What a difference 48 hours can make. On Tuesday, Courtney Love was dropping hints that she was reuniting Hole, @-ing former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, “So do we tell the kids about the tour?” Well, it turns out, there is no Hole tour at all.
Responding to a comment on Instagram from Spin, Love confirmed, “No Hole reunion.” She went on to write that Auf der Maur are “playing some shows, new songs,” followed by a series of emojis (mostly eggs), a tag for Kate Moss’ modeling agency, and the words, “They didn’t see us, Patsy.” (And before you get excited again, remember that Hole’s former drummer was Patty, not Patsy, Schemel.)
Love also added the following comment to her original Instagram post: “Not a reunion baby. Me and @xmadmx touring new songs,” followed by a string of emojis.
So here we are again, another Hole reunion deferred. Hole, whose two most consistent members were Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson, broke up officially in 2002. Although Love announced a Hole reunion in 2009, the lineup featured no other previous members of the band, a trend that carried over to the 2010 Hole album, Nobody’s Daughter.
Hole last performed together at an after-party for a documentary about Schemel in 2012. The three-song set featured a lineup of Love, Erlandson, Auf der Maur, and Schemel, and found them playing two covers, Beat Happening’s “Red Head Walking” and the Wipers’ “Over the Edge,” along with Hole’s “Miss World.”
After all the iterations of Hole fizzled out officially, Love has been regularly teasing reunions, posting a photo of herself with Erlandson together at the end of 2013, followed by the promise of a new single the next year. Love and the Celebrity Skin lineup were photographed together in 2019, and Love and Auf der Maur had planned a tour together in 2020 that Covid derailed.
In 2021, Love did not mince words during a Vogue interview in response to a question about whether Hole would reunite: “No absolutely not. And you guys have gotta get over it. Our old manager Peter Mensch calls once a year to ask about a reunion: ‘Hey, just doing my thing I do every year with you and Jimmy Page [of Led Zeppelin].’ And I’m so honored to be in that company, but it’s just not gonna happen.”
In other Hole news, Auf der Maur is publishing a memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, that will cover her years in Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins on March 17. And Love is the subject of a new documentary, Antiheroine, that premiered at Sundance. When Antiheroine keeps it simple and maintains a focus on the subject speaking her truth, it doesn’t just offer the inside scoop on what happened to the girl with the most cake,” Rolling Stone wrote in a review. “The movie gives you a portrait of a survivor.”
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