Courtney Love Reveals Stripping to Her Former Band’s Hit Song Inspired Her to Make Hole a Success
Courtney Love is reflecting on her early days in the music industry. In a recent Instagram post, the Hole frontwoman shared some rare early footage of her performing with her first band, Faith No More, in 1984. While Love’s time with the band was short, she says it had a huge influence on her life.
Courtney Love spent six months in Faith No More
Love was just 20 years old when she convinced the members of Faith No More to let her join their band.
“Courtney was one of the revolving singers we had,” the band’s keyboardist Roddy Bottum said in a 2014 interview with Louder Sound. “She sang with us for probably six months. She was an awesome performer; she liked to sing in her nightgown, adorned with flowers.”
However, Love’s time with the band was short-lived.
“She was a very chaotic personality — she took a lot of work,” bassist Bill Gould explained. “It just got too much after a while.”
The Hole frontwoman says getting kicked out of Faith No More ‘was one of the best things that ever happened to me’
In her Instagram post, Love explains that she now sees getting fired from Faith No More as a blessing. Years after she left the band, they scored a hit with their 1990 single “Epic.” At the time, Love was working as a stripper while also playing in Hole. Hearing the song while she was dancing gave her the motivation to make her band a success.
“Getting kicked out of this band was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” Love wrote. “They wrote a number 1 hit with #epic that I used to have to strip to … and it pissed me off so much to be stripping to it, that it made me determined, gave me the head of steam to keep going and keep it together for my own band.”
Her attitude, she added, was, “Well if they can do it I can!”
Hole’s first full-length album, Pretty On the Inside, which was produced by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, was released in 1991. Their second album, Live Through This, came out in 1994, just after the death of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain. It was eventually certified platinum in the U.S. Hole’s third album, Celebrity Skin, was nominated for multiple Grammys.
Courtney Love thanks Faith No More for ‘adopting’ her
In her post, Love expresses her thanks to the members of Faith No More for taking a chance on her when she was just 20 years old.
“It’s the oldest footage of us to surface,” she says of the 1-minute video. “Not much of a song yet, not much of a front woman yet, but we all start somewhere! I was a homeless street kid, and I’m [grateful] to these guys for adopting me.This was a scary but fun time… wilding on streets of San Francisco.”
