After a year spent within and surrounding news headlines, Hole are finally being given the opportunity to simply be a "band" again.

With the tragic deaths of Courtney Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, in April and Hole bass player Kristen Pfaff in June throwing a world of fans into mourning, it seems that the band's second album, Live Through This, would never be viewed on its own terms for the outstanding thing that it is. It's testament to Courtney Love, and the album itself, that it's finally being recognised.

But with new bass player Melissa Auf Der Maur in tow, last September Hole hit the road in the US on a tour that finds them perform in Perth next week.

"It's been really good," says drummer Patty Schemel from her home town of Seattle. "The shows have been sold out and the audiences have been really cool. It's been good just to go back to work and tour. It's great to see the reaction, a lot of people in the audience know all the songs."

A Seattle native, Schemel had grown up on a steady diet of Fleetwood Mac, MIss and Cheap Trick before discovering the likes of Echo And The Bunnymen and exploring what punk and new wave had to offer.

"I was in about five or six bands before I joined Hole," Schemel recalls. "A lot of them were new wave and hard-core punk bands, a string of those. The band I was in before Hole was just at the time when the whole Seattle thing was exploding, and we were just like every other band on Sub Pop (laughs). That guitar-like..I hate to use that word "grungey" but a Mudhoney type of band with female vocals."

"Everyone was crazy here in Seattle because there was so much focus here and there were all these bands getting signed. You'd talk to your friends and say 'oh so and so just signed a record deal.' It was kind of crazy and weird."

"It's kinda funny. The word exists to equal all these bands that go underneath that term," Schemel answers before almost reluctantly saying ht word in question. "Grunge! Nobody uses it anymore. It's a joke! It's so easy to lump everything together under that word."

IN mid 1992, a year after the release of Hole's debut album, Pretty On The Inside, Schemel was asked to join the group. She had in fact been in a band that had previously supported Hole and was somewhat of a fan.

"They were looking for another drummer and a friend of Kurt and Courtney's recommended me," Schemel says. "So we got together and I tried out. When I joined we still didn't have a bass player because they'd lost their rhythm section altogether - so I spent a lot of time with Eric (Erlandson, guitar) learning all the songs and looking for a new bass player."

"I liked the album Pretty On The Inside a lot. I was familiar with the songs and when I got the offer to try out I thought they were a cool band. I liked Courtney's lyrics and Eric's guitar playing a lot. A lot of it had to do with the fact that it was a predominantly female band. That was a big one for me in joining the band, that it had other women in it."

"I think it was different when Eric started in the band," Schemel clarifies, "because he and Courtney started it together playing to five people in a club in LA. At the point when I started there'd already been a band dynamic. They'd already put out a record and were kind of established. They knew what they were like, where they wanted to go, the kind of music they wanted to make and the kind of direction they were going in."

"The music itself changed from that first record and the record now, Live Through This,. In that space inbetween the first record and Live Through This, Courtney had a baby and I kind of eel that there should have been a record in between to describe the progression the band was going through musically - but there was no record because Courtney was having a baby and there were line-up changes."

"The sounds of the music have changed a bit from that first record. It's more poppy and dynamic and relatively soft, of course with me being drummer and Kristen at the time being the bass player, that was all of our contribution on that record."

Although much is made in hindsight of the content of Live Through This and what frame of mind it was recorded in, Schemel recalls the recording sessions with nothing but fondness.

"We were in Atlanta. Kristen and I together did our basic tracks, our bass/drum parts. We felt that we were the foundation. She'd always say that the songs were like houses and we were the foundation of the house and it started from us. You can put all kinds of things but if the foundation isn't strong it's not going to be a great song, or a great house, or whatever. That was kind of a cool thing she used to say all the time."

The emotional content of the Live through This album bled with raw honesty; to many it seemed as though it was written as a soundtrack to the events of 1994 before anyone dared think that Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff would die within months of each other. Despite being overshadowed by those events, the album was still universally acclaimed as one of the year's best releases. Understandably, however, Schemel says it was frustrating that the album was often overlooked in favour of headlines and often misunderstood when attention was paid to it.

"Yeah, all these songs and the album title were all written and already decided before any of that happened," she explains. "It's a really crazy connection that the album's called Live Through This. I don't know where it's going with that...but right now I'm glad we're touring and playing, and all that's over and behind us."

Was there ever any chance Hole would break up?

"Yeah," Schemel replies in a hushed tone. "For a moment."

Her first gig with Hole was a proverbial baptism of fire experience at the Reading Festival in England and the band have (finally) been performing the excellent Live Through This material since that time. Erlandson has stated that despite people's views of it, Live Through This stands as an offering of hope for the future. Schemel tends to concur.

"I don't know, after playing the songs over and over you become desensitized to it," Schemel says with a quiet laugh. "But there's certain songs and certain sections of songs like Miss World or whatever that still make me get the chills. There's one that we do (Drunk In Rio) as an encore, that was written by myself, Courtney and Kurt. It's not recorded at all, it's just a little four-track thing. When we play it as an encore, that song gets me every single time. There's lots of meaning behind that one."

"I feel that any kind of music that makes you feel some certain way or some kind of emotion is powerful. I'm glad that our music does that."

And what of the often maligned Courtney Love? While a legion of press types write articles about Love from thousands of anonymous miles away, fueling preconceptions and misconceptions about her, and a short-lived LA band even tactlessly named themselves 'Courtney Love' in a show of well, whatever, if there's anyone who can shed some accurate light on Love it would be Schemel.

"She's really strong," says Schemel empathetically. "A really strong person. Right now it's good that we're touring and we're just being a band right now and that's all. She doesn't want to be separated from her guitar and that's good - to be playing and just focusing on our music. It's been good for her."

Hole are currently writing new songs on the road and have been trying out the odd new song idea here and there during gigs. Schemel (who by the way is in total agreement of Love's B rating of Live Through This in US Rolling Stone) is firm in her belief that the next Hole album is likely to be different. You can almost hear the relief and satisfaction in her voice. At last, Hole can now look to the future and simply make music once again.

"It's gonna be different," she laughs. "I can't say this like it's gonna happen but Courtney's exploring a lot of electronic parts and styles of music like sampling. She's got loads of cool ideas with sampling. I'm not saying we're gonna come up with some kind of techno album or anything but we've been looking into that and trying to incorporate that into our music. She's doing a soundtrack for the movie Tank Girl. So she's been doing a lot of work for that and coming up with scoring and stuff like that."

What's the Hole ambition?

"I think right now we're really trying to establish ourselves as a band and move on all past things that happened and put out another record that will, personally, be better than Live Through This. We want to continue to tour and work at that."