Sugar Babydoll were a short-lived US band formed by friends Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love in 1985.
Bjelland had learned to play guitar as a teenager, but at nineteen, she dropped out of the University of Oregon and relocated to Portland, where she became involved in the city’s punk rock scene. It was there that she first encountered Courtney Love and the two decided to form their own band. While Kat had the musical training, Courtney herself had been racking up a text book CV for the role of controversial rock star from a very early age. By the mid 1980s, Courtney already had a history of being expelled from school, shoplifting, time in a correctional facility, leaving foster care and more recently had been working as a stripper.
Love was keen on the idea of an all female band, and without an instrument of her own she took on the role of vocalist. Relocating to San Francisco, they recruited drummer Deidre Schlepper and bassist Janis Tanaka, then changed their name to Pagan Babies, although Love would later use the term “Babydoll” as a song title on the first Hole LP.
“We were going to make the most obnoxious music in the world,” Love said in 1998. “However, I had a doctor who gave me a hundred sedatives a week. So we ended up making this faux Cocteau Twins music, but I didn’t really have the voice, and I was singing in a register that was way too high for me.”
Courtney had already flexed her vocal chords during an ultimately unsuccessful tryout with Faith No More in 1982, who despite recording some demos with Love, decided they needed a more “male energy”.
Courtney and Kat’s apartment in San Francisco became their punk rock hang-out and rehearsal space, and it was here, in December 1985, that that they recorded a demo tape on a 4 track cassette recorder.
The band only performed live twice, once in a friend’s bedroom, where they played electric versions of their songs, and secondly in a friend’s living room, this time with acoustic guitars. By this time Kat was already moving towards a more hardcore punk sound, while Love was still pushing the band’s new wave dream pop, and like so many fledgling bands …there followed a heated debate. The internal feud resulted in Love being ejected from the band, apparently telling them “you’re never going to get anywhere playing that punk rock noise.”
Kat Bjelland went onto form the band Babes In Toyland.