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen. Let’s just pretend. Is that what you’re doing, pretending it didn’t happen? Great. Well, I’m not,” Love said at one point, rolling her eyes and imitating the hateful comments she knew would be thrown at her the second she left the stage. There were some upsetting moments of acknowledgement, too, like a lyric change that saw her sing “I’m the one who should have died,” as an obvious comment on her sadness.
But these moments are make-or-break. With so much emotion and all of it difficult, Hole channelled all of it into an electrifying set, blocking out the bullshit from the crowd and using their grief to power them on.
