Blood on their tracks

Garbage are back, and they sound like a sophisticated Garage band. Shirley Manson and Butch Vig tell Brian Boyd what happened after 'it all went horribly wrong'

Sometime in 1994, three of the US's biggest music producers decided to move to the other side of the recording booth and form their own band. Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson had impressive CVs - not least Vig who had produced the era-defining Nevermind album by Nirvana. Problem was, they needed a singer. Idly watching MTV one night, they happened upon a video by an obscure Scottish band called Angelfish.

The singer - flame red hair, whiter-than-white skin and a vocal gymnast - proved to be an arresting image. One phone call later and Edinburgh's Shirley Manson, ex shop assistant at the Miss Selfridge counter in the Scottish capital, was a member of a band called Garbage. There were known, none too subtly, in their early days as "three producers and a girl".

Over the course of three albums, Garbage fused a post-grunge rock sound with cutting-edge electronica superlatively - selling 10 million albums in the process. Shirley Manson, who had confessed to suffering from "body dysmorphia syndrome" - wherein you have acute problems with how you perceive your physical appearance - leapt from the music pages to the fashion pages.

She modelled for both MAC cosmetics and Calvin Klein. Not bad for someone who had been mercilessly bullied at school for her "red hair and gawky features", who had once considered herself "the ugliest creature alive" and who would mutilate her own legs with razor blades.

Manson proved herself to be the eminently quotable focal point in the band. Her online blog diary kept the libel lawyers busy and statements such as "I think The Spice Girls should be tarred and feathered" and "Jennifer Lopez could do with a good punch in the face" singled her out as a strong presence in an otherwise wimpy and contrived female rock world. In short, Garbage were an interesting band with an interesting frontwoman who could seemingly do no wrong.

"But then it all went horribly wrong," says a strikingly beautiful Shirley Manson as she sits in her hotel suite fixing you with her "I don't do bullshit" stare.

"We had to start the promotional duties for our last album - Beautiful Garbage, just two days after September 11th, 2001. It was just insane, there we were talking about our stupid band and our stupid record at a time when the US was in trauma. We had a tour lined up, we had sold tickets, so we had to do it. And plus the tour was with U2. And it just got worse and worse and worse - our front-of-house engineer had to be rushed to hospital one night, Butch Vig was then hospitalised with Bell's palsy and hepatitis. And then I discovered I had a potentially cancerous growth on my vocal chords. They were saying 'we have to take out these cysts' and I was going 'don't touch me - I'll lose my voice' and it was just terrible but in the end they operated and it was fine."

There was also the breakdown of Manson's seven-year marriage, but no, she doesn't want to talk about that, thanks.

It didn't help that Beautiful Garbage had been the band's poorest selling and poorest reviewed album to date - something which considerably interrupted their momentum. It was a bruised and battered band who reconvened in Madison, Wisconsin (their base) last year for work on their fourth album.

"It was awful, a terrible atmosphere, and people not getting on. There were disagreements about the music, about what to do next and I was just furious with everyone and everything - especially after all I had gone through," she says.

"There were tantrums and arguments and big confrontations and then Butch rings and says 'I'm leaving the band. I'm moving to Los Angeles' and it was the end of Garbage. Then we had this bizarre situation where we were all in different parts of the world - I was back in Scotland - and various members would be using Fed-Ex to send pieces of music to other members and there would be e-mails with sound files attached to them."

All sounds a bit Spinal Tap.

"Well, it could have been the sequel," she says. "I tell you, if that situation ever happens again, I'm walking, I'm just leaving. It's not worth it."

Gradually, all four members drifted back to Madison and into the studio. The recording session was jollied along by the arrival of ex-Nirvana drummer, Dave Grohl, to play on one of the new songs.

If indeed, tension and despair can produce great work, then Garbage have illustrated the point neatly with the new album, ominously titled, Bleed Like Me.

Butch Vig takes up the story: "Because of the band's background in production work, we were always known for our use of samples and sequencing - all this electronica boffin stuff going on in the background - but, you know, the technology has really moved on since our first album in 1995 and the stuff we were doing then any kid can now replicate in his bedroom because of what's now available. So we just thought 'guitars, guitars, guitars' on this album. We realised that what we really are, at the core, is a loud guitar band behind Shirley's voice. And that's the other thing - on this album, Shirley's voice isn't treated or anything, it's more or less just her bare vocal."

"That's probably why I got the cyst on my vocal chords!" interjects Manson. "Before, I'd be there singing and singing for hours and hours - but this time we just left my voice as it was. It was great actually seeing the boys just go in and set up their amps this time and just play it. There was little of them in the control room tinkering around with sounds. They just played it loud - like a real rock band."

From the current hit single, Why Do You Love Me?, which sounds like a girl group on a sugar rush, to the political Boys Wanna Fight, Garbage now sound like a sophisticated Garage band.

"The thing about this is, it's led to a bit of revisionism," says Butch Vig, "we've just been rehearsing for a tour and going back to play the old material; we are sort of wondering if we should just play it as we're playing now - as in forget the production, just rip out the song."

"The best thing for me," says Manson, "is that whenever people used to come and see us live they'd always be going, 'oh, you really do rock, don't you?' and that never came out on the albums. This, though, is the one that really captures the Garbage live sound. Super loud! Big buzzsaw guitars! As Butch said 'A guitar band behind Shirley's voice.' I like that, yeah, that's got it in one . . . "

Bleed Like Me is out now on the Warner label