Garbage may be back in action with their newly-released eighth studio album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, but vocalist Shirley Manson admits that not everything in the band is “hunky dory”, and confesses that she frequently feels “isolated” within the group she has fronted since 1994.
“I was always separate from the second I joined the band, ” she acknowledges, “I’ve always been an outsider.”
Manson’s comments come in a new interview with The Independent newspaper. “Nothing’s wrong with the band per se,” she insists, “but there’s very little proper communication about anything at all.”
“I’ve just started talking about it because I feel like I’ve become so isolated,” she tells writer Kate Hutchinson. “I don’t want to pretend everything’s hunky dory.”
Garbage started when producer friends Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson recruited Manson for their new project after seeing Manson’s previous band, Angelfish, on MTV.
“I love my bandmates, they’re lovely men, but they’re a boys’ club, and I’ve never been part of that,” the singer states honestly. “We live very separate existences and identities – it could be the secret of why we’ve lasted 30 years!”
“I was the interface between the band and management; band and record company,” she adds. “I stopped doing it because I hit a wall and had to protect myself. And then the entire communication between us just… drifted away.”
Manson goes on to reveal that Garbage’s management suggested that the quartet might wish to undergo group therapy together, as Metallica infamously did with Phil Towle following the exit of bassist Jason Newsted, but the process would have cost the group £100,000 – “or someething mad like that!” – so the four musicians turned down the idea. And if, not too far over the horizon, the band do decide to break up after more than three decades together, Manson will have few regrets.
“I realise it’s not going to last forever,” she says, “and we’re already running out of time, and so it feels very poignant and beautiful, and something that I want to protect.”
And as she suggests in a new interview with NME, Manson isn’t about to slink back into the shadows, whatever lies ahead. In reference to the fact that, at 58, she is the youngest member of the band, she says, “For some reason, society wants us to fold up and go away. When you get older, you can’t be pushed around in the same way that you once were.”