Hole co-founder Lisa Roberts moved to Ukraine to work for NGO on frontlines
Lisa Roberts, the founding bassist of Hole, moved to Ukraine to help with the humanitarian effort following Russia’s invasion.
Roberts, who co-founded the grunge band alongside Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson in 1989, was only in the band’s ranks for a year. Just months after their first show at Raji’s in the October, Roberts left Hole.
Ex-drummer Caroline Rue later claimed Love fired the bassist after she threatened a Long Beach club owner, the wife of the mobster Eddie Nash, with a screwdriver when the venue refused to pay the band for a performance.
However, in a new interview with The Daily Beast, Roberts revealed that she moved to Ukraine to help the country’s cause following Russia’s 2022 invasion. The bassist explained that she was drawn there because of her Ukrainian friends in the metal community. When she learned that these same friends needed assistance, she moved to the Donbas to work as the logistics manager for the NGO Road to Relief.
Before heading to the frontlines, the Californian had already been working in logistics for a prominent company and believed her skill set was perfect for the significant humanitarian effort in Ukraine. She then volunteered with the NGO last year but is now back in her native state.
Roberts hopes that the conflict will end one day, but for now, she’s in California studying paramedicine, planning to return to Ukraine to finish volunteering when she’s done. “For now I sit here in the US, depressed, around people who don’t give a fuck and don’t see the war with Russia as a problem to their lifestyle. They simply don’t care. They don’t want to talk about it and they really don’t give a fuck what I have to say about it,” Roberts said.
She added: “If I get the opportunity to go back I don’t think I will ever return here. I don’t have any reason to.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Roberts discussed her friendship with Courtney Love and offered a different account from Rue’s. She said: “I quit because I felt the quality was lacking” and recalled meeting the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who she called “a very angry and troubled man.”
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