Ahead of Garbage’s return to Edinburgh, lead singer, Shirley Manson, reflects on home, identity, and the enduring power of live music as she prepares to take on stages around Europe and one special date above the city that shaped her.
Manson is currently visible all over Edinburgh on the side of Lothian buses, advertising a much-anticipated stop at Edinburgh Castle on Garbage’s European tour. Earlier this year, Manson returned to the city for a pair of intimate charity shows raising money for Palestinian children, with former bandmates from Angelfish, the short-lived Goodbye Mr Mackenzie side project that preceded her breakthrough. It was, in many ways, a return to the point just before everything changed.
“I was in a place in my life where I had run out of options. I was penniless and had no future, so it didn’t take courage. It was the next indicated step. I took that step and my life exploded… but it could equally have landed differently.”
For Manson, who grew up in the Stockbridge area, that connection to Edinburgh runs deep. “It is my home city, your family, roots and values are imbued within; you carry them forever. Home cannot be erased; it sits at the root of who you are and how you navigate the world. Sometimes I feel like I want to reach it inside and touch it, to be reminded of the great tenacity of my people and the beauty of my ancestors.”
Yet for all that certainty, her place within the wider music world has often felt less easily defined. As a Scotswoman fronting an American band, she suggests Garbage are never on “Scottish lists” that document the country’s musical history. At the same time, she is not “British” either, making her something of an anomaly.
“It’s funny because as a Scottish artist I’ve always felt a little like an orphan. I’m not really British and I’m not American.”
After three decades on the road with Garbage and 17 million album sales, Manson now speaks about live performance as a responsibility. “Music and songs are so powerful and important to people. I want to play as many of our touchstones for fans as I can,” she says. “When I was young, it was like a great party, an opportunity to show off. Like a nurse: I’m here to serve the people, come here, let me administer to you. The older I get, the more sacred I see that role.”
Last year she enjoyed seeing Oasis return to Edinburgh for their triumphant reunion shows. “It wasn’t about the band. It was about the audience. Watching people pour out of their homes to see a working-class band was spectacularly beautiful. Those songs are powerful and profoundly moving.” She speaks warmly of Garbage’s 2023 touring partner, Noel Gallagher.
“I couldn’t praise him highly enough. I love him. He’s a really unique and exemplary human being. I mean, he’s like me; we say stupid s**t sometimes. We’re like a bull in a china shop and we offend people, but he is a very good man with a lot of integrity.”
Even for a band with Garbage’s legacy, touring has become a challenge in the modern age. “We played 40 shows (in America) and only ten of them were financially responsible. That’s alarming because if a band like us, with a very successful career and a built-in fanbase, can barely make it work, then a lot of young bands can’t afford tour buses or hotels. It’s very destructive for our societies.”
Anxieties about the state of the world seeped into the band’s 2021 album No Gods No Masters. Its follow-up, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, was “a much softer, more conciliatory record,” she adds. Its spectral closing track, The Day That I Met God, was partly recorded in Manson’s bedroom during ill health.
“That song is the most mystical of everything we have written. It got sent to me by the band while I was recovering from a hip replacement and also dealing with long Covid. I was dealing with a sick father and my own sick little body, questioning all my life choices, what it means to be a human being and an ageing one and a broken one. I was asking a lot of big questions, and the song became the vehicle for that exploration.”
It was while clearing out her late father’s house (a Church of Scotland elder at Stockbridge Parish Church) after his passing in October that she found many of the books that shaped his life.
“He was a very humble, simple soul and had no valuables or anything fancy, but what he did have was shelves and shelves of books.”
When not living in America, Manson also keeps a home in the city of her birth. A headline show at Edinburgh Castle may yet be a defining moment.
“It doesn’t get more glorious than that; arguably the highest point of my career will be playing at the most prestigious venue in my home city. I hope to make to those castle ramparts and afterwards take a long, slow walk down the Mound.”
No doubt, a moment to savour, high above the city that shaped her, where past and present meet on the castle ramparts.
Garbage and support Goodbye Mr Mackenzie will play Edinburgh Castle on 11 July.
