Garbage’s Shirley Manson: “We’re losing bands from working class beginnings and risk-takers”

Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has spoken to NME about the reissue of their 2005 album ‘Bleed Like Me’, the worsening conditions of the music industry, and the band’s plans for new material.

This week sees the alt-rock veterans drop their fourth album on vinyl for the first time, along with a raft of b-sides, remixes and rarities hitting streaming for the first time. While containing the singles and fan favourites ‘Sex Is Not The Enemy’, ‘Why Do You Love Me’ and ‘Run Baby Run’, the album arrived to mixed reviews and didn’t perform as well as its hugely commercially successful predecessors.

“To be a frank, I never had a particularly good relationship with that record until relatively recently,” Manson told NME. “We released it at a time of immense strife within the band, and dwindling interest from our record label and the general public.”

While the rock-leaning record has since become a cult favourite and sits warmly in the hearts of Garbage and their fans, ‘Bleed Like Me’ was made during a period of much inner-band tension and “unpleasant interference” from their label, Interscope Records.

“We were nobody’s child at that record label because they hadn’t wanted us there necessarily,” Manson admitted. “They had bought our label Almo, who had been a small independent label, and we had been sucked into this situation where we were a tiny fish in a massive pond. Interscope at the time were arguably the biggest player in the industry, and there we were stuck without an A&R that was interested in us.

“It was really stressful. They kept on pushing for us to work with people that we didn’t feel were the right fit. As a result of our resistance to that, they decided that we were being really difficult. It was at a time in the entertainment industry when people were much more pliable than we were.”

Relations then turned particularly sour when Manson had “a fortunate or unfortunate incident” on a flight from Los Angeles to London, when she was sat next to “a really famous rockstar” who let slip that Interscope had prioritised No Doubt over Garbage.

“I shan’t name [said rockstar] because I don’t want to cause too many ruptures,” said the frontwoman. “He’s really gorgeous and I love this person, but we got drunk together and he told me that he’d been present at an Interscope meeting where our future as a band had been discussed and there was a vote taken at the table where they decided if they were going to spend money on No Doubt or on Garbage. They decided to invest in No Doubt.

“No Doubt are friends of ours, we love them dearly and this has no bearing on them whatsoever, but to hear that from a well-known and highly regarded rockstar was devastating. He told me this story, and then it was war. I wasn’t going to do fuck all for that record label ever again.”

Manson explained how this led to a feeling of the industry only seeing space for one “female-fronted rock band” on the scene.

“We were meeting the same resistance at radio stations too; they were also saying, ‘Well we’ll be playing No Doubt, we won’t be playing Garbage’,” she recalled. “The domino effect was devastating. It caused us to turn in on each other because we were so frustrated.

“We couldn’t really move anywhere and we felt like we were playing with our hands tied behind our backs. That will drive a person insane, and it did. We all went mad and we took the pressure out on each other. It caused a lot of heartbreak.”

Check out our full interview with the NME Icon Award winner below, where she also pointed out how circumstances are only worsening for new and rising artists, and revealed the band’s plans for an incoming new album.

NME: Hello Shirley. Having the rug pulled out from beneath you before the release of ‘Bleed Like Me’ must have done serious damage to the band’s confidence?

Manson: “When you release a record, you’re really leaving yourself vulnerable to criticism, to disappointment, to shame, to embarrassment. When you open yourself to public criticism, yes you can enjoy great praise, which is wonderful and lovely – but it doesn’t touch you like the negative criticism does.

“Although the record sold pretty well – I think it actually sold a million copies in the end – it was received disastrously! We’d got the most damning reviews we’d ever had telling us that our career was over, nobody wanted to hear from us, and there were a lot of cruel comments.”

Bust still you had to soldier on?

“We had a tour planned, so we just went on tour and forgot about the criticism, but things had got so bad between us as a band. We were in Australia and due to come to the UK. Our manager called to tell us that the tickets weren’t selling very well so I just sat down with the band and said, ‘I love you, but I’m done and I’m going home – cheerio, goodbye!’

“The band wanted to go into the studio to make another record, but I literally said, ‘It wouldn’t even matter if we wrote [The Beatles’] ‘Sgt Peppers’ – they would piss on it anyway’. I didn’t feel like we were being judged on the music, it was all on people’s bigotry towards us and who they believed we were.”

“I went home and I stayed home, and then the shit hit the fan. My life fell apart and we didn’t get back together for five years after that.”

• READ MORE: Garbage: “If you’re as successful as we were in the ‘90s, that is a burden”

Dave Grohl plays drums on ‘Bad Boyfriend’ on the album. Did that not give you guys a boost at the time?

“Dave Grohl is the most incredible expanse of joy that you can hope to meet as a human being. Him stepping in and playing on ‘Bad Boyfriend’ was a big boost to the male members of the band. He was a really good friend with Butch [Vig, drummer], of course, through their work with Nirvana [Vig produced ‘Nevermind’].  I had very little to do with it, but I had very little to do with the members of the band at this point. That’s the eternal loneliness of being the only female in a male band, but that’s a whole other story.

“I love Dave Grohl with a passion, as does the world. He’s really something. He came in and bolstered the flagging spirits of my male counterparts and sprinkled his fairy dust on our record. We have that for all eternity.”

How would you describe that impact of being told, ‘There’s no room for you’?

“It was devastating. ‘There’s no seat at the table’, was what we were being told. Yet we were still expected to fulfil our contract and to go around the world on tour to garner an audience for the record. It was soul-destroying. We all knew there was no point to it. If your label does not give a shit about you then the rest of the world is not going to give a shit about you.”

And the industry had changed so dramatically since the ‘90s too…

“Yes, this was also the period of Napster and file-sharing that we were unaccustomed to. Nowadays, we’re all used to it. We’ve been beaten down and forced to accept the shit sandwich that we’ve been offered. Back then, we had been used to releasing records, records being sold and there being a transactional relationship. Then all of a sudden our music was literally stolen.

“I think I can speak for so many musicians: it was devastating to have your music leaked and have no control over how you’d release a record. You had no idea of how it would drop, who had access to it. That would affect your chart positions, and you were judged by your chart positions. We felt like we were getting shysted at every turn, and we didn’t believe in ourselves enough to think that we’d have a future beyond that.”

Metallica received a lot of backlash for their war on file-sharing at the turn of the century, but does that all seem fair enough now with hindsight?

“It was outrageous, because poor old Lars [Ulrich, drummer] was painted as a greedy capitalist. To be frank, I was also in that fight, I was very vocal about it, and I received a lot of flak too. It’s not my story to talk about Lars, and I wouldn’t take anything away from him for being a hero, but I did have the foresight to see where this was going, and the people who criticised Lars did not.

“We’ve seen a horror story develop, basically. Those of us who emerged in the ‘90s and before have been lucky enough to weather this with a lot of resentment in our hearts. We can still survive, but people have to understand that when you make music and it is taken from the musician for free by a record label who make billions of dollars from it and shares it with a streaming company who also make billions, then there’s some discrepancy here.”

Do you see an uneven playing field in music?

“Now what you have are musicians who are independently wealthy – maybe they come from a wealthy family – and they can start to carve out a career for themselves in the music industry. You have the old guard who made records before 1995; they themselves can survive. Then the artists who enjoy phenomenal success also survive. What you lose are the baby starter bands coming from working class beginnings and any middle class of musicians. They’re not the ones who are making really accessible, mainstream-sounding music – but the ones who take risks. Perhaps they’re making music that’s perhaps super heavy, that’s esoteric and strange.

“You can hear that capitalist and economic strain in today’s music. It’s nonsense and it’s a heartbreak. Everyone is losing out. What’s happening to young musicians – and I underline the word young – is a fucking outrage. Somebody in government needs to go and help them out, because this is not right. It’s abusive.”

A lot of bands have been speaking out on the financial strain – English Teacher and Another Sky to name just two. People are saying the government are ‘hostile’ towards creatives.

“It’s not that they’re hostile to them existing, it’s just that they don’t give a fuck about them existing. We’re talking about a capitalist system and all they care about is profit. Not only do they care about profit, but they want more profit. Nothing works like that in the long-term. You can’t make infinite wealth. Things reach their apex and they can’t go beyond that.

“These record labels are unwilling to accept that there is a limit to what a musician or an artist can make for them. They’re created this system that’s akin to throwing so many bodies at this problem – one will get to the other side, many will not, and they’ll pump enough money into the lucky artist to reach global saturation and squeeze as many pennies from it as possible.”

And it’s getting worse?

“We used to think that the record labels were bad enough back when we were coming up, but they were angels compared to what’s going on now. It’s really frightening and depressing. You see all these kids in mainstream pop and they look wrung-out and exhausted in their late teens and early 20s. They’re pitted against each other like racetrack dogs and they’re working every hour that god sends.”

This and your own experience seems to echo what’s happened to RAYE. She was held hostage by a label who wanted things their way, then she spoke out, broke out, and then cleaned up at the BRITS…

“That’s a glorious story. What a fantastic triumph of art over industry. It’s really a thrill. I heard that record last year and thought it was really interesting. She’s talking about very different things to the factory-made pop stars, and as a result she’s fucking swept the board.

“Record labels have algorithms and patterns. They want homogenisation. They don’t want the individual. It’s Orwellian. There are always people who break that mould and make exciting music, but when you listen to modern radio you can really hear the impact of those logarithms and expectations. It’s stifling.”

Do you see huge change incoming?

“There is a practical side of me that wants to believe there’s always a reckoning on the way. I want to believe that, and perhaps there will be. The fabric of a society is reliant on the morality of the people. We the people need to stop accepting these shit sandwiches. We’ve become a society that has become very cowed and scared to speak out. We’ve become accustomed to a lot of cruelty from our governments around the world. It will be dependent on the people if we’re going to hold anyone to account.”

Is that likely?

“I don’t know if society gives enough of a shit about musicians to save them. Very soon we’ll have AI-generated music. It’s happening already. We’re going to lose something very beautiful in the process. Even if you think back to the ‘70s and the incredible artists we had then, I don’t see them now.

“There are a few absolute jewels – really exciting and wonderful people – but that’s an exception to the rule rather than the artists you tend to see.”

Your last album ‘No Gods No Masters’ got some of the best reviews of your career. Has that given you a certain compulsion for your next album?

“I was really delighted that ‘No Gods No Masters’ was received so well because we had no expectations whatsoever. Going into this next record, I feel a shift. I’m trying to dampen my outrage. As a society, we’ve become so beaten down and broken-hearted. I’m trying to reach for something that’s a little bigger than me, because if I don’t then I’m going to drown in my own dismay.”

Where has that dismay come from?

“I had a hip replacement last year. I feel amazing and wish I’d done it earlier. I was in excruciating pain for so long after falling off the stage at KROQ’s Weenie Roast about eight years ago. I also lost my dog, which doesn’t sound like much but it has literally ruined my life. The loss of her has coloured everything. Having a body that didn’t work, losing the joy of my life, it’s been a real challenge to try and get myself back up and not be destructive with my depression and my rage. They always need to be tempered.

“I’ve been managing to go through that struggle and meet the world, which is demonic. Everything I’m seeing on my social feeds feels demonic. All of us are fighting that on a daily basis and it’s poisoning everything. We all need to fight to not let our hearts become ice-cold.”

So the next album is the calm after the storm?

“It’s a searchlight, this record. After scorching the earth, we’re coming out of a filthy cave with a searchlight. We’re looking for shards of life and humanity.”

Do you think we’ll hear new material this year?

“We are in the studio as we speak, actually. It’s supposed to be done by the end of May, and we’re on target. It’s amazing; we are the little engine that could but nobody ever thought would.

“No one ever bet on us. We are the classic underdog in a way. Our public success was a long, long time ago – and since then we’ve operated from an underdog status. It feels like we’re really earned our spot on the team, which brings with it a way to enjoy that I didn’t when I was young.”

And you get to return to Wembley Arena on your upcoming tour?

“Can I just say that coming to London to play Wembley for the first time since 1999 feels extraordinary? I never ever thought I’d get back there. To come back to the United Kingdom and play that venue, which we played at the absolute height of our success, as a 57-year-old woman in the music industry with very little support but based solely on the connection we have made with other human beings. I couldn’t be looking forward to it more.

“What I remember about the last time we played was that we had been Number One in various countries around the world, my idol Chrissie Hynde came and sang with me on stage, my mum and dad were there, my sisters were there, it was a glorious moment in our career and really exciting.”

“I can’t imagine how it’ll feel because last time I didn’t feel I deserved it. This time around, however… This is our hard work, this our tenacity, this is our ability to survive a fucking unbelievable and treacherous industry that doesn’t exactly lend a hand to veteran musicians – especially older women.”

The reissue of ‘Bleed Like Me’ is out now. Garbage will be touring the UK and Europe throughout the summer. Visit here for tickets and more information.

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