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Bloody But Not Beaten

A long hiatus, illness, bust-ups: most bands couldn’t cope. Shirley Manson tells Dan Cairns why Garbage can

The eyes have it. Try as she might, Shirley Manson cannot prevent her large, greeny-blue irises from signalling the truth — no matter that this is often at variance with the words about to emerge from her mouth. Saucers full not of secrets, then, but of openness and humour, they yank the already restless rug from beneath her attempts at a polished interview technique. Twenty years and more than 11m album sales after entering the music-business fray, the lead singer of Garbage is still failing utterly to button up (or put the blinkers on).

Now, after a four-year hiatus, and barely one week into promotional duties in support of Bleed Like Me, her band’s fourth album, the Edinburgh-born musician is already showing signs of fatigue. “You lie in bed at night,” she says, “and the soundbites come flying between your ears. You cringe at every awful thing you said. But you get bored of hearing yourself speak, so you end up coming out with different answers and you contradict yourself just to keep yourself interested.” So, I suggest, words are ... “Useless,” she interrupts. “They’ve done tests on people with regard to what they’re saying, what they think they’re saying and what people are actually hearing, and of course what you hear is different, depending on the person receiving the words.” She pauses, seemingly finished, but then another (another!) thought occurs to her. “And even the words you choose aren’t necessarily representative of yourself. So you’re f***ed.” She laughs, her eyes boring into mine. “You may as well just go home.”

It’s been a long day, ensconced with European press tapping Manson for clues and bite-size, quotable chunks. Relaxing later over a bourbon and Coke, the singer has to be steered back to the subject of Bleed Like Me. She’s never been an on-message type of girl, as her famously unexpurgated and lawyer-vexing web diary proved for many years. Yet this deeply likeable loose cannon has rarely taken the easy route, opting instead to spray opinions from her great elephant gun of a gob at anyone in her line of fire.

Still needy after all these years, Manson, who has received therapy in the past, is as messy and messed-up as they come. What this means is that you get it pretty straight. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that the singer is on the verge of being sectioned. If she wants to have a good yak, a long moan, even a cry, she isn’t saying “Pity me”, but “This is me.” And, thank God, there probably isn’t a PR minder in the world who could corral her.

“I was full of rage,” she says, recalling the moment when the group reconvened at their Wisconsin studio to record the follow-up to 2001’s Beautifulgarbage. “Absolutely full of corrosive rage. I was so furious at everybody.” Issues — swept under the carpet, increasingly clamorous and finally painfully resolved — have always dominated the life of this band. Even the way they came into being sowed the seeds of future discontent, when the drummer and producer Butch Vig, riding high after working on Nirvana’s Nevermind, teamed up with his buddies Duke Erikson and Steve Marker and, in 1994, set about searching for a singer. When they spotted Manson performing with her band Angelfish on MTV (she had previously been a member of the Scottish indie group Goodbye Mr Mackenzie), what seemed to them like an obvious, indeed compelling, choice was viewed by others as one driven entirely and cynically by marketing requirements.

The fact that, more than 10 years later, there remains a faint whiff of suspicion hanging over Garbage says a lot, I think, about how we still regard women in rock music — and no example is more glaring than the stroppy, lippy, opinionated female, never mind one with looks that are deemed unconventional. Manson personifies this problem, and she’s acutely aware of the compromises she’s asked to make in order to, as it were, blunt her impact, to soften the blow.

“It makes me grossly uncomfortable,” she says. “We’re so unaccustomed to seeing anything other than this homogenised idea of what a sexy woman is. One half of me feels I should be like that, and if I’m not, then I’m ugly; and the other side of me, the intellectual side, thinks, ‘I don’t want to be like that, I don’t agree with how women are being funnelled into this really narrow, restrictive idea of how we should look.’” With a background of teenage self-harming, Manson is acutely sensitive about both her appearance and the actions — confirmatory, compensatory — this can lead her to take.

“I’ve never had a lot of physical confidence, ever,” she admits, “regardless of my success, regardless of how many ‘beautiful’ photographs have been taken of me. And I’m 38 years old, so I know that, in society’s eyes, I am far removed from the stereotypical idea of what’s considered attractive. But there’s a real contradiction, because on the one hand I don’t like the way I look, yet at the same time I refuse to fix it. I’m well aware that most women my age have dabbled in the occult of facial homogenisation, and I feel that that emphasises my faults and my failings. Oh well, who ever said I was 100% sussed-out and balanced?” A long silence, a swig from the glass. “I can’t believe that I’m talking like this to you. I must be absolutely out of my mind.”

Manson would balk at the notion that her vulnerabilities are the result solely of her gender. As the new album’s key song, the title track, makes clear, she feels a wider kinship with anyone, woman or man, who falls outside the rigid parameters of conformity. Containing a series of vignettes based, she says, on real and invariably damaged people (including her friend the self-mythologising, impossibly cool and possibly apocryphal American writer JT LeRoy), the song explodes into devastating greatness when, at its end, Manson sings: “You should see my scars.” Writing it was, she admits, the first moment in a life scarcely characterised by high self-esteem when she allowed herself to think: “F***, I’m good.”

The sessions the track came out of, though, were fraught to the point of implosion. There were any number of causes for the tension that crackled in the studio as they sat down to write, but chief among them was the circumstances in which they’d promoted their previous release. “We had to go on a promotional tour literally two days after September 11,” Manson recalls. “The very notion that we went on that tour is laughable and ludicrous. We realised nobody wanted to talk to us. It wasn’t like we were oblivious. We were sitting in the midst of this chaos, talking about our stupid band and our stupid record.” The group then embarked on a support slot with U2 in America, during which Vig was hospitalised with hepatitis and Bell’s palsy, and Manson was discovered to have a potentially cancerous growth on her vocal cords.

“One specialist said, ‘We’re going to cut this off, but you need to know that there are serious risks involved. We may have to squeeze your vocal cords.’ At which point, I was immediately like, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I’m not going to sound the same again.’” She found an altogether less alarmist surgeon in New York, who whipped the cyst out, gave the all-clear and sent her home for a mere three weeks of recuperation. And back she went to Wisconsin. “But I was so unenthused, I stopped coming into the studio,” she says. “I told Butch I was feeling really uninspired, and he did his usual sort of, ‘Don’t worry, party girl, you’ve just got to keep chopping away, keep hacking away at the ice block.’ And then, about five days later, he called me up and said: ‘I’m leaving the band and moving to LA.’”

Five months spent brooding in different locations saw the four members take stock and find renewed courage to get back together and attempt to rescale their former commercial and artistic peaks (Beautifulgarbage had been a relative failure in both respects). Bleed Like Me opens with the furious, high-octane Bad Boyfriend, with Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on drums, beating merry hell out of the kit. This sequencing was a deliberate bid to set the bar high for what follows, and the album ’s 10 subsequent tracks of the band’s signature electropop-punk do indeed fly out of the traps — as though their very lives (okay, their careers) depended on it. The lead single, Why Do You Love Me, has received the coveted Most Added (to radio) cachet in America, so things seem set fair. And Manson, revitalised both by making this record and by her collaborations with Queens of the Stone Age and Marilyn Manson, is raring to go. Or she would be if she could remember she had an album to promote.

“I’ve managed to understand that what I do is not what I am,” she says. “I was with one of my girlfriends, going, ‘I don’t know about this record, it’s been awful to make.’ And she was like, ‘So? It’s a record. If it’s flawed and it’s not perfect, so what?’ It sounds moronic, but it really was a eureka moment for me. I was like, ‘You’re absolutely right: it’s okay for me to make a record and forget about it.’”

Do you really think it’s flawed, I ask. (Trust me, it isn’t, at all.) And, long before her mouth can formulate a pithy response, those extraordinary, laughing eyes send out their signal, and its meaning is: “As if.”

Why Do You Love Me is released on March 28 on Warner Bros; Bleed Like Me follows on April 11