Credits: Far Out / Courtney Love via Instagram
Mon 20 October 2025 21:30, UK
Despite largely being defined by her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in the eyes of the mainstream, Courtney Love had stood as a central character in the burgeoning alternative underground to anyone paying attention.
Lone before forming Hole, Love had been about. With the help of a trust fund, Liverpool’s new wave hosted a young Love hanging out with the likes of The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, jumping back to her native States as a brief vocalist for an early Faith No More, and landing bit parts in Alex Cox’s cult Sid and Nancy and Straight to Hell features. Looking to start a band inspired in equal parts by “Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac” as per her Los Angeles zine ad, Hole was sparked in 1989.
Contrary to the tired and frankly sexist authorship aspersions cast on Hole’s sophomore LP Live Through This, plenty of the material was written by Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson as early as 1991, not long after their Pretty on the Inside debut. Released in April 1994, Hole’s second album was dropped amid a turbulent maelstrom of the decade’s grunge movement Love had found herself swept up in, issued only one week after her husband’s violent death by his own hand. Featuring the explosive ‘Miss World’ and ‘Violet’, Live Through This stood as the scene’s essential bookending records, finding greater commercial success with Celebrity Skin four years later.
Second single ‘Doll Parts’ indeed bottles a piece of Cobain’s history and spirit, however. In response to a cover of Hole’s jagged jangle number by Miley Cyrus, Love posted an appreciation as well as offering an insight into the song’s genesis. Accompanied by a clip of Nirvana’s appearance on Channel 4’s The Word, Cobain declaring Love “the best fuck in the world” on stage, Love cast her mind back to the initial embers of their relationship just when Nevermind had begun to explode from the music underground to the mainstream.
“The song ‘Doll Parts’ is a homage I wrote in 20 minutes in a girl named Joyce’s bathroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Love posted on Instagram in 2020. “I had to write most of the lyrics on my arm in Sharpie as I ran out of paper. People were pounding on the door as I wrote it. It was played for the first time about an hour later, at the Virgin Megastore in Boston”.
She added, “It was about a boy, whose band had just left town, who I’d been sleeping with, who I heard was sleeping with two other girls, it was my way of saying ‘You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t choose ME, and here is all the desire and fury and love that I feel for you’. That “boy” was none other than Cobain, romantically pulled in many directions like a fought-over rag doll, much to Love’s chagrin.
Burning passion and spikes of insecurity are as good a potent well of lyrical fervour as any, as Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ or Derek and the Dominos’ ‘Layla’ will testify, but ‘Doll Parts’ three-chord shuffle adds a weird, beckoning confidence at its heart in only the way Love can, veering between pained “I love him so much, it just turns to hate” to the coy “dog beg”, a reference to Cobain’s sexual pining, all swirling in a chaotic but all too human portrait of messy romance and fraught lust that’s sowed the seeds for many a blossoming, if rocky, coupling in the music world and beyond.
“Good songs don’t always come in 20 minutes, but the force was strong and that one did,” Love reflected. “Anyway I married that guy”.
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