Manson Family Values

Shirley Manson is all but spitting ire. The singer's just been given a disdainful once-over by a snotty member of staff in this posh Dublin hotel, and was blanked upon asking for help with a dysfunctional room key. Such attitude is a red rag to a chanteuse like Manson - she's been living out of a suitcase for too long to tolerate these kind of overpriced parlour games.

Loitering in the lobby, trying to locate the band's press officer, your reporter has picked the wrong moment to re-introduce himself. Later, Shirley apologises for her brusqueness. "I didn't recognise you," she explains. "I was in full-on diva mode!"

Hell hath no fury . . .

The last time I interviewed Garbage was about 10 months ago, just prior to the release of their second album, Version 2.0. Since then, they've undertaken the kind of press and touring campaign that both makes and breaks bands; endless TV, print and radio interviews, gigs, shmoozing sessions with the local record company afterwards - the quartet don't so much tour as launch full-scale offensives on whatever territory they're in at the time. In the Garbage universe, every day's like the invasion of Poland. The analogy is one Shirley Manson will later echo, testifying that they often feel more like "a little army" than a band. But it's a strategy that's paying off: Version 2.0, initially greeted with lukewarm reviews and relatively sluggish sales, has now outsold the band's acclaimed debut, and looks likely to surpass the six million mark.

Initial resistance was puzzling but not unheard of in a climate where second albums were becoming an increasing problem for breakthrough acts, particularly stateside. So while Version 2.0 was easily its predecessor's equal, on Planet Pop, you're only new one time. The transition from "underground" contenders with a neat line in subversive videos to continent-conquering rock behemoth was not a smooth one. But paradoxically, that second album was both brighter and darker than Garbage, front-loaded with the kind of bittersweet singles that would make Blondie bristle, yet tempered by sentiments that are as bleak as anything from OK Computer. The effect is kinda Abba-backed-by-Ministry; tantalisingly illicit, yet strong enough to swim in the mainstream. In short, Version 2.0 was a Trojan horse that required a little pushing. But push it the band did, and now they're reaping the rewards. And the whirlwind.

Today is the same as any other on the tour treadmill, only moreso: Garbage are doing English as well as Irish press in Dublin, and the place is swarming with media-beavers, PR people and record company personnel. In a carpeted corridor, standing around a large table furnished with mineral water and coffee, Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and Butch Vig are savouring a rare idle moment between interviews. Maybe because success came relatively late to everyone in the Garbage organisation (even Manson, the youngest at 31, spent a good ten years in relative obscurity before entering that ephemeral celebrity zone), there's something reassuringly real about this quartet, and inquisitive hacks are obliged to check their bullshit detectors in at the door. To wit, Vig, on his first day in Dublin, comes off like any American abroad when he speaks wistfully of the Guinness he'll consume after tonight's show, the first stop on the European tour (the group spent the previous night rehearsing in Belfast, breaking in a couple of hitherto unplayed tunes).

But despite the faint air of nerviness, and the fact that the band are usually doggedly insistent on doing press as a group, Hot Press have been granted a rare half-hour with Shirley alone. After waiting an hour for Channel 4's The Big Breakfast to, as one Mushroom Records footsoldier dryly put it, "ask her what colour knickers she has on", press officer Ashley leads myself and Manson into a large conference room, where we huddle around a small table in the corner.

She's taller than you might think, blue-eyed, red-tressed and theatrically made-up. In this interviewer's experience, the Garbage organisation's favourite tactic is to charm the pants off you while still keeping close counsel: if you grill any one member - especially Shirley - too intensely, the others will rescue their comrade with meditations on drum loops, overdubs and all manner of technical minutiae. That said, sans bandmates, Manson's still no pushover.

"I think when you love and respect others as we do within this band, it's automatic that you want to protect them," the singer considers. "And they want to protect me from anybody, whoever they may be. I think that's human nature. But also this year, when the second record came out we got a lot of flak from the media that tolled the bells of gloom and doom, in that our record was gonna flop, or that it wasn't gonna sell as well as the first record, and we got a lot of pressure from industry papers saying, 'Oh, they're over'. And we really learned as a band to huddle together and rely on each other and concentrate on why we did this in the first place. We focused all our energies onto just going out and touring, and we stopped thinking about the industry and all the peripherals, and it really drew us together as friends.

"The record has consequently picked up, and I think that has been a really binding experience for us. We feel like a little squadron, it's us against, not the world, but I think we realise that there's lots of people wanting to be our friend right now, and lots of people who work around us who have done great things for us, but as soon as we stop selling records, these people won't be there for us anymore. So it's important to remember really what this is about."

In the last year, Garbage have had to up the ante as a live act and face the challenge of headlining Point-sized venues (Wembley looms large on the tour itinerary). Similarly, Shirley has had to morph into a performer capable of holding that unpredictable crowd-beast for up to two hours every night. Here, she faces a riddle that has befuddled so many before her - how to project intensely private feelings, writ large, onto thousands of strangers every night, and still function as a normal human being. After ten months on the road, she admits that while touring hasn't solved the turmoil that begat tunes like 'Medication', she at least has a medium for expressing it.

"I'm much different now than I was even four years ago," she reflects. "I think I'm a much happier person because I've been able to find a creative outlet for a lot of internal issues. And discovering that I might be relatively okay at something helped bolster a really dangerously low self-esteem, which I don't suffer from as badly now. I mean, the engineer that worked on our record said to me very recently that I was 'verging on dysfunctional' when he first met me. He came on board as our guitar tech on the first tour and he thinks that I have just completely metamorphosed as a human being."

But does she come off stage feeling like she's been exposed in some intimate act, pouring out her guts to the multitudes?

"No actually, I find it quite the opposite," she counters. "I don't feel like I'm giving anything away, I feel I'm receiving. I think I'm quite different from a lot of performers in that respect. And when I come offstage consequently, I feel much more in touch with others. It's reassuring me that I am like absolutely everyone else, because I do believe that people who come to our shows share something in common with us - I mean they must do, otherwise they wouldn't recognise themselves in our music. And so, when I get up on stage and feel that connection, it makes me feel one of us, that's why I think I'm addicted to it. It's just once that high of performing starts to wear off that I start to feel isolated and dehumanised."

Without getting into Norman O. Brown's theories on the sexual neuroses of crowds, Shirley did recently remark that performing was like "giving multiple people multiple orgasms".

"I say these things just to be flippant," she laughs. "I mean, I do find the catharsis of playing live quite precious, but I really don't want to demean it by talking about it in print in any profound way, because I think people just snigger at it and find it funny - understandably so. But I find it really moving at times."

The phenomenon of the live rock concert is a relatively under-analysed area; many tomes have been produced about theatre and cinema, yet, as Bono once opined, the psychology of performance is a subject that has never been addressed satisfactorily in music writing.

"I think people just write it off as showing off," Shirley reasons. "They don't care to go any deeper than that. Which again, is fair enough. But I think great blackness moves people to perform, I really do believe that. I mean, I rarely look at anybody in the media with any kind of . . . I feel that they're stripped of all dignity. I think all celebrities are truly pathetic. It's a sickness in some respects. Luckily they get to do something amazingly fun, joyous and celebratory, and that's what saves them from, y'know, the absolute abyss. We're blessed that way, we get to do something incredible, and we get to bring pleasure to other people which, again, is amazing. But I do think it's a sickness, albeit a tremendously beautiful one! (Laughs)

"I think audience and performer are very similar in that they're looking for personal affirmation," she continues, "and that in itself is a sickness, because you really shouldn't need to see reflections of yourself in everything that you look at, everything you touch, everything you read. But basically that's what we all do. I mean, if I think about my own life, all the paintings I love, all the books that I read that I fall madly in love with, all the artists that I'm drawn to, it's all to do with myself, in that I recognise something of my life or myself or those close to me in that painting or that book or that movie."

A band can't undertake a campaign like the one Garbage are in the middle of without sustaining some sort of collateral damage to their personal lives, if not their mental stability. And if Shirley's marriage to her husband Eddie is to endure, this entails some pretty severe sacrifices, right down to taking a vow of, if not silence, then celibacy.

"Absolutely, it is a vow of celibacy in some respects," she admits. "And it is a huge sacrifice, but one that I seem to be willing to make, and that he's willing to make with me in that I think we both realise it's something transitory and won't be here forever. And that, hopefully as a relationship, we can overcome and sustain beyond my career as a touring musician. So in that respect there are sacrifices that I make that do take a toll on me, and I'm operating in a tremendously cruel industry and it can be very tough and exhausting.

"But the upside is that for all the cruelties that you face, you have these great triumphs and vindications, and that in turn builds you as a person and kind of develops your character, and you learn a greater empathy and understanding of others which I think is invaluable. And we work ourselves extraordinarily, frighteningly hard. Everybody talks about how we are a hard working band, but I think the achievements that we've enjoyed are really profound."

While Manson undoubtedly turns a fair proportion of male heads, many women also gravitate towards her - in celebrity circles alone, she has received the support of many of her peers, including Siouxsie Sioux, Francoise Hardy and Chrissie Hynde. Indeed, after the first album came out she was, feather boas and all, regarded as something of a gay icon.

"I like that though," she ventures.

Why?

"'Cos I always think they pick really good people! (Laughs) I mean, I think the gay community have a really good sense of humour, they don't take themselves too seriously."

But there's more to it than that. They seem to identify with the fact that she is, by all accounts, as insecure as the rest of us about her appearance. And then again, some women just fancy her.

"Well, I think women are just not threatened by feelings of attraction towards other women," she reckons. "If they were to discover they were bisexual or gay, I think they would be cool with it. Whereas men I think are brought up to believe that being straight is the only way forward for a man and I think that's what frightens them into closing the possibility of being able to enjoy both."

Does she ever look out at, as she calls them, her "little tiger cubs" in the audience and say, 'I'll have that one?'

"Ehhhm, no because I think when it's your audience, it's a very different dynamic, I don't feel predatory in that respect."

Does she in others?

"I look at women all the time, I think they're remarkably beautiful, absolutely. I love looking at other women. I think I'm very much a woman's woman. I've never really been a great hit with men in my life. I'm not one of those women who has an hour-glass figure and a drop-dead gorgeous look about her. I never have done, so consequently I've learnt not to really care whether men find me attractive or not. And I don't mean that in the personal sense, in that, of course I would care if I couldn't find a partner in my life, but in a broad sense, I'm not seeking male approval. I know a lot of women whose whole self-esteem relies on the fact that they walk in a room and a man turns his head, but to me personally it's not important. I do think that as a society, women still are under pressure to appeal to a male sensibility, a male aesthetic, and that's slightly alarming. And unfortunately - or fortunately - for me, nature decreed that I wasn't going to be built that way anyway, so it's never really been an issue."

The last time we spoke, Shirley was somewhat bemused by the fact that many had misinterpreted 'Sleep Together' ("If we sleep together/Would you like me better?/If we come together/We'll go down forever") as a seduction song, rather than something a little more desperate. I wondered if, when the band perform it live, people interpret it as the former?

"Well, we've never performed that song, tonight's gonna be the first time, which is funny," she considers. " But yeah, I agree, I think that's a really desperate song, which nobody really has picked up on, they think it's a sexual, come-hither . . . a come-on song. And it has amazed me that people look no further than a shocking headline. I thought it was perfectly obvious that was a really pathetic, bleak song. Maybe that's my problem, I'm not sure.

"But yeah, I see a lot of people that I know still on that merry-go-round, still looking for some self-respect in someone else. Again, it's that reaffirmation, that wanting to be reflected back from someone who is in lust or in love, or someone who thinks you're absolutely amazing for that five minutes, that ten minutes, or that night. Just basking in that reflected glory of oneself, you try and make yourself better. Although, having been guilty of sleeping with people in the past in a desperate attempt to feel better about myself, I never come off stage feeling bad about myself, whereas I used to after having casual . . . a casual acquaintance. I think that's what's so phenomenal about performing because I think it's a bargain, an equal exchange."

If one employs a little lateral thinking while interpreting the voiceovers in 'Push It' ("C'mon push it, you can do it"), the image of a demented midwife wielding the "gynecological instruments for mutant women" conceived by David Cronenberg in Dead Ringers comes to mind. Which is a rather Freudian link to the subject of motherhood.

"I think I'll welcome it as a final escape from my self obsession," she reckons. "I think it teaches you to stop thinking solely about yourself and actually start thinking about somebody else's well-being, and I think it's a really good distraction from a lot of idle neuroses. I think the idea of motherhood I find intimidating, I mean, to be a good mother must be phenomenally difficult, but I look forward to being able to channel my unbearable amounts of energy into it. But I want to make sure that I've run my own course so that I'm not one of these sad fucked up mothers who has children but puts them on the backburner. I want my children to be absolutely my urn. I want there to be a full-frontal assault - mother goes to the backburner!"

But it seems mother will stay off the backburner for a few years yet. Mind you, 12 hours later, Butch Vig will express reservations as to how long a group of their vintage (they've an average age of 40) can go on, reasoning that they're only working so hard because they sense a limit. Vig, after all, has put a very lucrative career as a producer on indefinite ice in order to give Garbage his full attention. But then again, the band are focused and ambitious, and have much to prove, if not in the studio, then in the live arena. Besides, nobody ever told Burroughs or BB King to quit when they were 50.

Back at the hotel, as I gather up tapes and tape recorders, Shirley requests that I offer a prayer to the god of my choice that the show goes well, and urges me to "make all the answers up. You know yourself. Just make me sound eloquent." For a moment there, she has the air of a student teacher who's just been informed that the Minister for Education will be making a spot-check.

The source of her anxiousness becomes clearer that night. Mushroom records have flown their sales brigade in to witness the show, and label head Korda Marshall will also be in attendance. Plus, the band have a further point to prove: their last Irish appearance at the Big Day Out in Galway was a disaster - held up by delayed flights, they had to swap slots with the Beastie Boys, arrived on-site in a state of exhaustion, went straight from the tour-bus onto the stage, and due to curfew restrictions, had to quit after ten minutes. This will be their first chance to make amends.

They do so with little difficulty. When Garbage kick off their set at The Point with the double whammy of 'Temptation Waits' and 'Not My Idea', it soon becomes clear that, by their second album, the group have built a set studded with an impressive array of anthems. 'Vow', 'Queer', 'I Think I'm Paranoid', 'Milk', 'Special', 'Stupid Girl', 'When I Grow Up', 'Push It', 'Only Happy When It Rains' - it's a non-stop, black-nail-varnished, Teutonic-for-the-troops greatest hits revue, with thousands of knobs on. And while the mix in the early part of the set takes a while to settle (although to be fair, the presence of Joe O' Herlihy beside Bono and Gavin Friday in the free seats would set any tech's hands trembling on opening night), the band are slicker than one of William Gibson's hacker-heists, with Duke's lead-lines adding contagion to the sweetness of the melodies, while the hundreds of interlocking loops, backing tracks and extraneous noises spit twisted chunks of metal into the mix.

Granted, this is the kind of combo who fight shy of freeforming, and as such, the show will always be at least one quarter earthed. But while they never hare off after Sun Ra or Hendrix or Crazy Horse down the rocky road of improv that leads to The Lost Chord, the set never lags either. And Shirley wants it bad - you can see it in the way she works the stage like a bantamweight (the pre-gig hour on the treadmill to facilitate better breath control is paying off), chatting at length between tunes and ad-libbing snatches of New Order's 'Temptation'. Indeed, during the crowd-baiting 'Push It' ("Make the beats go harder!") and a blistering 'Vow', she taps into hitherto unseen reserves of aggression, almost entering Patti Smith's orbit. Such abandon suits them.

At the aftershow bash in the Clarence, scores of BMG and Mushroom employees are getting stuck into the free bar, while upstairs, the band attend to meet 'n' greet duties. Duke and Steve concoct Garbage cocktails (a rather tempting mix of cranberry juice and vodka), Butch nurses a burst blister, the legacy of three weeks off at Christmas, and across the room, Shirley's husband Eddie reclines, a refreshingly stoic and down-to-earth looking character. His wife is more relaxed now, all nerves well and truly burnt off. Ever the pro, she coaches a camera-shy female into a photo-op with, "Take it from me, this is a good angle. Just put on a big cheesy smile." Soon, she'll head back to her hotel - Butch fondly refers to his bandmate as "a lightweight", but one suspects that the singer's position as Garbage's focal point affords her little comfort in these situations.

Later, in the lounge of the Clarence, Steve Marker experiences a severe case of deja voodoo: the last time he was in this room was Christmas two years ago, on holiday with his and his wife's parents. The guitarist rocks to and fro on his haunches and shakes his head at the improbability of it all. Elsewhere, Mr. Vig is musing on how he owes it all to Killdozer - a mix he did for the Madison band so impressed the folks at Sub Pop that they wanted him to produce

all their acts. Enter Nirvana. The rest is his story.

The party finally wraps up with your reporter and Vig indulging in a fan's appreciation of Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man, which beat out Fatboy Slim as the group's choice of pre-gig listening tonight. Reviewing said opus the next day, one starts to see the connections: cosmetics and carnality, sin-thetics and soul, serious-as-shit sentiments over relentless electronica. First we take Wisconsin. Then we take Dublin. n

* When I Grow Up is out now on Mushroom/BMG