‘Revenge’: Shirley Manson on her favourite Patti Smith song
In an era still dominated by grunge, Garbage was the next best thing for rock and roll. Although they may have started playing the same kind of alternative of the time, hearing Shirley Manson’s smokey growl over electronic beats on tracks like ‘Stupid Girl’ was the perfect complement to what the riot grrl movement was doing just a few years before. For Manson, this went much further than just the riot grrls. This was the movement that Patti Smith had started decades before.
For all of the great female-dominated punk that came out of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Smith was a rare breed in the 1970s. Born and raised in the same New York City underground clubs that gave birth to artists like The Velvet Underground and New York Dolls, Smith was more interested in making an impact as a poet than a punk rocker.
Although she certainly had decent chops as a musician, her greatest strength was every word she said, whether singing about the healing power of music or trying to make sense of the world around her throughout Horses. When Manson first heard Smith, it came from the song ‘Revenge’ from the album Wave.
The project marks a bit of an end for the Patti Smith Group, but it’s clear from this song that she was already becoming one of the biggest stars of the underground. Outside of her signature wail, a line like “I feel upset, let’s do some celebrating” could have fit just as easily on a disaffected 1990s indie rock album as it did back in 1979.
While Manson got into Smith a bit late in the game, she couldn’t stop once she started, telling Line of Best Fit, “I heard this tune much later, when I was in a band called Goodbye Mr Mackenzie… then I ended up falling into a tunnel of love with Patti Smith that remains to this day. One of the touchstones in my life, who has inspired me as a human being and as an artist.”
Considering the song’s themes of a love gone wrong and wanting nothing but cold revenge, this could have been the unintended bible for what Garbage would sound like. Manson may not have been as cutthroat as Smith was, but when you listen to a piece like ‘I’m Only Happy When It Rains’ or ‘As Heaven Is Wide’, it sounds like she took that kind of disaffected anger and channelled it into a more sinister tone for the 1990s.
While songs were always Manson’s weapon of choice, Smith always found it easier to make her way into the written word. If anything, some of the greatest snapshots of her life came from years later when she channelled that same poetic intensity into books like Just Kids. ‘Revenge’ may have been a look at what she wanted to say at the time, but the book gives some added context about what that kind of life was like for a woman making her way through New York.
Although people normally single out Smith for her contribution to female representation in rock, that’s only seeing the forest for the trees. Smith was a true poet of her time and one of the greatest icons to come out of the rock scene, and even if she didn’t claim to be a musical dynamo, she could do more with three sentences than most songwriters could do across their entire discography.
