Go Baby Go…
Cherry lips, 5 Night stands on MTV, songs for James Bond movies, computer games and hits galore - everyone wants a piece of Garbage. HeavyMetal-Inc. included...
How’s the UK tour being going so far? Shirley - Well, being the first time we’ve being in the UK for three years we were very nervous. We opened in Portsmouth and it wasn’t our best show. But the last two shows have been fantastic, so we feel we’re up and running. The crowds have being incredible – we’ve been really amazed by support we’ve received from the fans on this tour. We feel very privileged to be in a position where we’ve enjoyed a career for seven years people coming to our shows and getting into to what we do.
You recently headlined at the Big Day Out festival in Australia and have played to audiences all over the world. Where do you find the best crowds are? Shirley – Well, they’re pretty wild up in Scotland – they breed them wild up there. It depends where we are at any given time – each time you get an amazing reaction it feels like it’s the first great reaction we’ve ever had.
While Garbage remain very much a rock band at heart and there are still the heftier moments on the disc, BeautifulGarbage shows off a more poppy side to the band and is the most refined Garbage album to date. How receptive have the audiences being to the new material? Shirley - I think the record is a bit lighter but live it’s still very much a rock show. If anything, some of the new material is probably heavier than anything we’ve done before, so I think it depends on what songs we’re playing on any given night. The record is so eclectic, it’s just down to what songs we focus on, but there are still a lot of loud guitars flying around.
Beautiful Garbage offers a diverse range of sonic styles. - Bubby singles such as Androgyny, Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go) and Breaking Up The Girl. - Ballads (Can’t Cry These Tears, Cup Of Coffee), epics (So Like A Rose), anthems (Shut Your Mouth, ‘Til The Day That I Die), and weightier numbers such as Silence Is Golden and Parade). Do you think you’ve escaped the curse of being confined to one limited genre? Duke – Yes, Beautiful Garbage is a little bit all over the place. We don’t want to keep on making the same record. We don’t want to make the same songs we were making in ’95, we want to move on and try new stuff to keep ourselves and hopefully other people interested in what we’re doing. On this record we felt free not to worry about fitting into the label that people expected of us. We just said screw it and tried some different things, and it took some people aback because it wasn’t what they were expecting. But after a few listens it starts to make sense and fits into what we’ve always being doing – taking different styles from different eras and bringing it all together.
In an MTV interview several years ago (Version 2.0 era) you said successful musicians are in the lap of the gods. What do you think has been the key to Garbage’s success? Shirley - I think what probably differentiates us from a lot of other bands is that we’ve had so much past experience in other bands – we’ve being in alternative rock bands all our lives and it gets to the point where you want to explore and do different things. We don’t feel threatened as people because somebody thinks we’ve made a pop record or somebody thinks we’ve made a pastiche record… Steve – It’s a great word, isn’t it, pastiche? Shirley – Oh yes, it’s a lovely word – it sounds like a cake! But seriously, we’re making music for ourselves and trying to explore all the possibilities that are open to us. We want to go down as many different avenues as possible because we’re curious about how certain records are made. Like on the song Can’t Cry These Tears Anymore – we’re fascinated by Phil Spectre’s production and how those records were made. We love the whole notion of the girl groups from the 60’s who really paved the way for people like me, like the Shankly Lads for example, the first punk rock girls. We just wanted to see how these records were made, see if we could do it and know what it felt like to make these records.
In a music world increasingly over populated by men, alongside such people as Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love, Sheryl Crow and Alannis Morissette, you burn the torch brightly for female musicians…
Shirley - Well I think when you talk about Gwen and Courtney and me, the three of us all feel we are rarities right now because there are very few of us out there left. We hope there is going to be a new generation who are going to come up and do things bigger and better and inspire more women to play, produce and be heard. We all want that to happen - if we’re part of that its amazing. It’s like passing on a torch, although you can’t hold on to I forever. So if you feel like you’re passing it to someone who’s been inspired by what you’ve done, it allows you to keep a little piece of something amazing in history.
What affect did your appearance in the Celvin Klein ad have on this?
Shirley - I think the Celvin Klein campaign marked a certain rite of passage for me. Through the success of the band and all the things that we’ve done together and how we’ve changed as people, I felt I could suddenly embrace myself and didn’t have to freak out about the way I looked, why I wasn’t slim enough, good enough, pretty enough etc… I finally managed to throw that off at the age of 30! It was a great laugh. I took off all my make up and was seen bare face. The campaign was actually totally at odds with what most fashion campaigns were about, and it was trying to say you don’t have to be perfect.
You can have creepy looking people like Shirley Manson and Moby and Brian Malko, and they can be seen as attractive because of what they do and who they are. I thought that was a great thing what Calvin Klein was trying to do with that campaign.
The tour diaries on your official website indicate that the making of the new album was rather stressful…
Shirley - Yes. It was miserable making this record. I was really furious and upset that the band were going home to their wives and I was stuck in a hotel, thinking its not fair etc, and I said one or two rash things in a moment of rage, because I was pissed off. I think a lot of the reasons why this record is much more pop than the last two records is for exactly that reason and I think the same can be said of the boys. It was a weird record and there was a weird atmosphere between us. We’ve being together for a long time now, and as Butch pointed out last night, we’re having our seven-year itch. Theirs a lot of friction between us – we love each other dearly, but when you’ve being stuck together for that period of time and you’re growing together, it can be very stressful. I think this record what definitely a milestone for us in that sense, and its going to be interesting of what we do on our next record, because of what we did on BeautifulGarbage.
What inspired the album’s title, BeautifulGarbage? Shirley – We took the title from Celebrity Skin – when Courtney sung Beautiful Garbage, it’s a great contrast of words and I wish we’d thought of that, so I nicked it! I suggested it to the band and we used it because we all thought it was appropriate with the kind of record we made – we had Courtney’s blessing, to!
What Garbage songs are personal highlights to you? Duke – Push It had a video that classically related to the song so that was a highlight. Not because its necessarily the strongest Garbage song, but in terms of what we did with it – it was an amazing combination of music and visuals.
The sleeve artwork of the cover of BeautifulGarbage is very striking – do you have much input into the design of the artwork? Shirley – Yes, but we’ve had our problems with art departments and record companies for years. I guess you always have a pre-determined idea in your head of what you want. But because of the way record companies work you always have to include everybody and bring them into the equation. They end up spending a lot of our money in bringing ideas to us, many of which really aren’t very appealing. On our first album we literally got a call saying ‘You have to decide on a record cover tomorrow’, and we were like, ‘what the fuck?’ We don’t like anything you’ve sold us! So basically, I had a pink bow that was lying around it the studio so we said let’s just photograph this, photographed the pink feathers… Duke - Stuck them together and made our own little handmade CD and sent it in… we saw what they did – they screwed along with that, and it wasn’t quite as good as what we’d came up with… we were so frustrated. You’d be amazed with what we have to go through. Shirley – The best one was when we did Version 2.0. We hired a local artist in Chicago to come up with a cover for us. We’d never met him before but we liked his portfolio. When we actually went to meet him in Chicago our heart sank when he arrived at the door with a ponytail in flowing robes, and asked us to removed our shoes. At that point we should have immediately known this was going to be a disaster and walked out but like the idiots that we are we all tramped into his studio, and he had eight or nine really young people that work for him – he was like there guru! He asked us what we wanted for our sleeve (we could tell he wasn’t listening and was distracted) so we came back a week later. He said ‘I’ve got twenty great record covers for you – every ones a winner!’ and we were getting more and more tense and despondent. He showed us everyone – and they were all shite! Steve - We told him we wanted the colour orange on it and there was only one design that was orange – it was awful. So we photographed Shirley’s orange jacket… Shirley – And we made the other sleeve ourselves!
How did the idea for the Velvet Underground cover come around?
Duke – Well we were going to do the show where you have to come up with an idea for a cover, but all our original ideas were classed as too obscure. So the closest we could get to obscure that was still acceptable to the media establishment was the Velvet Underground – but they said they were too obscure to… Shirley – We were like, (shouts) What? Everybody knows the Velvet Underground… but apparently not. So we picked Wild Horses because we loved that song and I knew I could sing it. There were a lot of covers that we’d love to do but I or the band couldn’t hack it – so you always want to bring something new to the equation and make it as least as good as the original.
There’s an image that if you’re in music or media its very glamorous. Do you find the reality is completely different (e.g., when on some days you can’t even be bothered to put your make up on!)
Shirley – There is an element of glamour – albeit for only that one and a half-hours on stage. It feels glamorous, whether people think that’s glamorous I don’t know. But that’s the best bit and the only bit that matters. I mean, no disrespect intended but you can imagine interviews are not something we relish going through every day. But we know we have to do it to get our music heard by people in this media saturated age we live in. That’s just the way it is. If you’d saw us roll out of our buses at 6.00 this morning, tired, hung-over and irritable, crawling in here with our head in our suitcases, you realise its very rough sometimes… Steve – The glamour factor was very low this morning!
Courtney Love is currently fighting a legal battle over her rights as an artist. Do you feel Garbage and artists in general are getting ripped off by record companies, MP3 sites etc?
Shirley – We getting well and truly fucked up the arse by the record industry – you better believe it. There is literally time for a revolution. I got signed by a record company when I was on the dole, ten years ago, for £6,000. I’m still signed to that record label. We’ve had every shit-hot lawyer looking at the contract, but I’m signed and sealed with them until death do us part. I don’t think that’s fair. There’s probably no other contract in the world that could be upheld like that, but artists are still not valued very much, and we get abused – that’s just the way it is. I hope Courtney wins, but it’s all about money at the end of the day. The record industry has large pockets. The Internet and MP3 scandal has really helped artists in the long term, but in the short term, we’re getting royally fucked at both ends. The thing I didn’t like about Napster was what Shawn Fanning (company boss) was doing was really hypocritical. He was offering our work for free, meanwhile making profit for himself but not sharing that with us. If Shawn Fanning took the millions of dollars he got for selling Napster and shared it on the internet with us, that’d be totally fair enough, and a bargain for everyone. But he wasn’t willing to do that – he just took what we and other artists have all over the world, and sold it – and I don’t think that’s right. Now I notice he’s changing his own philosophy, so in the long term we’ll see how he stands in history, but right now he looks like a thief to me.
And Finally…
Have you any Spinal Tap-esque moments to share? Shirley - Oh yes, plenty… Duke - You do get lost trying to find the stage often, you do turn up at meet and greets, sometimes the band out number the people asking for autographs! Shirley - There are many times we end up looking like idiots and they’re really embarrassing… Steve - But those are some of the best moments to!
What would each of you write on your epitaph? Shirley - I told you so! Steve – I knew this would happen! Duke – Better luck next time!
Don’t quote us…
"We’re really hung-over so you’ll have to bear with us if we’re really inarticulate and can’t make sense of anything… we were playing in my homeland last night and a lot of whisky was drunk. Hence why Butch (Vig, drummer) is lost!"
Cherry lips, 5 Night stands on MTV, songs for James Bond movies, computer games and hits galore - everyone wants a piece of Garbage. HeavyMetal-Inc. included...
How’s the UK tour being going so far? Shirley - Well, being the first time we’ve being in the UK for three years we were very nervous. We opened in Portsmouth and it wasn’t our best show. But the last two shows have been fantastic, so we feel we’re up and running. The crowds have being incredible – we’ve been really amazed by support we’ve received from the fans on this tour. We feel very privileged to be in a position where we’ve enjoyed a career for seven years people coming to our shows and getting into to what we do.
You recently headlined at the Big Day Out festival in Australia and have played to audiences all over the world. Where do you find the best crowds are? Shirley – Well, they’re pretty wild up in Scotland – they breed them wild up there. It depends where we are at any given time – each time you get an amazing reaction it feels like it’s the first great reaction we’ve ever had.
While Garbage remain very much a rock band at heart and there are still the heftier moments on the disc, BeautifulGarbage shows off a more poppy side to the band and is the most refined Garbage album to date. How receptive have the audiences being to the new material? Shirley - I think the record is a bit lighter but live it’s still very much a rock show. If anything, some of the new material is probably heavier than anything we’ve done before, so I think it depends on what songs we’re playing on any given night. The record is so eclectic, it’s just down to what songs we focus on, but there are still a lot of loud guitars flying around.
Beautiful Garbage offers a diverse range of sonic styles. - Bubby singles such as Androgyny, Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go) and Breaking Up The Girl. - Ballads (Can’t Cry These Tears, Cup Of Coffee), epics (So Like A Rose), anthems (Shut Your Mouth, ‘Til The Day That I Die), and weightier numbers such as Silence Is Golden and Parade). Do you think you’ve escaped the curse of being confined to one limited genre? Duke – Yes, Beautiful Garbage is a little bit all over the place. We don’t want to keep on making the same record. We don’t want to make the same songs we were making in ’95, we want to move on and try new stuff to keep ourselves and hopefully other people interested in what we’re doing. On this record we felt free not to worry about fitting into the label that people expected of us. We just said screw it and tried some different things, and it took some people aback because it wasn’t what they were expecting. But after a few listens it starts to make sense and fits into what we’ve always being doing – taking different styles from different eras and bringing it all together.
In an MTV interview several years ago (Version 2.0 era) you said successful musicians are in the lap of the gods. What do you think has been the key to Garbage’s success? Shirley - I think what probably differentiates us from a lot of other bands is that we’ve had so much past experience in other bands – we’ve being in alternative rock bands all our lives and it gets to the point where you want to explore and do different things. We don’t feel threatened as people because somebody thinks we’ve made a pop record or somebody thinks we’ve made a pastiche record… Steve – It’s a great word, isn’t it, pastiche? Shirley – Oh yes, it’s a lovely word – it sounds like a cake! But seriously, we’re making music for ourselves and trying to explore all the possibilities that are open to us. We want to go down as many different avenues as possible because we’re curious about how certain records are made. Like on the song Can’t Cry These Tears Anymore – we’re fascinated by Phil Spectre’s production and how those records were made. We love the whole notion of the girl groups from the 60’s who really paved the way for people like me, like the Shankly Lads for example, the first punk rock girls. We just wanted to see how these records were made, see if we could do it and know what it felt like to make these records.
In a music world increasingly over populated by men, alongside such people as Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love, Sheryl Crow and Alannis Morissette, you burn the torch brightly for female musicians…
Shirley - Well I think when you talk about Gwen and Courtney and me, the three of us all feel we are rarities right now because there are very few of us out there left. We hope there is going to be a new generation who are going to come up and do things bigger and better and inspire more women to play, produce and be heard. We all want that to happen - if we’re part of that its amazing. It’s like passing on a torch, although you can’t hold on to I forever. So if you feel like you’re passing it to someone who’s been inspired by what you’ve done, it allows you to keep a little piece of something amazing in history.
What affect did your appearance in the Celvin Klein ad have on this?
Shirley - I think the Celvin Klein campaign marked a certain rite of passage for me. Through the success of the band and all the things that we’ve done together and how we’ve changed as people, I felt I could suddenly embrace myself and didn’t have to freak out about the way I looked, why I wasn’t slim enough, good enough, pretty enough etc… I finally managed to throw that off at the age of 30! It was a great laugh. I took off all my make up and was seen bare face. The campaign was actually totally at odds with what most fashion campaigns were about, and it was trying to say you don’t have to be perfect.
You can have creepy looking people like Shirley Manson and Moby and Brian Malko, and they can be seen as attractive because of what they do and who they are. I thought that was a great thing what Calvin Klein was trying to do with that campaign.
The tour diaries on your official website indicate that the making of the new album was rather stressful…
Shirley - Yes. It was miserable making this record. I was really furious and upset that the band were going home to their wives and I was stuck in a hotel, thinking its not fair etc, and I said one or two rash things in a moment of rage, because I was pissed off. I think a lot of the reasons why this record is much more pop than the last two records is for exactly that reason and I think the same can be said of the boys. It was a weird record and there was a weird atmosphere between us. We’ve being together for a long time now, and as Butch pointed out last night, we’re having our seven-year itch. Theirs a lot of friction between us – we love each other dearly, but when you’ve being stuck together for that period of time and you’re growing together, it can be very stressful. I think this record what definitely a milestone for us in that sense, and its going to be interesting of what we do on our next record, because of what we did on BeautifulGarbage.
What inspired the album’s title, BeautifulGarbage? Shirley – We took the title from Celebrity Skin – when Courtney sung Beautiful Garbage, it’s a great contrast of words and I wish we’d thought of that, so I nicked it! I suggested it to the band and we used it because we all thought it was appropriate with the kind of record we made – we had Courtney’s blessing, to!
What Garbage songs are personal highlights to you? Duke – Push It had a video that classically related to the song so that was a highlight. Not because its necessarily the strongest Garbage song, but in terms of what we did with it – it was an amazing combination of music and visuals.
The sleeve artwork of the cover of BeautifulGarbage is very striking – do you have much input into the design of the artwork? Shirley – Yes, but we’ve had our problems with art departments and record companies for years. I guess you always have a pre-determined idea in your head of what you want. But because of the way record companies work you always have to include everybody and bring them into the equation. They end up spending a lot of our money in bringing ideas to us, many of which really aren’t very appealing. On our first album we literally got a call saying ‘You have to decide on a record cover tomorrow’, and we were like, ‘what the fuck?’ We don’t like anything you’ve sold us! So basically, I had a pink bow that was lying around it the studio so we said let’s just photograph this, photographed the pink feathers… Duke - Stuck them together and made our own little handmade CD and sent it in… we saw what they did – they screwed along with that, and it wasn’t quite as good as what we’d came up with… we were so frustrated. You’d be amazed with what we have to go through. Shirley – The best one was when we did Version 2.0. We hired a local artist in Chicago to come up with a cover for us. We’d never met him before but we liked his portfolio. When we actually went to meet him in Chicago our heart sank when he arrived at the door with a ponytail in flowing robes, and asked us to removed our shoes. At that point we should have immediately known this was going to be a disaster and walked out but like the idiots that we are we all tramped into his studio, and he had eight or nine really young people that work for him – he was like there guru! He asked us what we wanted for our sleeve (we could tell he wasn’t listening and was distracted) so we came back a week later. He said ‘I’ve got twenty great record covers for you – every ones a winner!’ and we were getting more and more tense and despondent. He showed us everyone – and they were all shite! Steve - We told him we wanted the colour orange on it and there was only one design that was orange – it was awful. So we photographed Shirley’s orange jacket… Shirley – And we made the other sleeve ourselves!
How did the idea for the Velvet Underground cover come around?
Duke – Well we were going to do the show where you have to come up with an idea for a cover, but all our original ideas were classed as too obscure. So the closest we could get to obscure that was still acceptable to the media establishment was the Velvet Underground – but they said they were too obscure to… Shirley – We were like, (shouts) What? Everybody knows the Velvet Underground… but apparently not. So we picked Wild Horses because we loved that song and I knew I could sing it. There were a lot of covers that we’d love to do but I or the band couldn’t hack it – so you always want to bring something new to the equation and make it as least as good as the original.
There’s an image that if you’re in music or media its very glamorous. Do you find the reality is completely different (e.g., when on some days you can’t even be bothered to put your make up on!)
Shirley – There is an element of glamour – albeit for only that one and a half-hours on stage. It feels glamorous, whether people think that’s glamorous I don’t know. But that’s the best bit and the only bit that matters. I mean, no disrespect intended but you can imagine interviews are not something we relish going through every day. But we know we have to do it to get our music heard by people in this media saturated age we live in. That’s just the way it is. If you’d saw us roll out of our buses at 6.00 this morning, tired, hung-over and irritable, crawling in here with our head in our suitcases, you realise its very rough sometimes… Steve – The glamour factor was very low this morning!
Courtney Love is currently fighting a legal battle over her rights as an artist. Do you feel Garbage and artists in general are getting ripped off by record companies, MP3 sites etc?
Shirley – We getting well and truly fucked up the arse by the record industry – you better believe it. There is literally time for a revolution. I got signed by a record company when I was on the dole, ten years ago, for £6,000. I’m still signed to that record label. We’ve had every shit-hot lawyer looking at the contract, but I’m signed and sealed with them until death do us part. I don’t think that’s fair. There’s probably no other contract in the world that could be upheld like that, but artists are still not valued very much, and we get abused – that’s just the way it is. I hope Courtney wins, but it’s all about money at the end of the day. The record industry has large pockets. The Internet and MP3 scandal has really helped artists in the long term, but in the short term, we’re getting royally fucked at both ends. The thing I didn’t like about Napster was what Shawn Fanning (company boss) was doing was really hypocritical. He was offering our work for free, meanwhile making profit for himself but not sharing that with us. If Shawn Fanning took the millions of dollars he got for selling Napster and shared it on the internet with us, that’d be totally fair enough, and a bargain for everyone. But he wasn’t willing to do that – he just took what we and other artists have all over the world, and sold it – and I don’t think that’s right. Now I notice he’s changing his own philosophy, so in the long term we’ll see how he stands in history, but right now he looks like a thief to me.
And Finally…
Have you any Spinal Tap-esque moments to share? Shirley - Oh yes, plenty… Duke - You do get lost trying to find the stage often, you do turn up at meet and greets, sometimes the band out number the people asking for autographs! Shirley - There are many times we end up looking like idiots and they’re really embarrassing… Steve - But those are some of the best moments to!
What would each of you write on your epitaph? Shirley - I told you so! Steve – I knew this would happen! Duke – Better luck next time!
Don’t quote us…
"We’re really hung-over so you’ll have to bear with us if we’re really inarticulate and can’t make sense of anything… we were playing in my homeland last night and a lot of whisky was drunk. Hence why Butch (Vig, drummer) is lost!"
