BAND INFORMATION & HISTORY

CHAPTER 3

The historic impact on Nirvana and the arrival of the so-called grunge phenomenon meant that Smart Studios became one of the places to record at, and the friends opportunities to play in their own bands decreased still further. Butch vig was christened Mr grunge by the fawning media, but his new found infamy began to stiffle his other projects - Spooner reformed and released a new album in 1993 called Fugitive Dance, but soon split up again. By this stage, the trio of Butch, Duke and Steve were bursting with new ideas and were desperate to find a new way of expressing these creative urges. Whilst buried deep in the production of the Smashing Pumpkins brilliant Siamese Dream album, Butch put it to his friends that they should form a new band and doggedly try to work on it. They agreed, and so Garbage was formed. Talking their name from a derogatory comment made by a by-stander who was frowning upon a Nine Inch Nails remix Butch was working on, the new band started looking for a singer (this cynical bystander, Pauli ryan, later played percussion on some of the debut album). Obviously, with their background and butch's profile, Garbage could have picked anybody they wanted.

Whilst waiting for the right singer, they recorded a few loose ideas but they were in clear need of a frontman. Or in this case a frontwoman. Enter MTV and Anglefish video for 'Suffocate Me'. It was 2am, and there, right in front of their eyes the woman they wanted - Shirley Manson.

When shirley received a phone call from the most fashionable producer in the world, she was elbow deep in washing up. She wasn't really sure who this Butch Vig character was, so she asked a few friends and, surprised by what she found out, decided to give it a go. The next day she flew from Edinburgh to Wisconsin for an audition - it was awful. after meeting the band in Steve's house, she was asked to sing along to some odd, rambling instrumentals they had recorded, and was given no indication of what they wanted. She was nervous, under-confident and thoroughly miserable throughout. She left within a few hours and on the flight back home chastised herself for being so naive.

However, once back home in bonny Scotland, she started listening to the tapes of that disastrous audition and actually began to quite like them. She plucked up enough courage to phone Garbage again and declare that she felt another shot was worthwhile - she was right: this time the audition was a completely different experience and the impact of her joining was immediate and considerable. Butch told Raygun: "She was understated. Instead of being over the top and in your face, she was more reserved; that made it more intense. A lot of the tracks on our record are that way. Instead of screaming and hollering and trying to be provocative that way, she pulls it back to the point where it's almost like ready to snap. She stretches words out, hangs on them, she has great phrasing." With a drunken night out to celebrate their success, Garbage's line-up was now officially complete. To mark her recruitment, Shirley set about immediately insisting on the boys wearing loud multi-coloured nail varnish!

Before any gigs were booked. Garbage set about recording their debut album - after all, there was no shortage of qualified producers! Over the next half year, they shaped their first long player, although initial work was slow, as the three friends and Shirley still had to get to know one another.

Musically, Garbage's agenda was set from the very start. The studio was  to be used as much as an integral part of the recordings as the instruments themselves. Quite often, simple drum loops or samples were used as the foundation for a song, and the sonic framework was built up from there, with the more traditional instrumentation only being added much later. Experimentation was the order of the day, and the freedom which this gave Shirley was reflected in her stunning vocal performances.

The early recordings were a veritable cornucopia of sonic tapestries - on one track the sound of Butch on a telephone from a restaurant was used. On another, a mangled digital tape deck was used. Elsewhere, a broken air-conditioning system was miked up and recorded, and a barking dog and scraped sheets of metal were also sampled. Even mistakes were allowed in - for the soon - to - be - smash hit 'Stupid Girl', an incorrect sample was meddled with and readjusted to the correct key, which then provided the very backbone of the song. Ironically, with such an open and adventurous plan, many songs were stripped down to the core basics- often a track would emerge after being written on an acoustic guitar only, and they were never afraid to use raw electric guitar. So there was a very diverse and contrasting methodology behind almost every track they put to tape. As Steve recalled to Guitar Magazine, "we like a challenge and we like new sounds, and it seems to me that since the mid-80's maybe no-one's really exploited what's out there. Rock music, guitar music hasn't taken up the challenge of rap bands like Public Enemy and still retained its character, and yet there's such a lot you can do with samples without going out and buying a pristine sample library. Sample your mistakes and make a song out of it - we've certainly done that." The influences were there for all to see - Patti smith, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Velvet Underground, The Pretenders, Jeff Beck, The Who, The Stooges. to name but a few. And the process was certainly fruitful - most of the songs' best versions were the first takes.

It soon became clear that Garbage's music was to be filled with a huge variety of sounds, samples, ideas, improvisations and lyrical twists. Their music was one of extremes - white noise mixed with bittersweet melodies, one-off accidental samples layered over deliberate classic guitar, and the latest hi-tech studio wizardry combined with the decades old instrumentation. In the course of twelve tracks, Garbage visited all manner of musical territories, including metal, pop, dance, rock and trip hop.

Shirley layered this diverse musical background with a powerful and striking vocal. Sonically, she was sensual yet aggressive, coy and yet direct. Lyrically she took the superficially pop style tracks into much darker realms - the record discusses many topics including perversion, sexual assault, sadomasochism, prostitution, insecurity, ambition, voyeurism, hedonism, desire, hate and self-destruction. As Butch told on journalist "you have to have melody, you have to have harmony, you have to have hooks. That's that basis, but we wanted to take it somewhere dark, poke in some of those dark corners of the psyche, places people don't like to talk about." The common staple of so many records, pure love, was barley allowed a look in, other than a fleeting appearance on 'Waiting For You.' not all of the lyrics were just Shirley's work however they all contributed, and many of the words were written during an intense, and at times difficult, session at a remote log cabin. Ultimately, however, Shirley reserved the final approval as she was the one to actually sing them. Despite her darker side, Shirley shied away from deliberately morose or self-indulgent lyrics, ridiculed the idea that 'real' alternative music stars have to be "fucked up, miserable and cutting yourself with razors every six minutes."

One of the problems of being a well-known name in the alternate music world, is that your every move and decision is closely inspected for 'credibility'. Had Garbage been an unknown act completely, their demo tape would have been sent out with member's names and details enclosed. However, as Butch Vig was so famous, it was decided that in order to avoid these so-called 'indie fascists', their tapes would be blank all but for a phone number. The early demos were posted and the response from record companies (unaware of their potential catch) was huge. The band were swamped with offers of a deal - as yet, they had not played one single concert.