'I'm not married anymore'

By Sylvia Patterson

source : The Sunday Herald.com

 AT 38, Shirley Manson is sick of being asked whether motherhood features in her plans. Her biological clock may be ticking towards midnight, but, the Edinburgh-born singer complains: “I’m getting to the point where I want to scream, ‘No, I’m not gonna have any f***ing children, all right? Don’t f***in’ want any f***in’ children.’ I’m so sick of that notion being forced on me. As if having children is the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. To assume everybody who has children is not self-centred and selfish is ludicrous,” she continues, passionately. “I see the way some people control or live through their children. Having a child does not save you from yourself or from your selfishness.” We’re in a swish hotel room in central London and Shirley Manson, Scottish frontwoman of the American rock band Garbage, is perched on a sofa: all angle-poise limbs, pipe-cleaner jeans and kohl-smudged eyes. “I feel like I should feel it,” she admits. “But the desire to have children has never been particularly strong with me.”

It annoys her intensely, this pressure that she “should”. Hauling up the perennially slipping strap of her top, she seems, unconsciously, to be drawing attention to the weight of expectation that’s been laid on her narrow shoulders. “When your life doesn’t conform to the plan – car, house, two children – there’s a wee element of, ‘Oh God, I’m a failure,’” she explains. “No matter how successful your career or what you’ve seen or done.”

Self-esteem has never been easy for Manson, but it’s hard to account for this talk of failure. Aside from the undeniable success of her career, Manson has at least achieved one part of “the plan”: a good marriage.

The first time I met her was 10 years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, where Garbage are based. She was there with her boyfriend, the Scottish sculptor Eddie Farrell, the pair giggling like besotted teenagers. The following year, they were married and their very private, long-distance relationship continued – he in Edinburgh, she a globe-spanning rock star. In 2001, she was still referring to Farrell in interviews as “the love of my life”. This, presumably, is the foundation on which all those motherhood queries are built. She’s done well to sustain it, I tell her.

“Who?” she says, oddly. And then, “Me?” Then she adds, in a whisper: “I’m not married any more.”

It’s a shock. Manson is visibly stunned by what she’s just said. She doesn’t want the world to know. “I don’t want Eddie bothered,” she explains. Staggeringly, she’s managed to keep the marriage breakdown secret, certainly from the public, for at least two years. I ask if she’s all right. “I am now,” she says. And I believe her.

Manson is Scotland’s most celebrated alternative-pop daughter, globally famous for over a decade. In 1994, she was head-hunted by Garbage’s three founder members: Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and Butch Vig, producer of Nirvana’s hugely influential album Nevermind. They had spotted her during her sole appearance on MTV with her group Angelfish.

Until then, Manson had spent many years struggling as a member of Edinburgh indie-goth band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie. Today, Garbage are an 11-million-album-selling international success story. Their sound is a dense, technologically skewed take on guitar rock, centred on Manson’s haunting voice – which, with characteristic modesty, she attributes to asthma. Over a decade, Garbage have produced four albums and a string of superb singles, such as Only Happy When It Rains, Stupid Girl and Queer. Today, Manson is rock royalty: she counts Bono, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani and Marilyn Manson among her friends.

Ten years on from our first encounter, she barely seems to have changed. She’s still enormous fun, an uncompromising rock’n’roll spirit and a bewitchingly articulate feminist. “The sublimation of women”, as she puts it, is one of her favourite topics.

Yet there are differences. Above all, she seems more self-confident. In her late 20s, to the bewilderment of everyone around her, Manson would describe herself as “a negative person, obsessed with death, a slothful depressive”.

She was fond of telling an outrageous, profoundly Scottish story about falling into a tent as a kid, in front of the indifferent boy with whom she was madly in love, catching her elasticated trousers in the tent-zip.

“Everyone saw my bare arse as I fell in, and pished themselves laughing at me,” she recalls. “I just sat in there, greetin’.”

Her appearance has changed, too. Gone is the bleached crop she was sporting in 2001, which didn’t suit her. Now she’s as glamorous as I’ve ever seen her, standing straighter, taller (5'11'' in her heels) and more emotionally secure. Despite the turbulent events of the past four years, she has discovered a fresh zest for life.

We’re lucky to have Manson the rock star at all. Since 2001 – when they recorded their third album, Beautiful Garbage – the band have been imploding. Internal problems have continued through the recording of their new album Bleed Like Me, a thundering, stripped-back record born from what Manson calls a “disparate, desperate” recording process. In fact, she says, it’s a miracle the record was made. “We weren’t communicating at all.”

She almost gave up the band for good. “Certainly there were times when I was, ‘F*** this’,” she says. “I didn’t join a band to be a business. And it was starting to feel like it. It wasn’t anything anyone was doing, it was what they were not saying.”

The “boys” – her band-mates, now aged 45 to 53 – are “passive-aggressive” characters, she says, silent over their own dilemmas. They have recently lived through two bereavements: Erikson lost his father; Marker his mother. Then there was illness. Vig contracted a life-threatening strain of hepatitis, but no-one told Manson. “I thought he was grumping,” she admits. “I was off partying with U2 and he could’ve died.”

For Manson, there was surgery, to remove a cyst on her vocal cord, which led to “six months of freaking out”. For one week, she was completely silent. “Which seems do-able, but it was torture,” she insists. “Speech is my absolute lifeline and I felt like I’d lost my personality, been stripped completely of me … I felt invisible.”

Finally, there was writer’s block. When Manson’s lyrics did emerge, the focus, as ever, was emotional bedlam. The album’s highlight is It’s All Over But The Crying, a sonic tower of regret and vulnerability: “Everything you think you know, baby, is wrong,” she sings, “and everything you think you had, baby, is gone.”

Manson has always had spooks in her brain. An “ugly-pugly” girl, as she puts it, she was bullied at school for her “froggy eyes”. For much of her life, she has been demonised by self-loathing: as a teenager, she drank, smoked dope, sniffed lighter-fuel, self-harmed. A bright child whose father is an academic – a geneticist and theologian – she wilfully snubbed family expectations, choosing to spend five years working in Miss Selfridge, where she loved her shop-girl “comrades”. After years of youth theatre, she joined the Edinburgh band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie “for a laugh”, but also felt a strong desire to be the focus of attention, which she calls “an unbelievably weird and sad and disgusting personality flaw”.

In 2001, Manson finally sought psychiatric help. “I loved it,” she says. “It changed my life, having someone teach you skills, how to deal with your anxieties.”

Now Manson has the confidence to position herself as “a counterpoint to all the stage-school pop princesses” in a music industry she describes as “vampiric”. It’s also one, I suggest, that requires ambitious young women to get naked.

“More and more naked,” she nods. “Young girls now correlate the word ‘sexy’ with nakedness. It’s practically, ‘Show us your labia’. If you play that game of allowing yourself to be judged by your physicality, it will not sustain you through a long career. There’s always going to be someone younger, more beautiful, more desirable. It’s a temple of dust.”

Through her struggles with self-esteem, Manson has drawn strength – physical and psychological – from boxing, a sport recommended to her by a personal trainer in Los Angeles. “Amazing, discovering how to channel the power of my body,” she brims. “Physically, I’ve always imagined myself as really small and meek. But when they strap on the gloves, the whole ritual…” She turns into Rocky, mitts aloft. “Yo, Adriiiaaan!”

Ostensibly, at least, there’s no questioning Manson’s improved sense of self-worth. “I’m 38,” she announces, “not bad, eh?” Then she laughs uproariously. She’s “morally opposed” to cosmetic surgery. Homogenisation, in any form, makes her foam with rage.

“These are media images of unrealistic perfection that nobody can aspire to or attain,” she froths. “It breeds an intolerance of imperfection and flaws that’s driving everybody insane. The irony is, the reason beauty is beauty is because it’s uncommon. It’s unusual.”

She swigs some water, then continues: “I hate this notion being rammed down our throats that if you’re not young, gorgeous and perfect, you’re nothing. That equation is the most terrifying notion we could perpetuate in our society. Women are f***ed if they play that game; they’ll be constantly pushed down, controlled and exploited.

“Here am I. I’m 38. My career’s probably never been better. And I’ve made a decision which may or may not impact on it – I refuse to hide my experience and my age, as if it’s something I should be ashamed of. I’m alive. I know lots of people who’ve never been lucky enough to get to this stage in their life. And I’m not gonna hide it for anybody. They’re just gonna have to f***ing deal with me.”

Four years ago, when Manson made the call to the man she laughingly calls “my shrink”, she wasn’t this strong. “I was absolutely mad,” she says, “I shaved off all my hair … The cogs going round, a high-pitched squeal coming out my ears, ‘Brrrrrr!’ I was in a corner, in a knot, I had to get help. I was away from home, travelling, I was pretty much by myself at that point.”

Isolation has always been a theme with Garbage, and not just in the songs. There were five months, during the recording of Bleed Like Me – in 2003, in Wisconsin and Los Angeles – when each band member went home, to get a clean break away from everything.

Occasionally, during that time, Manson was “over here” (Edinburgh); but mostly “over there” (Los Angeles), staying with friends or in an apartment on her own. But she insists Edinburgh is her permanent home. “I never technically left Scotland,” she says. “I still think of Scotland as my home, my base, even though I’m never there any more.” You wonder what she did, those five months.

“I did nothing,” she says. “Going to the movies and reading books. I must have seen every single movie that came out two years ago. Spent a lot of time bike-riding. Stuff I haven’t done since I was a kid.”

One advantage of staying at home was that she rediscovered cooking. “I hadn’t cooked for myself in years,” she smiles. “I like roast chicken and all the trimmings; that’s my thing. Very simple but I love it. If I’m not feeling good, I’ll be: ‘I have to roast a chicken, that’ll help!’ And invariably it does. The smells, mmm, delicious … You relax, that helps alleviate all stress – temporarily.”

These last few years have evidently been a time of soul-searching, of finding answers where she can, and recognising when they’re not there to be found.

“All the fairy tales we’re fed when we’re kids just lead us to believe that life is something that it’s not,” she says. “Life is not a smooth line. You just have to accept that and move on through it.”

During the Beautiful Garbage period, harsh realities impinged on Manson’s life. “My dad had a heart attack, my mother had cancer. A friend lost their son at seven years old. I lost my own niece at seven, through cancer. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Sometimes, I suggest, being a grown-up involves relinquishing all certainty. “You have to relinquish,” she nods. “But in some ways that’s good. No expectations. Because you learn to be more fluid and you can sail through it a little better. Instead of being … what’s the word? When you don’t move, like a wall.

“Immutable,” she says.

Manson, it seems, has fallen in love again: with being in a rock band. “It’s permanent adolescence,” she laughs, “which is pathetic, but also quite brave.” But she seems thrilled that Garbage have survived the chaos. “We got through one more go-around and you immediately fall back in love again because you realise: we need each other; we’ve done this amazing thing together.”

Financially, Manson could walk away today. So presumably she does it for the good of her soul? “I have no soul,” she guffaws. “It sounds really clichéd but I never joined a band to make any money. I was in a band for 15 years without making one penny. I just don’t want to do anything that isn’t really good fun.”

A few years ago, at an industry event, Manson was struck by her own good fortune. “I remember thinking, God, I am so privileged to be a musician. To be part of that lineage is so pure and has nothing to do with politics and violence and everything that’s disgusting. I felt briefly, momentarily, just so chuffed.

“And then of course the self-loathing kicked back in. And I was disgusted with myself again … for even having a remotely positive thought about myself.”

Today, the good feelings are more resilient. Manson still needs music, still needs Garbage – but there’s little trace of self-loathing. She’s comfortable in her skin.

“I was speaking to my girlfriend two days ago,” she says with a laugh. “It was her 40th. I said, ‘Well, Morag, how are you doing?’ She said, ‘I’m 40. It’s horrid.’ And I laughed. I can’t say it bothers me that much. It’s only frightening because you’re edging ever closer to the end. I just hope I get to live, and function, for as long as I can.

“I keep thinking: 38 years went by like that,” she adds, snapping her fingers. “And there’s so much more to do. Just … for fun.”

Garbage’s new single Why Do You Love Me is released on March 28; the new album Bleed Like Me is released on April 11

06 March 2005