The new album by Garbage, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, has the kind of sound that makes you think you have always known it. You somehow know the words as they land; you have the tune in your head on a single listen. But try saying that to the Edinburgh-born singer Shirley Manson, who – although she has lived mainly in the US for almost 30 years – is incredibly Scottish about flattery, which is to say she doesn’t like it. “I think possibly you just relate deeply to the lyrics of Chinese Fire Horse,” she says wryly, down the line from Los Angeles. That track is about life chewing you up and spitting you out because you are too old. No, I say firmly, one fiftysomething to another (she is 58), I don’t relate to that at all.
Let All That We Imagine has its roots in 2016, when Manson fell off stage on the first day of the tour for Strange Little Birds, the last album but one. “I’m not blaming myself for my physical exuberance,” she says. “I was thinking about lyrics, I was thinking about my body, and I tumbled into the security barrier. I smashed my hip pretty badly, but it took five years for it to disintegrate.”
That resulted in a hip replacement in 2023. “The physical recovery is surprisingly easy,” she says. “I mean, there’s a lot of indignity involved. I had to zoom around in a sweat suit with a walker. I’ll leave that image just there; I don’t need to embellish that.” Between the pain and the painkillers, though, she had terrible brain fog and Garbage ended up writing the album remotely, the rest of the band – Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker – sending her musical ideas. “I felt really isolated. My band are not communicative at the best of times, and I was completely cut off from them. The only thing I would get would be these instrumentals with some zany titles.”
Weirdly, it worked: they had an album to tour by last year, and were about to play their biggest UK gig in 15 years, at Ovo Arena Wembley, when Manson’s other hip “collapsed the day before” and she had to have that one replaced too. “It’s been very confronting. It makes you question everything, how you want to move forward in your life, particularly as I’m at this late stage in my career. It’s also been really fascinating, though, I’ve got to be honest with you – dark and depressing and soul-crushing, and also kind of wonderful.”
“That’s such a Shirley Manson thing to say,” I say.
“Oh, God, really?”
Only Happy When It Rains wasn’t technically the breakthrough Garbage single – that was Stupid Girl – but both were released in 1995 and became the soundtrack to the year: caustic, self-aware, catchy but not in a people-pleasing way. Manson herself had been, as she describes it, plucked from obscurity, on the dole in Scotland and trying to get paid to make music. “I was pretty miserable, and I got a phone call out of the blue: do you want to come and work with one of America’s most favoured sons? Before I knew it, I was off, flying to Madison, Wisconsin, working on a new record, with a brand new band, and these people I’d never met before, and it was a wild, wild experience.”
That favoured son was Vig, who, then nearly 40, was famous as the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind and was an all-purpose big beast of alternative rock, a credited producer on Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins albums. “It’s so mad,” Manson says. “In pop music terms, we were ancient when we started. I was the youngest member of the band, and I was 28, and we’re now 30 years on. That’s fucking bananas.”
That eponymous debut album could do no wrong – it sold 4m copies worldwide and went double-platinum in the US, the UK and Australia. Manson says now that: “Butch in particular was credited with all our work, even though, to his eternal defence, he went out of his way to explain that the band worked as a band.” Truthfully, though, Manson had such panache that a whole bunch of us (by “us” I mean listeners to 90s indie rock) didn’t even notice the guys and thought this was a Scottish band, a frontwoman and her friends, and couldn’t figure out why they weren’t in the UK more often. We didn’t have Google then.
“It’s funny you should say that,” she says, in a warm, you-idiot tone of voice. “As the years have progressed, I realise I don’t belong to anyone. Nobody really wants me. I’m definitely a Scottish artist, but Scotland has not really seen us as a Scottish band, and England obviously hasn’t seen us as a UK band, and then we come to America, and they think we’re some kind of transatlantic supergroup. We’ve landed nowhere, really.”
The 90s were also brutal to women in the music industry. “I was so young and I was hungry and distracted. I didn’t notice a lot of the micro-misogyny and the micro-sexism at first,” Manson says. “I was blinded by the dazzle of my career. I wasn’t paying attention. Back then, I read my own press, like a fool, and I was reading these horrible descriptions of me, really degrading or sexual in nature, or just nasty shit. It wasn’t just the male writers, although primarily the 90s music journalists were male. It really stung, and I found that hard.”
Critique was often lascivious and slavering, but any amount of objectification was supposedly fine because it was always ironic, and that, in itself, was bullshit. But it morphed into a kind of bitterness and resentment, which I never understood. People would tear into Manson – and everyone: Kenickie, Sleeper, even Salad – and I never really got where the anger came from.
“I think it goes back to the 90s offering a different kind of woman, for the first time, arguably ever in culture,” Manson says. “Liberated, mouthy, opinionated, political, also often beautiful and powerful. At first, I think they thought it was a marvellous distraction, a joyous kink. And then, all of a sudden, they” – I’m going out on a limb to say “they”, here, are the patriarchy – “were like: ‘Wait a minute, these women are getting a lot of attention and taking up a lot of column space, and we’re going to crush it.’ Subconsciously, not deliberately, I don’t think. But there was a sense of: ‘You can go back to the hole that you crawled out of. Let’s get back to real music, serious music, proper creativity, important statements and important sounds coming from the men.’”
It was a lot – endless horrible personal remarks from one direction and relentless, adulatory image-making from the other. “The problem with a lot of success is it comes with a lot of visual accompaniment. Your self is reflected back at you on every magazine. Some versions are gorgeous and fantastical and you look nothing like yourself – maybe there’s a small semblance of you in the eyes. And then there are incredibly unflattering ones … I wasn’t the right personality to deal with that. I found it repulsive. I didn’t get an iota of pleasure out of it. I felt that, if I was good enough, I would look like that image. But I don’t, so they have to augment it with lights and makeup and hair and stylists and nail manicurists. It really did a number on my self-esteem.”
In the aftermath, Manson was open about her struggles with depression and body dysmorphic disorder, but that openness was distorted in the media as fragility, which now bugs the hell out of her. “I hate the phrase ‘mental health’, as applied to me. I have a very healthy psyche. I’m pretty tough, mentally. I have definitely suffered from bouts of depression. I see that as a healthy part of existing in the world. I think it’s really necessary. I think all this nonsense about us permanently having to feel ecstatic is silly.”
She moved to the US in 1996. “Perhaps some other bands might have done well living in different continents,” she says, “but I don’t think it was on the cards for us.” By 2001, they were still flying high – Version 2.0 in 1998 had sold well, Beautiful Garbage did fine – but “we have to touch on the devastation wreaked by September 11 in the States,” she says. “That changed modern radio entirely, and one could argue it’s never really fully recovered since. Programming became really conservative: radio would only really play a certain sound – a very reassuring, unthreatening, fun vibe – and these very fierce women from the 90s just disappeared. That was when we started to see the rise of real mega-capitalist pop. We’ve been inundated with those sounds now for 20-odd years.”
Manson loves pop. She loves Taylor Swift: “People make fun of her lyrics because they talk about an experience that they’re uninterested in, a very young woman coming of age, but make no mistake, Taylor Swift is a genius.” She loves Chappell Roan: “There’s nothing better than singing along to Pink Pony Club when you’ve just come off reading the news. Get me out of here, take me away, Chappell.” Yet she still lands the point, matter-of-factly, that mainstream music has been homogenised, in a way that makes me sad. But only later – it’s hard to feel sad while you are talking to Manson.
In the mid-00s, the band went on a hiatus, cutting short the tour for their fourth album, Bleed Like Me, talking about solo projects. Manson’s mother developed dementia, and died in 2008, at which point, she says: “I was very depressed. Watching my mother die was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and my career had stalled. I had to make a choice to pull myself out and up, into my life. I just started saying to myself: ‘You are an artist. You do this for a living. You’ve done it very successfully, and you can do it again. So let’s just go and start writing music and being musical, doing the work, filling it with love and interest and passion and having an idea of where it’s going.’ I never believed I was an artist until my mother died. I felt it was her last gift to me.”
Garbage rediscovered their enthusiasm for each other and found a new way of working when they reformed in 2010, the year that Manson also married Garbage’s sound engineer, Billy Bush. Her first marriage, to the Scottish artist Eddie Farrell, had ended in 2003. “When I was young, I broke my back trying to facilitate communication in this band, and it nearly killed me. In 2012, I thought: ‘If they want this as much as I want this, we will do this together. And if they don’t want to do it, then it’s over.’ I was just going to sit and hold my own seat without having to serve the group. And I don’t have any expectations of them any more. We love each other, and if one of us goes down, the whole team is on it – we swarm to each other’s side. But other than that, we exist as four pillars, with massive space between us.”
But the 2012 album, Not Your Kind of People, was a critical but not a commercial success, the 2016 tour was an orthopaedic disaster, and the 2021 album, No Gods No Masters, explicitly political and denouncing “capitalist shortsightedness, racism, sexism and misogyny”, as she put it at the time, nearly made her “very, very ill. I managed to pull myself out of what felt like a very dark abyss. And I was driving my husband insane. He was saying: ‘You’ve got to stop this. You can’t save the world.’ And although I disagree with him – I do believe in singular action – I had to save myself.”
She describes a pre-gig ritual Garbage have had since they reformed. “We started doing it at the beginning of each show. It’s a piss-take of what all these other bands do. We look as though we’re about to high-five each other, and then we miss each other’s hands. We’ve done it for years. But now, since my surgeries, every time I do this ritual, and the hands go sailing through the air, I have a tiny pinch of: ‘Are we being the very thing we’re taking the piss out of? Or am I wanting some real connection here?’”
Just go for it, I advise. Make the authentic high-five.
“I don’t know if I’ve got the moral courage. I don’t know if it’s possible for us. Everybody’s so fucked up, it’s amazing.”
The funny thing is, there was a lot of to and fro before the interview about whether Manson would turn on her camera for our video call. She didn’t want to, and I let it drop because the aforementioned savage 90s media was bound to make a person wary. When it came to it, it was nothing to do with the 90s, she said. “I’m sorry, but I’m nude in my bedroom, and I really don’t think you would appreciate that.”
I didn’t really need to know what she looked like – I just wanted to see her expressions. But you can pretty much always hear that she is smiling.
• Let All That We Imagine Be the Light is out on 30 May (BMG).
