Garbage
Three Madison, Wisconsin, producers, one Scottish singer, and the bad-mood pop that MTV could not stop playing. Garbage's "Only Happy When It Rains" and "Stupid Girl" made Shirley Manson the alt-rock frontwoman of 1996, Version 2.0 went to number one in Britain, and they even sang a Bond theme.
Butch Vig had produced Nirvana's Nevermind, and by 1994 he was burned out on long records. He, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, partners in Madison, Wisconsin's Smart Studios, had been remixing U2, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails and wanted a band built on that remix sensibility. The name came, in Vig's telling, from a friend who heard the tapes and said it sounded like garbage, or, in the band's own book, from a line in Vig's 1993 journal: "I hope that all this garbage will become something beautiful!" They wanted a woman up front, and Marker found her on MTV's 120 Minutes, singing in the video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me." Shirley Manson had no idea who Vig was and had to be told to check the credits on Nevermind.
They met in London on April 8, 1994, the evening Vig learned Kurt Cobain had died. Her first audition in Madison was, by her account, a disaster; a second chance, and her quiet vocal on "Queer," got her the job, and she moved from Edinburgh having never written a song. The band steered deliberately away from grunge toward a pop record, mailed demos with no biography so Vig's name would not start a bidding war, and signed to Almo Sounds for North America in December 1994. The debut album entered the Billboard 200 at number 193 in August 1995. Samuel Bayer's video for "Only Happy When It Rains" became an MTV Buzz clip in February 1996 and pushed the song onto Top 40 radio; "Stupid Girl," built on a drum sample from the Clash's "Train in Vain," hit number four in Britain and 24 in the United States and earned two Grammy nominations, alongside one for Best New Artist. The album sold more than four million copies. Manson bristled at the "three producers and a girl" framing, and Almo nearly pulled the tour after four shows.
Version 2.0 (May 1998) debuted at number one in Britain, drew eight VMA nominations for "Push It" and Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Rock Album, and the band turned down Saturday Night Live as "not ready." In 1999 they recorded the theme to The World Is Not Enough and headlined Edinburgh for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. Beautiful Garbage arrived three weeks after September 11, 2001, with the upbeat "Androgyny" as "the wrong song for the moment," and Interscope soon dropped them, saying there was no room to promote more than one female-fronted rock band. They reunited in 2011 and released Not Your Kind of People on their own Stunvolume label in 2012.
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