Angelfish: Shirley Manson’s pre-Garbage cult origins
“We wanted to work with a female vocalist who didn’t have a high, chirpy, girly quality to her voice,” Garbage co-founder and guitarist Steve Marker told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “We had discussed who we really respect, and names like Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde came up. And Shirley had some of the same depth.”
When Garbage exploded on the scene in 1995 with their debut self-titled album, led by the hit singles ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ and ‘Stupid Girl’, everyone heard the origin story of how the boys in the band—the Wisconsin based trio of Marker, drummer Butch Vig (already famous as the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream), and guitarist/keyboardist Duke Erikson–had plucked their firecracker frontwoman from virtual obscurity across the pond.
At the time, the impression in the US was that the Edinburgh-born Shirley Manson had essentially won a talent contest or—in a more insulting way—a Wonka golden ticket. This had enabled her to flee Scotland for the glitz and glamour of…Madison, Wisconsin, and the home base of Vig’s recording studio.
In reality, when Manson auditioned for the Garbage men in 1994, she was already 28 years old and a seasoned performer, having been a member of several Scottish bands dating back more than a decade. The most prominent of those acts, a band called Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, brought on Shirley as a keyboardist and backing vocalist way back in 1984, and within a few years, she was already on the fringes of legitimate fame, as the band inked a record deal with a major label, Capitol, and scored a minor hit with the single ‘The Rattler’.
By the dawning of the 1990s, though, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie were scuffling and getting passed around different labels, with no one quite sure how to market the group’s atmospheric guitar pop sound in that transitional pop moment. Manson had also ended her romantic relationship with the band’s frontman, Martin Metcalfe, but “we continued working together”, she later told the LA Times. “It was awful.”
One thing a lot of people seemed to agree on, both inside and outside the band, was that fan favourite Shirley Manson ought to be singing more. The rest of the group didn’t want to be trapped in another bad record deal, however. So, in 1993, a side project was formed with Shirley as the frontwoman and the rest of Goodbye Mr Mackenzie as her backing band. Signed to Radioactive Records, the new entity, known as Angelfish, introduced Manson to a much larger audience, as the single ‘Suffocate Me’ managed to gain some traction on alternative and college radio in both the UK and the US.
Famously, when the music video for ‘Suffocate Me’ aired on the American MTV series 120 Minutes, Steve Marker happened to be tuning in that night, supposedly for the very purpose of scouting a lead singer to potentially poach from an upstart indie band. The Shirley Manson he saw in that video, if not fully formed, was at least 90 per cent realised, and merely in need of a bigger stage and opportunity.
To the loyal cult following she’d already built with Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and Angelfish, Manson’s decision to leave those projects for good and head to America could have felt like a bitter disappointment. Manson might have regretted it herself at first, too, as relations with the Wisconsin boys famously got off to a rocky start.
“I come from a background of what I call working bands,” Manson told the LA Times in 1995. “That means we basically travelled around doing [crummy] gigs. There’s a certain snobbishness that exists among bands like that, where the word ‘producer’ becomes an ugly word. So when I joined [Garbage], my attitude toward the other [members] was, ‘You don’t know everything.’ Once I started to work with them, though, I quickly realised that not only were they musicians with a profound knowledge of the studio, but they were also passionate about what they wanted to do musically—even persnickety about what sounds they wanted to make.”
Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, who still have a cult following in the UK, reunited for a tour in 2019. “We did ask [Shirley to join] but she couldn’t, and possibly wouldn’t,” Metcalfe told The Herald. “She was touring during the summer and, you know, she’s the lead singer in a world-famous band that tours everywhere in the world, so the idea of her coming in to do backing vocals is probably a bit ridiculous anyway.”
Garbage, meanwhile, released a new single, ‘There’s No Future in Optimism’, earlier this year.
