MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH

MEET THE Manson family. You join me on an overcast April Fool's Day in an upstairs suite in a plush Kensington hotel. Garbage are doing press for their forthcoming second album Version 2.0, and the foursome are valiantly guzzling down industrial quantities of coffee and water in an attempt to wake up for this mid-morning interview. Mind you, for all the caffeine abuse, there isn't a smoker among them, at least not while asthmatic singer Shirley Manson's in the room.

As Shirley and guitarist Duke Erikson busy themselves with the cafetiere, guitarist/bassist Steve Marker attempts to address a question both of us have forgotten. Butch Vig, the band's flamboyantly bearded drummer and a celebrated producer in his own right, gamely explains his comrade's fuzziness:

"We finished the album and flew to New York and mastered it," he relates, "then flew straight to LA and did the video for 'Push It', and flew straight back and did two weeks of ten-hour a day interviews in the States. We just got over here three days ago, spent a day in Brussels, yesterday was Copenhagen, today is London. We're trying to cram in a lot of press in a very short time, because it took us longer to get the record done than anticipated, and we have to start rehearsals a week from Monday. The tour starts on May 15th and we're not ready, so . . ."

I get the picture. The band have barely had time to finish, let alone listen to Version 2.0, and yet they're here trying to talk about it for my benefit. Indeed, the quartet seem more interested in hearing my opinion of the record than offering their own. Which is flattering, but this being Garbage, I can't help likening their hospitality to that of the family of white-trash bloodsuckers in Kathryn Bigelow's 1988 cult movie Near Dark. Interview with the vampires indeed: it's still an hour shy of noon and we've already discussed David Lynch, the futility of existence and the incurable human condition. But it is precisely this bleak curiosity that lends even the group's most audacious new tunes an insidious sense of menace.

"'Sense of menace' is good," Duke drawls laconically into his coffee.

"I think that we share a certain sensibility," Butch muses, firing up his brain for yet another day of questions about Kurt, Courtney and Billy Corgan (which he won't answer on the grounds that he has a doctor/patient confidentiality with his former clients). "For one thing we love dark pop songs, and I think maybe being from the mid-west there's a sense of being isolated. Like in Blue Velvet, there's this veneer of everything looking really normal but under the surface it's not."

"I think a lot of places are like that," Duke ventures. "Every place has a certain veneer that draws people to it in the first place, and then you start to discover what they're really like. I mean, every individual's just like that, people are just like that."

He looks me in the eye.

"Admit it!"

Okay, okay, I admit it.

"Poor Peter's sobbing," Shirley cackles, tucking her legs under her on the sofa.

"It is a little early for this kinda talk," Duke considers."We like to wait before the sun goes down before we start talkin' like this!"

With this, the guitarist, who seems to have suddenly morphed into a younger version of Millennium's Lance Henrikson, leans forward and says:

"Can we take this tape? You've got two goin' here."

As Duke has pointed out, I have indeed come armed with two recorders. One is for back-up. Ever since a tape jammed on me in a recent interview, I've been a little . . .

"Paranoid, are ya?" he mock-glowers.

Paranoid is a word that crops up a lot in Garbage circles. It's even in the title of one of the new tunes. Indeed, Mushroom Records are so antsy about copies of Version 2.0 being pirated over the Internet that their Irish distributors BMG have been instructed not to issue me with the new ultra-chic press-pack (interactive CD/biog, screen saver, the works) but instead, hastily run off an advance tape. The ironies are flying. Thousands of pounds worth of promotion are being pumped into a record with state-of-the-art production, and I'm furnished with a bootleg of it.

Let's rewind a few years. Garbage's origins are in Madison, Wisconsin. Duke was born in Nebraska, where he attended college and taught drawing for a couple of semesters, before moving to Wisconsin, attracted by the art scene. Butch, the son of a small town doctor and a music teacher, was raised in Viroqua and got his degree in film at the University of Wisconsin, spending much of his time composing electronic soundtracks. Steve had moved around a lot as a kid, but spent most of high school in Mamaroneck, N.Y. before becoming a communications-arts major ("total avant-garde bullshit"), also at UW.

The three came together in Madison in the early 1980s, in a pop outfit called Spooner: Vig played drums, Erikson was the singer and guitarist, and Marker the soundman. By 1987, after three albums' worth of local celebrity, the band broke up. Butch and Duke went on to form a modestly successful jangly guitar outfit called Firetown.

In 1984 Vig and Marker had founded Smart Studios in Madison and were recording local surf-punk bands as well as dorking around with a side project called Rectal Drip during downtime. The Drip even scored a minor local hit with a cover of a macabre children's song, 'John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt'. Smart prospered, taking on clients from the Sub Pop, Touch And Go, Slash and Twin Tone labels, eventually hosting Nirvana's Nevermind demos as well as remixes for U2, Nine Inch Nails, House Of Pain and Depeche Mode. Also, Butch's production skills were now in demand by the likes of Sonic Youth, the Smashing Pumpkins, and of course Nirvana. However, the three still had the bug to put a new band together.

In 1993, after Vig finished working on the Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, an embryonic Garbage began to take shape. However, the band still needed a lead singer. In '94, after being impressed by Shirley's performance in the video for 'Suffocate Me' by Angelfish on MTV's 120 Minutes, they contacted her. Even though Marker admitted to being initially somewhat scared of the fiery diva, and the audition scenario at his house was excruciatingly awkward for all involved, both parties soon struck up a rapport.

"I think luck had more to do with it than anything else," Duke admits. "It's almost an impossibility that we could've gotten along with someone coming from the other side of the planet, that we could hit it off so well, musically and as people. It's a fluke. And we're the first to admit it."

Following a couple of low-key, limited edition singles (Butch's presence was initially kept a secret from industry insiders lest his LA player pedigree distract from the music), the quartet's debut album Garbage was released in the autumn of 1995. A tour with the Smashing Pumpkins whipped the band into shape as a live act, and after a gruelling touring and promotional campaign, the record went on to sell four million copies, yielding no less than five hit singles.

Certain albums move into the mainstream because they some-how rub up against whatever raw nerves are exposed by the times. It hardly seems mere happenstance that Garbage, with its layers of stimuli and sin, seemed to wobble with the same sense of moral panic as phobic films such as Se7en, Strange Days and (Shirley's choice) Natural Born Killers. This was prime pre-millennium tension, a time when such phenomena as body-piercing, cosmetic amputation and shit sculpture were now, as Jane's Addiction would have it, nothing shocking.

In David Fincher's Se7en, serial killer John Doe hacks off a model's nose, quite literally to spite her face, leaving her with the option of dialling 911 and living with her deformity, or swallowing a vial of sleeping pills. She chooses the big sleep. It was a brutal, but apt, metaphor for the decay of the human soul through an end-of-the century obsession with the surface perfect. In the same black vein, Kathryn Bigelow's (her again) Strange Days took voyeurcore to the ultimate extreme, painting a 1999 where humans would pay black market prices for "clips", virtual snuff movies in which the viewer could vicariously experience murder, rape or even suicide. Garbage's death-disco grooves seemed entirely in sync with such grisly dispatches from Planet Babble-On.

Back on earth, Butch is a little taken aback at the amount of far-fetched theories I've dumped on his band's music.

"See, he's giving us lots of soundbites we can use in interviews," he says to Duke.

"We're gonna rip you off, baby!" Shirley threatens.

At this rate, I'll get home with a tape full of me talking Garbage.

"It's better than, 'How did you get your name?'," Butch reasons.

"That's his next question, actually," Duke intones, dryly.

And no amount of theorising can distract from the fact that, at heart, Garbage are a very fine pop group. Like its predecessor, Version 2.0 is crammed with shining melodies, barbed hooks and ingenious arrangements. Mind you, the perv-pop sensibility is always tempered with the bitter word, like on 'Medication', where Shirley sadly croons, "And still you call me co-dependent/And somehow you lay the blame on me." Or 'I Think I'm Paranoid', where she makes a dominance and submission game out of an old bubblegum chorus: "Bend me, break me, anyway you need me/All I want is you".

But while Garbage have always had a soft spot for bands like Blondie, Roxy Music and The Pretenders (Shirley does a great Chrissie Hynde at the end of 'Special'), this time around there's a new ghost in the machine: Brian Wilson. The California dreamer is all over the first half of the record, and most obviously, in the "Don't worry baby" steal in 'Push It'.

"Because we all love The Beach Boys, we thought it would be 'cute' to sample them as a harmony," explains Shirley. "So we stuck it in and it sounded amazing to have them as backing vocalists. Then of course, for legal reasons we had to sort of amend it and have me do harmonies and seek Brian's permission, but then I suppose, that subtly injected a sort of (laughs) 'Beach Boys consciousness' throughout the recording process.

"In 'Special' for instance, I can't think of any latter-day bands where a female is singing those sort of stacked '60s-style vocals, and we thought it would be really effective. That is my favourite moment in the record, when you hear those."

"And 'Look So Fine' is more of our Carpenters moment," adds Butch.

That makes sense. Heavenly melodies sung by a honey-voiced woman suffering from a fatal disease of the ID. The same woman Sonic Youth commemorated so breathtakingly on 'Tunic (Song For Karen)' from the Goo album. Another Butch connection.

During the mixing of Version 2.0 (the title refers to the com-puter software used in the recording process) Shirley furnished Rolling Stone with a "partial list" of the influences on the sessions. These included Julie London, Kraftwerk, Radiohead, Patti Smith ("as always"), The Manchurian Candidate and The Conversation. The musical references are self-explanatory, and it takes no great leap of imagination to understand why these paranoid voidoids would rate the John Frankenheimer conspiracy classic, but Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film must've resonated with the band on a practical as well as conceptual level.

In The Conversation, Gene Hackman's surveillance expert is hired to track and record the movements and voices of Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams. The evidence is to be delivered to a mysterious businessman, played by Robert Duvall. As the tapes are slowly, teasingly made more comprehensible, it becomes apparent that what was originally thought to be a simple case of marital infidelity could be a possible murder plot. Supervising editor Walter Murch's sound collage and re-recording work won the film an Oscar nomination.

One imagines that the Garbage crew would've identified with Hackman as they waded through the sedimentary layers of extraneous noise in search of the emotional core of each song. Butch alone had to digest six 90-minute tapes filled with snatches of conversation and incidental sounds which he had taped onto a tiny recorder during the last tour. Tracks like 'Push It' and 'Hammering In My Head' ended up with over 100 drum loops to be cut and pasted. One imagines that making Version 2.0 was less an exercise in writing and recording than sonic excavation.

"It wasn't until about three or four months into it, when we had to do rough mixes for some people at the label, that the songs came together," Butch confesses. "They'd been really cool, but it got to the point where we had to play something for them, and so we were forced to take all these fragments of things and cobble them together to make it sound like we had some songs finished. And that was the first point where we went, 'Ah yeah, we do have some songs starting to come together here.'"

If there is one dominant Garbage characteristic, apart from Shirley's voice, it's the production, the overall sound. And a painstakingly democratic approach is something the band have in common with that other cyborganic quartet, U2.

"They're not speedy when they make records either," observes Butch, who should know, having orchestrated an itchy remix of 'Staring At the Sun' for Bono and pals last year. "In a lot of ways I think they work the same way we do, they just go into a studio and make music from scratch. It can be very spontaneous, and then also you can get bogged down on this small little detail and spend days doing it. It can be exhilarating and frustrating, sometimes within the space of half an hour."

So, in a claustrophobic studio situation, are Garbage brooders or bruisers?

"Boozers," deadpans Steve.

Beneath Version 2.0's pristine production sheen, there's an undercurrent of sexual cruelty that brings to mind everything from Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon to Marianne Faithfull's 'Why D'Ya Do It?'. Indeed many of the songs are schism-riddled psychodramas, one-act plays filled with love and loathing, lust and repulsion.

Shirley seems to play it predatory one minute ("I knew you were mine for the taking/Your eyes light up when I walk in the room" - 'Hammering In My Head'), vulnerable the next ("I'm open wide/I want to take you home/We're wasting time/You're the only one for me" - 'Look So Fine'). It's a record that's black with paradoxes, dispassionate and engaged at the same time.

I put it to the band that, although it can be counter-productive to isolate the lyrics (especially when you consider that one guitar line can suggest as much psychological trauma as any couplet - indeed, Duke and Steve's overdubs often serve as counter-commentary to the song's core sentiments, poisoning what are essentially sweet melodies), there are some pretty bare sentiments on the album. It seems I've touched a nerve here.

"Every interview we've said exactly the same thing," Duke responds. "We really hate talking about the lyrics apart from the music."

"It's like, you shouldn't even look at 'em," Butch maintains. "They have to be heard being expressed, how the character comes out in her voice with the music, and the emotion you get from it, it really has to be the two together."

However, Shirley's prepared to cut me some slack.

"That said, ask the question anyway," she instructs. "I'm curious as to what it was."

Okay, how about the lines "If we sleep together/Would you like me better/If we come together/We'll go down together"? That seems to allude to the very precarious practice of searching for one's identity through the sexual act, rather than using sex as an expression of the self.

"Which is exactly what that song's about," Shirley admits. "A lot of morons think that's a sexy song."

Sexy? It's horrible. Well, maybe not horrible, but . . .

"It is horrible," she insists. "It's supposed to be horrible. It's so weird to have people think, 'Oh, it's sex, therefore it's nice. Oooo, Sexy.'"

She spits the word out like a bitten maggot. Which says more about Garbage's idea of carnality than any amount of ink-blots. But then, a lot of people get off on fucking to the sound of Tricky's Maxinquaye.

"The irony about the lyrics is that I had two notebooks packed full of ideas," Shirley continues, "but basically the stuff that's on the record came from just when we were playing together again, writing the record, rather than any notes I'd kept. There were a few tiny little elements, like the line 'The Trick Is To Keep Breathing' which I had from the Janice Galloway novel (the Scottish novelist's 1994 debut tells the tale of a young drama teacher, Joy Stone, who becomes afflicted with a deep and mysterious depression - PM) and I always thought it was an amazing title, and these words stand by themselves. But mostly it was just spontaneous."

In 'Medication' Shirley sings, "They got me on some medication/My point of balance is askew." Autobiographical?

"It's more metaphorical," she qualifies, "but it came through a literal experience."

What were you on? Anti-depressants or . . .

"No, oh God, no," she says, looking horrified.

"Beer," interjects Duke, pulling his bandmate out of the hole I've spent the last few minutes digging for her. Whether conscious or not, this seems to be a typical Garbage tactic. As soon as I start blundering into tender territories, one of the band will change the focus from the particular to the general. It's something that doesn't go unnoticed by the singer.

"I think we're very protective of each other," she'll admit later. "Unlike a lot of bands, we really do function as one, and I think that's very rare. That's probably one of our greatest weapons, it makes us very powerful as a unit, strong. We've talked about this a million times: with a lot of bands it's one person's vision, it's one dominant leader, and in this band we really rely on each other in a four-way split."

Back to the amateur analysis. In 'When I Grow Up' Shirley asserts: "When I grow up/I'll be stable/When I grow up/I'll turn the tables". Does she now feel vindicated for all the years of struggle?

"No, 'cos I don't think any of us feel that we've done it," she stresses. "We feel that we're doing it. And that's great about it, there's still a sense of urgency and unfortunately - I repeat the word - desperation in a way. I mean, occasionally there are moments. I can remember just one instance when I was onstage and I remember lookin' out and thinking, 'How did I get here? How am I here?' And that was a weird moment 'cos y'know, even in all the years I was in bands I never remember feeling comfortable onstage, I always felt like people in the audience were thinking 'What's she doing there?' I was really self-conscious. Just one moment on the last tour I remember feeling really comfortable and at home, and that's when I thought, 'How did this happen?'"

"How long did that last?" asks Duke.

"Until you fuckin' spoiled it with your guitar solo!" n

* Version 2.0 is released through Mushroom Records/BMG Ireland on May 8th.

* Garbage join a mouth-watering line-up including Pulp, Beastie Boys, Ian Brown and Cornershop for the Galway Arts Festival's second Big Day Out on Saturday 11th July at Castlegar Sports Ground. Tickets, at #29.50, are now available from usual outlets nationwide.