An unanswered question in modern music history is: What happened to the culture that created all those amazing female artists in the 1990s? From Liz Phair to Björk to PJ Harvey to Hole to Bikini Kill to Tori Amos and others, women with wildly different sounds, looks and opinions were as critically and commercially powerful as, if not more than, men. Yet by the early 2000s, we were all living in a Disney pop star dominated world, in terms of mainstream commercial music.
Shirley Manson, the Scottish musician who has, for 31 years, been the frontwoman of Garbage, one of the most successful rock bands of the era and a major contributor to this woman-powered ’90s culture, has a fascinating theory.
“Sept. 11th stopped all alternative female voices in their tracks, because when people get scared, they get conservative and what does a conservative society loathe? A dangerous woman,” she said.
“The fact is, they stopped playing alternative female voices on the radio,” Ms. Manson added, sitting in her favorite cafe in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles this April. “I remember someone at Interscope Records telling me KROQ [Los Angeles’s alternative rock station] will only play one woman, and it’s Gwen Stefani, and therefore we’re putting all our marketing money into No Doubt. That literally became the dead end for that incredible explosion of female-empowered alternative voices, which were a direct result of that first incredible wave of alternative women: Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks. My generation was a response to that. Our careers exploded, so we were like, ‘Oh, hey, everything’s cool, everything has changed, the ceiling has been broken.’ And then we hit 2001 and it fell to the earth.”
She shook her head, continuing: “We’ve now seen two decades of very carefully managed, young, mostly solo, mostly Disney, mostly theater school kids, and they’re great! It brings people a lot of joy. To make somebody dance — what a great gift. I could cry just saying that. But as a result, we’ve also lost the esoteric and the fragile and the dark and the spooky and the fury and all the things that a patriarchal society considers not fitting for a young woman’s mind.”
As can be heard on Garbage’s new record, “Let All That We Imagine Be the Light,” the band’s first full-length in four years, Ms. Manson is doing her best to carry the torch for esoteric, fragile fury.
Wearing animal-print leggings and platform boots, her blonde-almost-white hair pulled back, lips painted red, Ms. Manson comes across uncannily like the image she projected when she first emerged on the American music scene in 1995: a charming, whip-smart, profane firebrand with elevated club kid style. At 59, Ms. Manson is the youngest member of Garbage, which has sold 17 million albums worldwide and which also includes the American musicians Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, and the acclaimed producer Butch Vig.
Garbage is associated with one of the most consequential eras in modern music history, when alternative music drove popular culture, and the last era in which guitar-based rock ’n’ roll was dominant in popular music. But Garbage is unique among its contemporaries because the group was conceived not as a product of the favored myth around how bands form (kids who grew up together start jamming in someone’s garage) but as the brainchild of Mr. Vig.
In 1994, Mr. Vig, who at that point had produced Nirvana’s 1991 breakthrough, “Nevermind,” as well as seminal records by the bands L7, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, decided he wanted to form his own band, a band that would skew more pop than the heavy grunge sound he was known for and that would be fronted by a woman. Mr. Marker had seen Ms. Manson in the video for “Suffocate Me” by Angelfish, then her band, on MTV’s late-night alternative music video show “120 Minutes.”
The singer first met her future bandmates in a hotel in London in April 1994, on what turned out to be the day the world learned Kurt Cobain had died. Her first official Garbage audition, held at Mr. Marker’s studio in Madison, Wis., did not go well. “We played her some new instrumentals and basically asked her to wing it and come up with some lyrics,” Mr. Vig said. “Not an easy thing to do. And the session was kind of a bust.”
A few days later, she told them she knew what to do. “She flew back, and in the same living room sang ‘Vow,’ ‘Stupid Girl’ and ‘Queer’” — tracks that would become Garbage’s signature blend of sing-along pop choruses with a cloistered, brooding darkness. “There was something in her approach that was the exact opposite of the current alt-rock singers that were on the radio: a quiet, intense understatement,” Mr. Vig said.
The inorganic nature of Garbage’s formation is central to the band’s identity, and perhaps, to its longevity. Her bandmates are all, in some ways, still mysteries to one another, Ms. Manson said, rather than old friends who built this thing from a place of deep intimacy and thus are subject to the whims of ego and disappointment in one another that can so easily destroy it.
“I have no idea at all — and I’m not being funny when I say this — I have no idea about who they are and who they want to be creatively,” the singer said. “I mean, we love each other and we can sit in a room together and really get along and have fun, but they don’t really talk to me. It’s not the romantic idea of a band.”
For Ms. Manson, personally, the arranged marriage origin story has been “the crux of a lot of my struggle, in the band dynamic, in the music industry, in how I’ve been perceived,” she said. “The specter of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain and Butch Vig has sat on me my whole career.”
She remembered the band’s first publicist telling her, “Just so you know, nobody’s going to want to talk to you, we’re going to try and steer them toward you, but nobody is going to want to talk to you.”
She added: “Even now, after 30 years of being the lead singer, I feel like a lot of my work is just considered to belong to that patriarchy, and it can be infuriating. I will say, this has nothing to do with Butch. It’s not his fault. He’s just a man.”
Many frontwomen deal with an unconscious sense of being subtly undermined while also being the obvious center of a band’s gravity. Ms. Manson fronts one of the most successful rock bands of her era, has appeared numerous times on the covers of Rolling Stone and Spin, while also being treated by many, she said, as comparatively insignificant to Garbage’s overall success.
Her outsider status, her friends say, is Ms. Manson’s superpower. “Her propensity for compassion is incredible,” said the musician and performance artist Peaches, who has known Ms. Manson since the mid-2000s. “We’ll have these dinners and there’s always young newcomers that Shirley has invited.”
In the rock world, the “Bono talk” is a moment in a young band’s career when the U2 frontman sits up-and-comers down to impart brotherly wisdom. The Coldplay drummer Will Champion talked about this experience on “The Howard Stern Show,” and Courtney Love once recalled telling Julian Casablancas of the Strokes about regretting turning it down when it had been offered to her and Kurt Cobain.
Ms. Manson does not see herself as rock ’n’ roll’s collective older sister — but others do.
“Shirley was kind of my mentor coming up,” said the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O. “Her love and belief made me feel like I was doing something right when I was floating on my lonely island of rock front womanhood. She doesn’t just carry her heart on her sleeve, she’s willing to turn her whole soul inside out, to speak to all the really hard, vulnerable, painful personal stuff that sensitive people go through in the system.”
“Shirley was one of the first people in the industry to reach out to me when I had some difficult experiences early in my career,” said Lauren Mayberry, the frontwoman of the Scottish synth-pop band CHVRCHES. “Shirley is a girls’ girl in the truest, best sense. She is conscious of encouraging and supporting other female artists, queer artists, artists of color, and that has always been really moving to see, as a fan and as another woman in the industry. It can be a very isolating place, and she has a real wish to pull people up with her.”
An “Angry Young Woman” From a Nice Family
The story of Ms. Manson’s childhood is often told like this: wild-child from Edinburgh, bullied at school, cut herself to cope, eventually found music as a means of processing her own pain. That narrative is true, but it also paints a limited picture of the girl who is moved to the stockroom while working as a makeup girl at the British store Miss Selfridge because she’s scaring the customers. “I was a really angry young woman,” Ms. Manson said.
But she was not some post-Dickensian street urchin. Ms. Manson’s parents were married until her mother died in 2008 from a rare form of dementia. “I loved everything about my mother, every cell of her, and she knew that,” she said. Ms. Manson’s father is still alive at 87, “and he’s still engaged in life, setting dates for himself, meeting old friends, obsessed with Robert Lewis Stevenson and John Muir and poetry and art and you’ll come to his house and he has his atlases out and he is pouring over them.”
Ms. Manson’s anger was born generally out of feeling confined by structures and limitations and, specifically, by kicking against her own personal patriarchy. “I was forged in a fire of rebellion against my father because he’s very dominant and he’s super smart and he was hard on his children,” she said.
Ms. Manson recalled watching her mother have to ask her father — a university lecturer — for money, which incited a deep rage within Ms. Manson. Her mother had lived in an orphanage until she was around 5, “so she was tough,” the singer said, “and she had been brought up in the system, so she was like a military brat almost — the beds were made with the special corners. She was an incredible cook and an incredible baker and she’d bust her balls every single day, but she was a trad wife.”
When Ms. Manson was 17, she joined her first real band, Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie. But by 1992, the band had been dropped by its label, which wanted to keep hold of Ms. Manson, so she formed Angelfish with the same members. Even though her talent was evident, until she walked into that studio in Madison she had never really written a song.
In a 2018 opinion essay in The New York Times, the singer wrote about the urge to self-harm in 1998, while on tour for Garbage’s second album. “I was suffering from extreme ‘impostor syndrome,’ constantly measuring myself against my peers, sincerely believing that they had gotten everything right and I had gotten everything so very wrong,” she wrote.
Thirty years in, Ms. Manson is still wrestling with the idea of what exactly she is, creatively. She makes music, “because I need the connection,” she said. “That’s my drive. I want to touch people. I’m like, ‘Are you there? Am I here? Are we real?’ And I love performing.” But, she says, “it took me a long, long time to think I am an artist.”
Though Mr. Vig had a strong sense of how Garbage should come across, musically, Ms. Manson understood the band’s image had to match its innovative sound. “When I joined the band, I never thought we’d ever get anywhere because we looked terrible!” she said.
Ms. Manson encouraged Garbage to pay more sophisticated attention to the visual artists it worked with, collaborating with Ellen von Unwerth, Sophie Muller and Stéphane Sednaoui, among others. The music video for one of Garbage’s early hits, “Only Happy When It Rains,” was directed by Samuel Bayer, who also directed Nirvana’s revolutionary “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
As the band was working on its third album, “Beautiful Garbage,” Ms. Manson’s first marriage, to the Scottish sculptor Eddie Farrell, began to break up. (She has been married since 2010 to the record producer and sound engineer Billy Bush.) The record was set to come out on Sept. 11, 2001, with a world tour to follow. Instead, the release was delayed until early October. Though the band did eventually go out on the road, it wound up cutting the tour short. The group promoted its fourth LP, 2005’s “Bleed Like Me,” then entered a period of semi-hiatus.
Together, Apart Again
Garbage returned to work in 2010, and has been playing live and making records ever since. The band began working on “Let All That We Imagine Be the Light” in 2023. Just like on the band’s debut, the guys worked on the music and Ms. Manson received the results “with no explanation, no communication, nothing,” she said. “Just instrumentals.” From there, she would get to work, coloring things in, building them out, bringing expression and vivacity and language to those sketches of initial sound.
“Every time you step up to create something, it feels different because you’re in a completely different place in your life,” the singer said. “And in this case, we weren’t even in the same room. I was in my sick bed and they were in the studio.”
In 2016, Ms. Manson had an accident onstage, seriously injuring her hip and eventually resulting in consecutive hip replacement surgeries, one in 2023 and one in 2024. “It was a nightmare but it was also great,” she says. “It gave me permission to be like, ‘I’m not young. I’m a broken old lady who smashed her hip on a crash barrier at KROQ’s Weenie Roast!’ It gave me permission just to relax. I don’t care what anybody thinks about me at this point, I really don’t.”
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