On Valentine’s Day, 1995, Hole taped an Unplugged session for MTV at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The band’s set-list on the night drew largely from the group’s superb second studio album Live Through This, incorporating three of its four singles - Miss World, Softer, Softest and Doll Parts - and also included a clutch of covers, among them Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf, Donovan’s Season Of The Witch and The Crystals’ He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss), which Courtney Love introduced on the night as “a really sick song”, and later mockingly described as a “nice feminist anthem.”
Against the express wishes of her bandmates, Love also found space in Hole's set for two songs written by her late husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who had died by suicide the previous spring.
The first of these, Old Age, Nirvana demoed in 1991, before Cobain gifted the song to Love, who recorded it for Hole’s 1993 EP Beautiful Son. The second song, listed as You’ve Got No Right on Hole’s Unplugged album, was actually titled You Know You’re Right, and is significant for being the last song Nirvana ever recorded, Kurt Cobain’s swan song. It would become the centre-piece of a bitter, nasty war of words and a fiercely-contested legal battle between Love and her late husband’s former bandmates Kris Novoselic and Dave Grohl before it finally made its way into the public domain. Grohl would later describe it as "beautiful and disturbing."
"Oh God, it’s hard to listen to,” he admitted in 2017. “It was not a pleasant time for the band. Kurt was unwell… He was in a place we may not have recognised."
