Category: Garbage

A Guest Posting by Ady Hodges

Garbage are one of those bands I have a sweet spot for, which has been compounded by the fact that I have never seen them live, despite having tickets twice! The first time I had to give the tickets up and the second time the gig was cancelled. Allied to this was the fact that in 1998, I was living in both Edinburgh & Portsmouth and they played in Edinburgh one of the weekends I was in Portsmouth & vice-versa.

I decided with this ICA that I wanted to include selections that covered their complete career to date, rather than focus on their more well known early work, to provide a more comprehensive career retrospective.

Complete Garbage – A Garbage ICA

Side 1

#1 Crush (from the Romeo & Juliet Soundtrack)

This track has never appeared on any Garbage album, despite that it is quite well known, as it has appeared in numerous TV shows & films, most notably in Baz Lurhmann‘s adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. There is a dark gothic air of menace here that is present in some of the best Garbage songs. As a song, it has an unusual structure, building through a driving beat with guitar and electronic flourishes to a pseudo chorus section, before fading back, as Shirley Manson lists the things she would do for her #1 Crush, ending on the “I will die for you” line that epitomises the stalkerish lyrics.

It’s All Over But The Crying (from Bleed Like Me)

Garbage quietly broke-up in 2003, but this proved short-lived and they issued a new album, Bleed Like Me in 2005. This beautiful, delicate ballad comes from that album and shows how well Garbage do heartbreak.

Breaking Up The Girl (from Beautiful Garbage)

Despite being know for being quite dark and gothic, Garbage have a pop heart. This is illustrated very well in this bright happy single from their 3rd album, although its layered, Spectorish backing vocals are still hiding some pretty depressing lyrics.

Special (from Version 2.0)

This smart jangly single is from the second album. It uses part of the Pretenders “Talk Of The Town “in the outro, something Chrissie Hynde was quite happy with, as she waived any royalties or writing credit. I love the lyrics, as there is quite a lot of venom in them;

“Do you have an opinion, a mind of your own?
I thought you were special I thought you should know,
but I’ve run out of patience,
I couldn’t care less”.

Even Though Our Love Is Doomed (from Strange Little Birds)

Strange Little Birds was the 2016 Garbage album and this track is proof that they could still do a fragile ballad like no one else. A lot of that is to do with Shirley Manson’s haunting voice, giving life to the tragic lyrics.

Side 2

Tell Me Where It Hurts (from Absolute Garbage)

This was the one new track on their first official greatest hits album. To my mind this is another track, that is reminiscent of the Pretenders, with Shirley Manson sounding very like Chrissie Hynde here. A string-drenched track that literally explodes into life, which makes it a great way to start side two.

Only Happy When It Rains (from Garbage)

Garbage’s first UK top 30 single and the first US hit remains one of their best loved songs and one of my personal favourites. This is because at its heart it is a great little grunge-lite song. The lyrics are tongue in cheek, parodying a lot of the grunge and alternative rock bands of the time, as is the deliberate callback to the similarly titled Jesus & Mary Chain track.

Automatic Systematic Habit (from Not Your Kind Of People)

Released seven years after Bleed Like Me, Not Your Kind Of People was a comeback album of sorts. This is the opening track, more electronic and less rocky than a lot of their work, but still recognisably Garbage. The lyrics are very defiant, “I won’t be your dirty little secret”.

Flipping The Bird (from No Gods No Masters)

A selection from the most recent Garbage album, No Gods No Masters. It’s another of their more poppy moments with some very eighties synths, that once again disguise some vicious lyrics, this time about sticking it to the people you can’t stand.

Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!) (from Beautiful Garbage)

Another very poppy, almost bubblegum track, driven by a funky rhythm, which is quite unusual for Garbage. Once again there are some Spectorish flourishes in the backing vocals, handclaps and chimes.

You Look So Fine (from Version 2.0)

Garbage’s ballads are often quite cinematic, and this, the closing track on Version 2.0, is the best example in my mind. You can see why they were chosen to record a Bond theme song, although I’m not a particular fan of “The World Is Not Enough” myself. The way this track ends with the refrain “Let’s pretend, happy end” is a perfect way to end this ICA.

Ady

Album: Version 2.0 – Garbage
Review: Uncut, June 1998
Author: David Stubbs

“THERE ARE surprisingly few bands like Garbage, bands operating in that shadowy, uncertain zone between the flesh of rock and the metal of techno. They’re all but alone in stepping into the breach left by the demise of The Cure and The Banshees. That their debut album sold three million copies suggests that there’s a hunger for what they’re doing in a time when the gap between rock’s Luddite traddism and techno’s bleep and booster extremism has never been greater.

Version 2.0 is, as its software-orientated title suggests, an upgrading of essentially the same model as the first album. It’s just a bit more of everything – just that bit smoother, rougher, harder, cooler, warmer, more efficient, more fucked up.

‘Temptation Waits’, the opener, with its whiplash backbeat and matt black exteriors, sets the tone – like some PVC panther, Shirley Manson establishes the character she maintains throughout the album, taunting, sensual, predatory, desperate, self-loathing, nasty.

Interestingly, in real life Shirley Manson is a very nice individual with a sensible and balanced attitude towards the stardom she never expected, who carries herself as if unaware of her Barbie-goth looks.

When she sings/breathes, “Watch my temper / I go mental / I try to be gentle”, the fact she’s only playing the role of a disturbed cyberbitch doesn’t make her “bogus” – rather, this is a perfect, controlled simulation, well-scripted, well-acted, whose psychological accuracy is underpinned by the electro-morphing shifts and turns in the man-made fabric of the sound. This is virtual emotional authenticity.

Garbage actually work with conventional rock structures of verse, middle and chorus – ‘Special’ is a great hunk of turbo-charged janglepop that could have been made any time in the last 20 years. It’s the way Steve Marker, Duke Erikson and Butch Vig (collectively responsible for the instruments, samples and loops) turn these songs inside out, shift from colour to black and white, cave them in at key moments of epiphany and crisis on the likes of ‘Medication’ and ‘Sleep Together’ that gives them the jarring detail, the full-bore impact lacking in straight grunge for all its sweat and hoarse platitudes.

Or take ‘Push It’, the single, loosely incorporating the chant from The Beach Boys‘ ‘Don’t Worry Baby’. The sense of plunging into the sexual unknown is exacerbated by the physical plunge the sound seems to take as if right down into the troubled recesses of Shirley Manson’s brain, midway through.

This is a plastic, contrived album made largely on fake instruments using studio trickery.

I heartily recommend it.”

JC adds…….

The emergence of Garbage via the eponymous debut album in 1995 was timely, certainly here in the UK, as it offered something just that little different and edgier from the many, admittedly excellent ‘Britpop’ albums released that year.

Three years later and the musical landscape had changed quite substantially in a way that, looking back now all these years later, was as important and as welcome as the sort of revolution of the punk/new wave era. There were comedown records offered by the likes of Pulp and Massive Attack, there were innovative and imaginative albums by Beastie Boys, Beck and The Beta Band, there was some proof that Scotland was continuing to punch above its weight as Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian and Idlewild all released what would prove to be some of their most enduring records, while our cousins in Wales had a stellar year thanks to Manic Street Preachers, Catatonia and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

In the midst of all this, Garbage released a second album, one which, as David Stubbs makes clear, wasn’t all that different from the multi-million selling debut except for the fact it managed to sound ‘smoother, rougher, harder, cooler, warmer, more efficient, more fucked up.’  Strangely enough, Version 2.0 reached #1 here in the UK where the debut had only managed to hit #6, but when all things were added up in due course, it sold fewer copies.  It was almost as if the fans of the debut had rushed out to buy the new effort, only to find that it being a bit more fucked-up meant it didn’t get too many listens.  Even today, it’s a CD (it was never released on vinyl until the 20th Anniversary) that you will come across regularly in charity and second-hand shops, with the record-buying public willing to decree it as landfill.  Just three years later, the sales of the third album would be less than 20% of the debut.

Maybe it’s the fact that so many weren’t able to stomach the contents of Version 2.0 that the music snob in me gravitates to it more than the debut.  Or maybe it’s just that it’s an excellent and enduring collection of songs, even if one of them seems to stray too close for comfort at times to Shania Twain territory:-

mp3: Garbage – Wicked Ways

But the PJ Harvey tribute elsewhere more than compensates:-

mp3: Garbage – I Think I’m Paranoid

One of four hit singles from the album, with this being the best-known:-

mp3: Garbage – Push It

One thing worth recalling is that Garbage, were by now considered to be just the right side of mainstream to be offered the opportunity to perform the theme song to the next James Bond film, one that was released in 1999:-

mp3: Garbage – The World Is Not Enough

Composed by David Arnold, with lyrics by Don Black who was a veteran of the Bond themes, it was a real shock to those of us expecting something akin to the first two albums, being a real throwback to the sort of classic Bond themes tunes I had grown up with, whether watching them on TV or later, in the company of my dad at the cinema.  The review in Melody Maker was incredibly sniffy:-

“You know what this sounds like before you hear it. If the people in charge want Garbage, then why not let them do what Garbage do?”

Or maybe let them stretch themselves a bit, proving they were happy to allow lead singer Shirley to briefly imagine herself as Bassey and not Manson.

JC

GREETINGS TO THE NEW REDHEAD

While jetsetting around Spain with the Villains I asked JC about getting the Charged Particles series going again. I proposed to get the ball rolling with a bit about Shirley Manson, whose name I’d casually dropped in a recent TVV post. It’s not much of a story, but it fits in nicely with another Charged Particles entry about my gym buddy Chris, who turned out to be a Foo Fighter. So, here you go:

THE SHIRLEY MANSON STORY

My wife, the beautiful Goldie the Friendly Therapist (GTFP), has a childhood friend named Lisa, whose boyfriend was a nice guy named Dan. “You’ll like Dan,” Goldie told me, “he’s a bassist in some band.” The band turned out to be Garbage. Dan wasn’t one of the four principal band members but he had recorded and toured with them. When Lisa and Dan got married I was hoping the band would be there because I was really interested in talking to Butch Vig. I didn’t listen to Garbage; nothing against them but just not my thing. But Butch Vig! With the possible exception of OK Computer I don’t think there was a more important rock record in the 90’s than Nevermind, and Vig was the guy that produced it for Nirvana!

The wedding took place on a classic Hollywood summer night at a 1920’s hilltop mansion. Probably because of Goldie’s long friendship with the bride, we were put at the band table. The Garbage table, as it were. Before I could position myself next to Butch Vig, Shirley Manson sat herself down at the corner on my left, gave me a big smile, reached out her hand and said, “Hi! I’m Shirley.” “I know who you are,” I smiled back. Then we chatted for the next 3 hours. I can say from personal experience that she is an absolute sweetheart. She has what can be called a charming laugh, and she laughed a lot that night. No airs or pretensions whatsoever; no need to call any attention to herself. Never having heard her interviewed, I was surprised at her thick Scottish accent. For some reason we got to talking about David Beckham, who I think had just been sold to Real Madrid. “Ach, e’s pew say wept!” said Shirley. It took me a moment to understand she was saying that Beckham was pussy-whipped by Posh. Then she did a pretty funny imitation of their appearance on Da Ali G. Show.

I don’t really remember what else we talked about. I just recall that she was super friendly, asked loads of questions, laughed quite a bit, didn’t talk about herself, and was a lot of fun. Later in the evening a few of the band left the table and went off to smoke cigars on a veranda looking down the hillside. I like a cigar and was regretting I hadn’t thought to bring one of my own. Shirley must have noticed my envious look because she turned to me and said, “Oh! Would you like a cigar?” and popped off somewhere before I could answer. She returned and presented one for me. So I nicked off to the smokers and had a cigar. With Butch Vig.

Goldie has a theory that I’m constantly running into famous folks because I am the least starstruck person there is. There are thousands of celebrities in Los Angeles, but very few are celebrated for doing something intelligent, or for being kind souls, so I’m just not interested. I used to work at a firm that did a lot of industry work which involved meeting loads of famous people, and there are very few I’d like to meet again. And I figure that people just want to be left alone anyway.

At the end of the night Shirley gave me a hug and kiss on the cheek and said, “Lovely talking with you, sweetie!” I’d love to tell you that rock stars and international sex symbols naturally gravitate to me, but it was just happenstance. She might remember the night, because it was a very beautiful wedding of one of her close friends, but I sincerely doubt that Shirley Manson would have the faintest idea of who I am or was. It was a good cigar, though.

Garbage – Medication

JTFL

JC adds – in case anyone wasn’t aware, all charged particle songs must end with the letters -ion.