The Heart of Garbage

Wiscnsin, USA, June 7, 2001

Take a walk down East Washington Avenue, past the Pontiac workshops, car dealerships, gas stations and establishments with names like Scooter Therapy and Roadway Transmission, and you’ll come to a squat redbrick building with grey doors. Like most facades that house extraordinary goings on – nuclear fallout shelters for example, or the redneck store in Pulp Fiction – it seems pretty nondescript from the outside. Looking at this anonymous structure, a line from ‘Love Street’ comes to mind: "I wonder what they do in there?"

Local realtors wondered the same thing, figuring this for a promising piece of property that had been left derelict for some years. And true, the place looks as if it has been shunned by its kind – there’s a 20 ft gap between it and its closest neighbour, and a nearby barbershop seems to have shuffled across the road in order to maintain a healthy distance.

Two men are loading equipment into a side entrance. One of them has long grey hair and looks like Killer Bob from Twin Peaks. A constant stream of traffic shushes past. The yellow of the traffic lights, the fire engine red of the hydrant and the lurid green of the nettles and weeds suggest further shades of mid-west Weirdsville. Peer beneath a nearby bench chained to a wall and you’ll find a small blob of amorphous matter about the size and shape of a human ear. It is swarming with angry red ants. It’s hardly surprising that David Lynch, who has a place in town, once visited here with his son, a beautiful boy with Eraserhead hair who kept running his hands over the surfaces of the interiors, transfixed by their textures.

This is Smart Studios, where all three Garbage albums were written and recorded. Despite Shirley Manson’s strong Scottish roots, the quartet are synonymous with Wisconsin, home of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and the source of Michael Lesy’s collection of photographic phantasmagoria, Wisconsin Death Trip.

"There’s this sense of isolation which has actually been a motivating force for us as people, in our lives, not just in a band,” Shirley reflects. “I think we’re quite happy being on the outskirts, we’re accustomed to that, almost as observers rather than participators."

The impressionable blow-in might describe this campus town (population 203,211) located on the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona as Fargo in winter, Blue Velvet in spring. On the way in from the airport, the lady cab driver talks like some hybrid of Frances McDormand and William H. Macy ("Okeey, looks like we got some fog comin’ in off Lake Mend-oow-taa"). But now that most of the 44,000 students have left for summer, a night-time stroll through the streets is a walk through a ghost town characterised not by tumbleweed and dust, but immaculately tended lawns, unmolested mailboxes and clean street grids patrolled by purring police cruisers.

The bar of the hotel where Shirley Manson lived for most of the last year it took to record her band’s new album is decorated with signed portraits of acts that have visited: Tito Puente, BB King, Ella Fitzgerald. And of course Garbage.

"I’ve been away from home for a long, long time," Shirley says, "and going into this record, I felt, ‘This has got to mean something to me to make it worthwhile sacrificing the time spent away from people that I love’. And so I wanted to say what I wanted to say, otherwise I wasn’t interested in doing it. And when I got together with the boys and we started playing together, I was able to come up with stuff on the spot much easier and much more comfortably than I had in the past, which I had found agonising to do."

Blame it on the fog.

In early morning and late evening, a thick mist comes creeping in off Lake Mendota towards that resort-style hotel (street number 666) where Shirley kept her quarters. John Carpenter once made a film about this kind of pea souper – it oozes over the pier, crawls up the walls and breathes itself into the air conditioning grilles, inseminating the dreams of the residents. It moves inland across the isthmus, snakes through the streets of Madison, seeps under the door of Smart Studios and goes, it would seem, right into the music being created within.

beautifulgarbage is a more evolved, more human record than either of its predecessors, largely due to three prime factors: an audaciously glasnostic musical policy, Shirley’s development as a vocalist, and some of her most direct and heartfelt lyrics to date.

It’s an album of hot colours and dark corners – the opening ‘Shut Your Mouth’ is designer dirty in-your-ear funk with free-flowing lyrics and what sound like purloined AC/DC riffs. ‘Androgyny’ and ‘Untouchable’ co-opt the high street hip-hop and r&b of acts like TLC or Kelis or even vintage Prince. Further on in, ‘Breaking Up The Girl’ and ‘Parade’ echo the songcraft of Big Star or Blondie, while ‘Can’t Cry These Tears’ is an ecstatic blast of epic Spector-esque pop that sounds like the Shangri La’s in search of spiritual satori.

"It lifted me off my heels to sing that song," remembers Shirley. "I gave myself a nosebleed because I sang so hard, with such abandoned enthusiasm. I can feel it off the rest of the band when I’m doing something great, I can feel it in their voices. When they get excited, they start grinning or they start jumping around, there’s a sort of agitation in the studio that fills me with excitement. It’s like falling in love, you get that sicky, tumbly feeling in your stomach."

But in many ways, ‘Silence Is Golden’, developed over 20 or 30 performances at the end of the Version 2.0 tour, was the album’s catalytic track. Beginning as a kind of mutant big ballad – Chrissie Hynde singing an industrialised ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ – the song shifts from 6/8 to 4/4 at the two minute mark as Shirley morphs into Patti Smith or Polly Harvey, shucking off an old skin and exposing a rawer one underneath. Ask Manson what triggered the song’s cathartic vocal performance and she says this:

"I was reading a book at the time about the surviving victims of physical and sexual abuse. I know a lot of my friends have survived incest or battery and something about the way the music sounded to me triggered off a thought; it’s a song about being heard, it’s a song to be heard."

It’s a key moment on the album, encapsulating recurring themes of vulnerability, disclosure and emancipation. More of that later, but anyone seeking an allegory for beautifulgarbage might consider a Calvin Klein photo shoot Manson did prior to recording. Klein’s images portrayed the singer stripped of the mask of near-theatrical make-up she’d affected for most of her public life.

"I actually wrote a letter to Calvin Klein telling him that he basically did something incredible for me," she admits. "He asked me very early on before the campaign had really started in earnest if I’d be willing to model for him, and I was kind of freaked out. But he said I’d be photographed by Steven Klein, who I’d wanted to work with for a long time but could never really afford, he’s really outrageously expensive. So basically I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it’ really for selfish, vain reasons, because I know one day I’m gonna be an old grandmother, fat, sitting on a rocking chair, wrinkles down to my ankles, and I want some gorgeous photos to show my grandkids.

"And when I arrived at the shoot the photographer said, ‘I want to take you with no make up on’. And I’d never been seen in public, I would never go out of the house without make-up on. I just hated the way I looked so much that I always had to paint this mask on. And because I trusted Steven Klein, I said okay. And he took these photos of me, and it was the beginning of my life right there.

“The photos aren’t glamorous in any way – like you say, I look like a little girl. I felt I’d really been able to lose a lot of baggage from my past life, leave it behind; it was like a new beginning for me. It’s a pure ugly duckling story."

So too is Garbage’s – three studio moles and an unknown singer catch a last-minute stand-by flight to the Grammys. For all the hi-tech trappings of Garbage’s sound, plus their penchant for employing cutting edge video directors like Sam Bayer and Stephane Sednaoui, their roots remain in rock’s sediment: British invasion groups and forgotten Nuggets heroes (they covered The Seeds’ ‘Can’t Seem To Make You Mine’ on the last tour). Marry this to a taste for Euro electronica, industrial noise, the ’60s chanteuse tradition, Roxy Music, Television and The Clash, and you’re halfway to understanding the forces of attrition behind the band’s shiny chrome surfaces.

But there’s also a fidelity to the holy grail of a great pop song. Butch Vig is just as likely to rave about Jimmy Webb’s ‘Wichita Lineman’ or classic Stones (he learned his chops, what he calls "the push groove and the pull groove", from listening to Charlie Watts), as he is Sigur Ros and At The Drive-In.

Ask each member when they were first moved by a piece of music and you’ll get surprisingly traditionalist answers: The Who on the Smothers Brothers Show, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Except Shirley’s epiphany was closer to home:

"My mother was in a church concert party, and me and my sisters used to go and watch her sing. And I have this really clear memory of sitting in the wee baby chairs in the front and looking up at my mother who looked absolutely huge; she was magnified on the stage, larger than life. She was wearing this blue and white floral dress and I thought she looked like a princess and she was singing ‘On A Clear Day’. And I just fell in love with that image of my mother, and the song really moved me because it was the first time I sort of got a window into my mother’s heart.

"I think listening to music that my mother played me as a child, like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee, definitely imbued in me a love of torch songs: slow, tragic, fucked up sounding singing; I loved the sound of ache in all the women I grew up listening to, it was something in the voice."

Back in the lounge at Smart, Garbage are eating New Orleans take-out and watching Jim Carrey make a horse’s arse of himself at the MTV movie awards.

Upstairs, Shirley throws open the door to her lair, the vocal booth, which is furnished with a music stand, mirror ball, church candles, Fender vibraphone amp, her guitars, and sundry bits and pieces that have apparently acquired talismanic value. On the music stand there’s a cut out newspaper headline: "Manson Was Right!"

Butch suggests we go for a drink. Shirley makes an exception to her early-to-bed routine and agrees to join us. Outside Smart, the mist has become alchemised into warm, heavy rain. Butch tries to get the car wipers to work while dialling up his girlfriend Beth (the petite brunette responsible for signing Nelly Furtado to Dreamworks) and cranking up Coldplay on the sound system.

At Genna’s bar, the sound system is playing Hendrix. Drinks are ordered. Shirley’s upstairs sitting on a bar stool, talking to Billy Bush. "Five more minutes and I was walking out," she says, like Bacall with a Scots accent.

There are, at the very least, two incarnations of the singer. One is the devil in Ms. Manson, the rent-a-quote-redhead who hoots and slaps your leg if you say something peculiar. The other is an almost bookish individual with antennae fine-tuned to the emotional temperature of a room, the one who quotes Yeats and corresponds with J.T. LeRoy, the 21-year-old cult author of Sarah (shortly to be filmed by Gus Van Sant) and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.

Shirley describes reading Sarah – which chronicled how, as a 12 year old, LeRoy learned to be a ‘lot lizard’ (truck stop hustler) from his mother – as being akin to first hearing Kurt Cobain sing. Their e-mail correspondence directly inspired ‘Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)’, a lurid pink blast of strychnine-flavoured bubblegum off the new album.

Has she ever met him?

"Never. Which makes it even more exciting and glorious and perfect and pristine. I mean it’s weird because I feel like I love him, and how can I love someone I’ve never met? But I think you meet soul mates on a variety of different planes. With J.T. it’s weird, it borders on the erotic and yet there is no sexual frisson at all. I mean he doesn’t bat for my team in the first place, let’s clarify that point right off, so it’s not a sexual thing, but there’s a sort of erotic desire for a connection with him because he’s like a hypersensitive – in the intellectual sense – individual who can read the tiniest details of the fragments of someone’s psychological make-up. Writing to him is like going to a priest. You can confess, or divulge."

Has he heard ‘Cherry Lips’?

"No. He keeps on begging me to play it for him and I’m such a paranoid neurotic I won’t send it to him. Because in some ways I don’t want to spoil the fun of him hearing it on the radio for the first time, I don’t want him to get bored with it, I want it to be like this fleeting jolt he hears. We have this joke, J.T. and I, that we’re gonna build a statue and erect it right next to the Statue of Liberty. He has to be in hot pants and super pointy high heels, and this transgender baby angel child will greet every visitor to the new world. I feel like I’m on a one woman mission to spread the word of J.T. LeRoy."

Outside, on the short walk to where Billy Bush has parked his car, the rain has once again given way to mist.

"Look Shirley, it’s The Fog!"

"I knew you’d say that."

The Fog has become an in-joke by now, trickling down from songs like ‘Milk’ and ‘You Look So Fine’ and into beautifulgarbage.

Butch: "I see colours, shades, grey, red – we were doing a shoot yesterday and when ‘Drive You Home’ came on, it sort of has this fog, I can’t describe it but I could see it as soon as the track starts, which is one of the reasons I love that song – it has this sort of 3D depth, you can see these tones."

"It’s a foggy record!" says Steve.

"That’s just called a bad mix!" says Duke.

Kings Cross, London, England, June 22, 2001

Garbage are filming an interview for the EPK (Electronic Press Kit) to go with the new album – since Madison, it’s been eight or nine hours of press a day across Europe and Scandinavia. The shoot is helmed by Sophie Muller, the celebrated director of videos for Blur, Björk, Hole and dozens of others. Ms Muller is tiny and thankfully froth-free, and her empathy with the band is in the details: the backlighting, the drape of blue velvet across the table so authentic you expect Angelo Badalamenti’s credit to materialise in the fabric. One of the technicians wonders if the lighting’s too blue, prompting Shirley to hum Lucinda Williams under her breath: "Am I too blue for you?"

At one stage the director asks Butch to move his hand from behind Shirley, as it makes her look like she’s got something growing from her neck. Shirley advises him to put it in his groin area. Butch looks forlorn as Duke points out that it now seems like he’s got something growing from his crotch. Steve reveals hidden talents as a continuity announcer on the station id clips ("Hi, we’re Garbage and you are watching…"). Between takes, Shirley recommends James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia and has her new chop-cut fussed over, while Butch raves about Weezer’s ‘Hash Pipe’.

Later, it’s dinner. Shirley maintains that the band that eats together stays together. If The Stones are like some camp old boys’ club and Fleetwood Mac a Californian soap-opera, then Garbage are a troupe of genetically engineered siblings, with all the familial closeness and dysfunctionality that entails.

Butch: "We’re definitely closer than a lot of bands – we fight and bicker but we go out to dinner together, we go to clubs together. If we’d done this when we were 20 we probably wouldn’t have lasted."

Over a smorgasbord of Indian fare, the band and their publicist Bernard plot strategies, trot out tour stories, do impressions of associates and laugh. They laugh a lot, mostly at a succession of dry martini one-liners manufactured by Duke, who possesses the dissipated charm of a southern gentleman, except he’s from Nebraska. Sadly, he is not related to Roky.

Despite the band’s pan-Atlantic differences (overrated, say the band, preferring to point out shared Northern hemispherical sensibilities), there’s symmetry in the backgrounds. Butch’s mother was a music teacher and his dad a doctor, while Shirley’s mother was a singer, her father a geneticist. As a metaphor for Garbage’s prosthetic soul music, it’s almost too perfect.

Shirley: "Well, what’s even more perverse about my parents is that my father was my Sunday School teacher too, so I think that’s an interesting addition to the cocktail. No wonder I’m so neurotic!"

Back at the bar of his Kensington hotel, Butch makes free with his stash of Cuban stogies and lets slip that fellow boffin Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange has given the new album his blessing. This is cause for some professional pride; whatever about Bryan Adams records, Mutt was the guy who put kick into Back In Black.

Besides, as the drink loosens tongues, certain among us fess up to deriving guilty pleasure from the Teutonic pop construction of Shania’s ‘Still The One’, a song seemingly comprised of four different killer choruses. A couple of hours later, we’ve veered so far off the record that I despair of ever getting back. The waitress approaches, asking if we’d like anything more to drink.

"Yeah," says Butch. "Six Jamesons."

She does a double take.

"I’m only joking," he reassures her. "We’ll save that for Dublin."

Dublin, Ireland, January 14, 1999

The first show of Garbage’s Version 2.0 European tour had gone like a dream, all soft-focus and fuzzy. Fresh from production rehearsals in Belfast, the band had a strong opening night in front of a full house at the Point Theatre in Dublin. Bono sent flowers. For Shirley, it was as if the little girl from Edinburgh had gotten the silver wand treatment. While the boys stayed up drinking Seabreezes, she retired early to her posh hotel suite with her husband and fell asleep, feeling wrapped in cotton wool.

The next morning, she woke up, stretched, and discovered a lump on her left breast. A doctor advised her to get it checked out. As the tour moved to England and the band’s most prestigious shows yet at Wembley Arena, she remained in a state of some unreality. The medics in Britain gave her a biopsy but couldn’t get the needle in, so she had to see a specialist. The lump turned out to be a benign tumour called a nerve fibrosa, but had to be removed anyway. She toughed out the next few weeks of the tour in a sling, but once she got home, it all fell apart. She’d had a lump taken from her breast, was nursing "a huge keloid scar" and had had no counselling.

"It was a weird wake-up call for me," Shirley remembers. "It was like being doused in cold water."

It’s early July, and we’re back in the hotel that has been the band’s home for the last week or so. This is the last interview of the promo tour and there’s a definite end-of-term feeling in the air. The record company folks are drinking champagne, Butch has a cigar on the go, Duke is singing M.O.P.’s ‘Cold As Ice’ and Mushroom label head Korda Marshall is taking everyone to dinner. Steve left for home this morning. Tomorrow the remaining three will scatter to Madison, LA and Edinburgh for a two-week break.

But right now, at a quiet table away from

the hubbub, Shirley’s thinking back to her ordeal two years ago, and the fact that the fans at the live shows thought her sling was "cool, a fashion statement", unaware of what was going on inside.

"I loved the irony of that," she smiles. "And in some ways that really typifies my whole experience in the public eye. Because I think that’s what pop stars do in some ways is they magnify pain, and other people find a reflection of that and turn it into some other type of… they perceive it in a very different way from the way you’re transmitting it. And the alchemy of that is so addictive. It’s like your pain gets turned into something positive, an amazing feeling."

When she found the lump, did she have an attack of the old Calvinist-Protestant guilt syndrome – I’m being punished for my excesses?

"That’s absolutely what I attributed it to, I was being punished for having so much joy and amazing brilliant things happening in my life. It was a relief in some ways, it was like, ‘Ah, here it comes! Thank you lord, for cutting it short, my agony!’ But it was interesting because you know, you really discover a lot about yourself when you have a fright like that. And I was always scared of that kind of thing ever happening, finding a lump, and I’m not so scared of it now, I know how I would deal with it, and I know I could cope. It forced me to rethink my whole attitude to life. It was just a weird experience that was really profound, and I loved it because it made me more conscious."

On top of the tour nightmare, Shirley’s mother was diagnosed as having breast cancer early in 2000. Then, as the band began recording beautifulgarbage in April of that year, Steve’s mother died. The album was book-ended by funerals; towards the closing stages of the mixing, Duke’s father passed away.

You can’t but hear all this in the twilit atmospheres of new songs like ‘Nobody Loves You’ or the narcoleptic loneliness of the closing ‘So Like A Rose’, as hypnotic as the Velvets’ ‘Candy Says’. Elsewhere on the record, ‘Cup Of Coffee’ is the closest Manson has come to the unnatural sorrow Nina Simone invested in ‘If You Go Away’, or Sinatra’s torch for Ava Gardner. Over this-is-not-happening theremin, she softly sings: "You tell me you don’t love me/Over a cup of coffee/And I just have to look away". And with that gesture, planets fragment into dust motes suspended in a broken moment between two lovers, while the string section has a nervous breakdown. It’s a remarkable study of obsession, of love-as-sickness. The first time I heard it, I likened it to John Carpenter meets The Carpenters.

"That song comes from perhaps the furthest back I can remember in my adult life," Shirley says. "And it’s weird ’cos everyone keeps on saying, ‘How could you write a song so personal?’ and it is deeply personal, but it happened so long ago that in some ways that whole process is dead to me. I felt relief when it finally came out because I tried to deal with that whole episode in my life on the song ‘Special’ on the last album and failed miserably.

“And when I finally did ‘Cup Of Coffee’, I didn’t even have to think about it. I heard the piano part that Duke had come up with, it triggered a movie of my life back then in my head, and I just literally followed the movie and then spoke the words to match. And I’m proud of it because I literally felt release when I got it out, it was like coughing up a dark, ugly black stone from the bottom of my stomach. And every time I hear it I feel how I did then, I actually feel that way."

‘So Like A Rose’ is a similar exercise that sounds for all the world like Manson singing to her teenage self.

"It was the time of night," she considers. "When I started singing, I just had the first line, and it reminded me of a boy who was in my peer group when I was a teenager. It reminded me of sitting in my bedroom listening to records and them touching me when I felt like an alien. It’s about departure of sorts, the desire to flee, the desire to transform and the desire to escape."

Reality and escapism, the yin and yang of rock ‘n’ roll. Tonight, this bar will be overrun with Madonna’s dancers and crew on downtime from the Drowned World tour, some of whom will never get this close to the spotlight again. Between solicitations from tour personnel pitching for a place on the next Garbage tour, Butch will express the pipe dream to put together a slow trance-y record, maybe recorded at soundchecks on tour, similar in feel to ‘So Like A Rose’, but with covers like Big Star’s ‘Thirteen’ or a morphine version of The Stones’ ‘Dead Flowers’. The road looms ahead.

Heathrow Airport, London, England, July 7, 2001

Shirley is sitting in the airport lounge, her bag and laptop at her feet, a padded envelope crammed full of video showreels before her on the table. She hasn’t boarded yet, but she feels airborne all the same.

The singer hasn’t been back to Edinburgh since Christmas, six months ago. She’s full of homebound apprehension, the edginess of the institutionalised on the verge of discharge back into the real world. The new album, the ‘Androgyny’ video shoot, the remixes, the touring, and then… what? She wants to take all those uncertain futures and sort them out right now, but she can’t – nobody can.

She tucks her legs under her on the sofa, puts her head on her arm, and laughs at her own jitters, thinking of the poem The Layers by the American laureate Stanley Kunitz: "How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?" 95 years old and the poet is still arm-wrestling the fates and the furies. "I am not done with all my changes," he wrote, facing down the ebbing time.

The Edinburgh flight is called. She gathers her things together, says her goodbyes and disappears down the stairs.

Shirley Manson’s going home.