Song 92: Doll Parts

'Top of the Pops' was, at its best, ok - a passable and peculiar weekly ritual which culture outgrew, but not for the better.

I occasionally enjoy watching old episodes on BBC4 of a Friday evening - they're currently halfway through 1990. Sometimes I know that I will have watched the episodes that are being reshown. Yet I wouldn't say, for all that I count myself as having a good "memory", that I remember them.

I was going to write, a few months ago, a list of most memorable Top of the Pops performances, but was surprised at how little I could think of. 

Sure, I can think of the first time I saw Blur and Damon wearing a Penguin t-shirt, I remember Michael Jackson videos, and New Order on the beach in LA, I remember people talking about Pulp the next day at school, I remember Tears for Fears doing 'Shout', I remember happenings and numbers, but in terms of a performance, a connection, something true and real, which broke beyond that businesslike, sterile yet winning format, I kept on returning to just one, really just one, which was this, Hole performing their Top 20 smash 'Doll Parts' in early 1995.

This is not what 'Top of the Pops' was mainly like. Mostly people mimed, and mostly there were backing tracks. And mostly people mimed along to "I want you cos I'm Mr Vain" and the camera panned around to people dancing awkwardly and trying to pretend like they were having more fun than they were.

But this was this - a recent widow looking at camera and howling "some day you will ache like I ache" ...

Timing-wise, I think that's precisely when I started getting into music heavily, started buying NME and Vox, hitched my wagon to the Britpop horse.

For all the impression that 'Doll Parts' made, for all that this was so much more than everything else on a Thursday night at 7pm,  I never bought it or any other Hole album.

Courtney Love is something of a testcase for misogyny in popular culture. The answers aren't obvious.

The question is, I suppose, is she a) a person of great talent and charisma held back and not given her due by perceptions of how a famous woman ought to behave, or b) is she someone who knew how to play the press to use her outrageousness to grab every bit of fame she could get?

Bit of both, innit? She had to put up with a lot, not even counting the main, unthinkably awful event itself ... people thinking her husband wrote her songs, people thinking she was in some way to blame, people (not least cos of the Nick Broomfield doc, which I'm afraid I lapped up, tenuous as it was) thinking she was actually to blame, insinuation and gossip, rumour and insult.

My university flatmate was a big Courtney Love champion, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't really having it, probably made immature and presumptuous moral judgements. I did think she was good at acting though - her performances in 'The Man in the Moon' and, particularly, 'The People Vs Larry Flynt' generated some acclaim and one might have thought a significant movie career would ensue. 

It didn't really happen, and I expect there were a variety of reasons why. But, yes, there'd surely have been more good parts for her if she was a man.

I wouldn't say it's entirely true that she was mistreated by the music press. That's not quite how I remember it. They loved to interview her, and clearly some of them thought she was fantastic, spoke up for her smartness, talent and charisma. And Hole were successful, selling millions of records, by any reckoning.

So, I guess, I'm mainly asking of myself ... why, when I responded to 'Doll Parts' viscerally as a 16 year old boy on the cusp of a lifelong obsession with rock'n'roll music, did I not pursue it, more likely in the coming years to buy an Embrace album than a Hole album?