The shuddering story of Shirley Manson’s audition for Garbage
Shirley Manson is a blazing icon among frontwomen in the rock music canon, with her fiery stage persona and strikingly bold style setting her well apart from the rest. But all of this brazenness is ironic, in a way, as her still ongoing tenure at the helm of the band Garage almost never took off in the first place – all because of a comedy of errors.
Hailing from Edinburgh, Manson started her musical life in various bands before being plucked out from across the pond by Garbage’s soon-to-be drummer, Butch Vig. “I was just like, ‘How could this possibly [be] happening to me?’”, she later recalled. “[Butch] had this incredible, cool, eclectic discography, and I was really flattered. I still am, actually, truth be told.”
But this flattery soon gave way to bumbling nerves because on Manson’s first trip Stateside to meet her prospective bandmates, she didn’t exactly hit it out of the park. “The very first [session], she had a rough go of it. We weren’t really sure if it was going to work. She went back to Scotland, but she called Duke [Erikson, Garbage’s guitarist] two weeks later saying, ‘I think I know what to do on some of these songs’,” Vig said. The second time around, Manson added her now classic pensive vocal quality into the mix, and they thought she was back on track. But then, laughably, things only had to get worse.
Of course, before the Garbage inception days of 1994, Vig had also been a producer for the likes of Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins and, most notably, Nirvana’s album Nevermind. However, his previous life came hurtling back down on him like a ton of bricks on the very same night he’d travelled to meet Manson again in London, and in the most tragic of ways.
The singer explained: “I went down to London and I met them. We had a meeting there in a hotel, which, ironically — it’s a story that that’s been told a million times, but it bears retelling — it was the night that Kurt Cobain killed himself. [Manson is referring to the night Cobain’s body was discovered]. That was the night I met the boys. When I got to the house I was staying with that night, it was all over the news. Of course, I immediately thought, ‘Wow, this is going to devastate Butch’.”
Catastrophic as the event was, Vig and his Garbage counterparts knew they had to invest in the new blossoming talent on their doorstep. Manson said the troops then “came and saw me play on tour with my band Angelfish. I was touring in the States with Vic Chesnutt. They came and saw me play in Chicago. We hung out that night, and we really liked each other. Then, finally, they asked me to record with them in Madison for one day. It was a bit of a fiasco — it didn’t go very well. So then they asked if I would be interested in coming back one more time and making the recording happen.”
But, on one final chance, the Scottish singer magically made it happen. From there, the band recorded their self-titled debut album, featuring smash hits ‘Stupid Girl’ and ‘Queer’, which met rapturous critical acclaim and rocketed Manson to instant female rock icon status. It’s scary to think how one shuddering fork in the road almost meant it never happened – but as they say, the universe is always connected.
