WHEN GARBAGE STRUCK GOLD
Band will play all songs from debut album celebrating surprise hit’s 20th anniversary
Garbage is commemorating the 20th anniversary of its groundbreaking, surprise-hit debut album this fall with a tour that promises everything the band recorded over 1995 and 1996 — not just Garbage, the album, but B-sides galore. Holy Garbage nerd-out!
This isn’t to say that Garbage needs to cater to alt-rock era nostalgia. The quartet rebounded from a mid-tour flame-out and a sevenyear hiatus in 2012 with the album
Not Your Kind of People, and even perpetually scowly Scottish siren Shirley Manson looked positively gleeful to be back onstage with bandmates Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker during a Toronto gig at the Phoenix that May. Nevertheless, while work on Album No. 6 continues apace, the band thought it would be fun to celebrate an album no one involved ever dreamed would sell four million copies and merit the “deluxe” reissue treatment 20 years down the road.
The Star spoke to Vig — also the uber-producer behind such mid-’90s classics as Nirvana’s
Nevermind, the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Sonic Youth’s Dirty — the day after a rousing Garbage gig in his hometown of Madison, Wis. The band returns to the Phoenix on Monday.
Am I right in thinking the success of Garbage took you all completely by surprise?
It really did. We had no intention of this becoming a full-time obsession, really. We were gonna make a record, and maybe gonna go out and play or promote for six weeks or a couple of months, and I was gonna get back to producing full-time. But I think what I found in Garbage was how much I love being in bands, especially with my friends.
Y’know, I’ve been friends with Duke
and Steve from way before we started Garbage, and then we met Shirley and she’s, like, our little sister. We’re all pretty close-knit and, I think, if we weren’t still having fun, we wouldn’t still be doing this. In hindsight, it strikes me that the first Garbage album anticipated the current era of “respectable” pop music at a time when it was thoroughly uncool to be making unapologetically shiny and synthetic pop music.
I think, sonically, it stuck out in left field because it didn’t sound like most of the bands on alternative radio. And I think that really was almost an accident. We didn’t really have any grand plan. I was just tired of making guitar-bass-and-drums records. By the time Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins had blown up, I’d done a thousand punk-rock bands so I was just interested in trying to find a new vehicle in the studio. We got these samplers and the samplers played a big part in how we manipulated sound on the first record. For better or worse, it has kind of an unusual sound.
I really liked Not Your Kind of People. Are you working on more new stuff?
Yeah, we have a new album that’s 90 per cent done. We’ve actually mixed a couple of tracks and we get off the road in November right before Thanksgiving and we’re gonna do about three weeks of recording in December, and then in January we’re gonna mix it. We’re hoping it’ll come out around May first-ish.
The new album is interesting. I’d say half the songs sound very close to “classic” Garbage and half the songs are kind of departures for us, just sort of more left field, I guess. There’s a couple of stoner goth-rock jams on it that are, like, seven minutes long. They’re my favourite tracks.
This is good to hear. I’d hate to see Garbage on the greatest-hits casino circuit.
We could probably just go out and play our greatest hits every year or so, but we’re really still interested in writing music and trying to come up with something that makes us excited. These days, it’s so hard to get any radio play or to sell anything, but it doesn’t really matter to us; we’re just in it for ourselves. If we’re not excited about writing new material, then that may sort of be the end . . . The touring is hard.
As you know, I’m not 20 years old anymore. It does wear your body down. So you’ve gotta have a reason to go out and play.