On a Thursday afternoon in London, Garbage are in a bit of a heap. They've just got back from a gig in Paris, have been put through the mill at UK customs, and are now getting ready to do a crucial concert at Brixton Academy, where they'll have to prove they're not just another throwaway product. Pop music is a disposable commodity, but Garbage have no intention of ending up in the trashcan. As they prepare to promote their second album, Version 2.0, they know they're fighting a battle against built-in obsolescence. Against the odds, they've managed to hold it together so far, but now it's crunch time, and the new album had better measure up to their critically-acclaimed 1995 debut. The four members of Garbage are seated at a conference table, discussing the burning topic of the day: the World Cup. Singer Shirley Manson is Scottish, so she has some interest in seeing her team struggle through the group qualifiers; guitarists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker and drummer Butch Vig, however, live in Madison, Wisconsin, and the shenanigans of the World Cup have largely passed over their heads:
The Garbage boys' real sporting passion is for Wisconsin's football team, The Green Bay Packers, and they've even managed to get Manson involved in the fortunes of her adopted home team. Manson now spends more time in Madison, Wisconsin than she does in Scotland, but she's not ready to declare herself a permanent citizen of the snowy city where Garbage write and record. "I like feeling like a temporary visitor, I prefer it that way," she says. Garbage can no longer be a temporary thing for Shirley Manson, and her recent marriage to her long-term partner, Eddie, may have to take second place to her musical menage a quatre. When she was first approached by the guys and asked to be their singer, Garbage weren't even a band, just three buddies fiddling around with loops and beats in their own studio. Butch Vig was famous as the producer of Nirvana's Nevermind album and Duke Erikson was already well into his 40s, with a grown-up daughter. Manson, meanwhile, was a feisty, twenty-something alumnus of Scottish band, Goodbye Mr. McKenzie, and singer with the soon-to-be defunct Angelfish. The guys spotted her on MTV and decided they'd found their singer. On the day they decided to phone her, Angelfish were breaking up and Kurt Cobain was putting a shotgun to his head. For any other band it would have been bad karma, but for Garbage it was a strangely auspicious beginning. But when the band put out their early singles, Vow, Queer and Only Happy When It Rains, they weren't expecting to take the world by storm - in fact they were prepared for prolonged obscurity in rock's backyard. Three producers-turned-rock stars and one singer-turned-supervixen - the recipe was a strange one, but it proved a near-perfect formula for their debut album, simply titled Garbage. Its runaway success forced the backroom boys to come out of the studio and onto the stage, and it turned Shirley Manson into a mascara-tinted teen icon. When she walked into the studio in Madison, Wisconsin, she found herself facing an almost blank musical canvas, an unfinished symphony of grunge, techno, trip hop and pop. There were no songs, just some musical doodles which the three Garbage men had left incomplete. "It has always been assumed that we had the whole album written and we were just looking for a singer to fill in the spaces," says Erikson. "It's not true at all. We just had two or three really rough sketches of things which were nowhere near being songs. We didn't know what we were going to do. We were keeping it wide open because we knew that once we had found a singer, a voice, that the songs would have to work around that.
"The biggest difference between this record and the first record," says Vig, "is that when we started, we were unsure of exactly how the songs would develop, so we all brought in lyrics, and Shirley took them all and made them her own.
"This time round, after playing over 200 shows in 18 months, we felt much more loose around each other. We communicated with a sixth sense, we didn't have to sit around and discuss it."
The new album, Version 2.0, is lighter and poppier than its predecessor, but it still has that slightly deranged undercurrent, and songs such as I Think I'm Paranoid, Medication and The Trick Is To Keep Breathing are either schizophrenic anthems for dark young things or tongue-in-cheek techno ditties, depending on which side of the psychiatrist's couch you're sitting.
"The weird thing we've found is that, depending on where people are coming from, they interpret the record in different ways," says Manson. "I was talking to one journalist who was saying, `why is your record so dark and depressing and morose?' And five minutes later I spoke to another journalist who was saying, `why is your album so poppy and melodic?' It's really bizarre, but we like the fact that people hear it in different ways, which was always our intention. We don't feel we made a dark album, we feel we've made a very pop, positive album."
Garbage play as part of the Big Day Out, which will be held at Castlegar Sports Ground on Saturday, July 11th from 1.30 p.m.
