The Pagan Babies

The Pagan Babies were a dream pop/alternative rock band formed in 1985 by Kat Bjelland (of Babes in Toyland), Courtney Love (of Hole), Diedre Schletter and Janis Tanaka. After Bjelland and Love left a previous project in San Francisco— their band Sugar Babydoll, which they formed with L7 member Jennifer Finch— they relocated back to Portland, Oregon, United States, where Bjelland was from and where Love had spent time growing up. There, they met Schletter and Tanaka and began playing music together. The band played a mere two shows at friends' houses, and released a four-track demo before disbanding in 1986. The demo included "Bernadine", "Best Sunday Dress", "Quiet Room", and "Cold Shoulders". Both Bjelland and Love have said in retrospective interviews that they were fairly "unproductive" while working together. After Courtney Love left Pagan Babies in 1986, the band continued on under the name Italian Whorenuns. Love would go on to form the highly successful band Hole in 1989, and Bjelland would later form Babes in Toyland. Several songs from Pagan Babies were later re-worked in Love and Bjelland's later musical projects. Hole re-recorded "Best Sunday Dress" in the early 1990s which appeared on several compilation albums, and Babes in Toyland re-did "Quiet Room" which appeared on their 1992 album, Fontanelle. A recording of the original "Best Sunday Dress", from the Pagan Babies master tape, can also be heard on the track "Starbelly" from Hole's debut album, Pretty on the Inside. The four tracks from the band's demo were transferred to MP3 format from a cassette belonging to a friend of Janis Tanaka, and began circulating on the internet in the mid-2000s. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.