The song that secured Shirley Manson’s place in Garbage: “It as really understated”
Garbage may have become one of the 1990s’ most enticing bands, but like all of the most fascinating success stories, their evolution came as an accident.
Vocalist Shirley Manson had been the singer of another band, Angelfish, in her native Scotland, beginning as a side-project to her previous group, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie. Manson’s draw was immediate: she and her band recorded with the Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz in Connecticut and toured across North America and Europe in the mid-1990s.
Their lead single, ‘Suffocate Me’, earned a single slot on MTV’s 120 Minutes programme and, fatefully, producer Steve Marker caught it just in time. Manson, in his eyes, was the perfect person to sing in his band, Garbage, alongside producers Duke Erikson and Butch Vig.
Manson, with her striking, damn-near infinite vocal range and enviable look of cool menace, represented a new kind of vocalist, someone who could be enticing while wielding a distinct power. “We wanted someone who could sing in an understated way,” Vig explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “At the moment, a lot of these alterna-rock singers have a tendency to scream. Shirley is just the opposite. By using understatement, she can sound even more subversive.”
Angelfish was slowly disintegrating and, after hearing of the producers’ interest in her, Manson was intrigued by Vig’s virtuosity, in particular, his resume boasting the names of Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins. The singer decided to hop on a plane to Madison, Wisconsin, to meet them at Smart Studios.
Having no experience writing, Manson lied and said she did, and was confronted with fragments of songs and unfinished jams that the three men had hoped she could impart her wisdom onto, turning them into fleshed-out tunes. Sitting together in Marker’s basement studio, the four had a rocky start, and Manson returned to Scotland, unsure of her future with Garbage. But two weeks later, she phoned Erikson, claiming that she knew how to interpret their songs, and soon, she was headed back to Wisconsin.
One early track, ‘Queer’, solidified Manson’s rightful place in Garbage. “They had a rough demo with some silly scratch vocals, with Butch Vig singing very aggressively,” Manson recalls to The Guardian. “I sang it quietly, and they fell in love with it.” Inspired by the Pete Dexter novel Brotherly Love, Vig wrote the lyrics from the perspective of a prostitute within the story of life in and around the Philadelphia mob.
Manson, in turn, rewrote the sexualised nature of the lyrics, opening its contents up for interpretation, and turned it into a trip-hop grunge hybrid, a soon-to-be mainstay of Garbage’s sound. Her vocals are an early iteration of her signature drawl, and her gentility is wielded like a double-edged sword.
“When she started singing, it was really understated,” Vig said, in conversation with Spin. “In fact, sometimes the more understated she sang, the more tense the track sounded. That’s one of the things we really loved that she brought to those early versions of the songs.” Erikson enthused to The Guardian that he, Vig and Marker “liked the idea of a female voice over this really dense atmospheric music”. Manson became the secret weapon, channelling an allure disguised as apathy that made Garbage all the more compelling, and ‘Queer’ was only the beginning.
Manson’s reinterpretation of ‘Queer’ is an anthemic display of Garbage’s continued draw: danger hidden beneath lush textures that has permanently flipped alternative music on its head.
