Shirley Manson

QUOTESARTICLESIMAGESLYRICS

STATS:

Real Name: Shirley Manson

Date of Birth: August 3rd, 1966

Location of Birth: Edinburgh, Scotland

Occupation: Singer

Marital Status: Sorry boys, this supervixen is married!

Career Hilights: First semi-successful band was "Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie," who had a single that reached No. 66 on the Billboard UK charts. After that was Angelfish, who did achieve notice in the US. Joined Garbage after Butch Vig and Duke Erickson saw an Angelfish video on MTV. It was the only time the video ever aired.

The 'ugly' sister of three, Shirley was [born on August 8, 1966 and] brought up in a funky area of Edinburgh[,Scotland]. Her father was a geneticist. In an early, proto-Garbage incident, one of his experiments involved dead chickens left in the family shed. When Shirley unknowingly came upon them five days later, they were dancing with maggots and she screamed the place down. Her father, as most fathers do, became quite bewildered when she came into her teenage-hood.

She had no self-esteem then, and she has none now. When asked to put a date to its inception, she mentions constantly comparing herself to her 'beautiful' sisters, bullying at school, and a circle of teenage girl mind-fuckery. "I've only just worked it out that there was this really big confidence-losing event," she says. "I was best friends with two girls, and I was so glad not to be on my own it didn't occur to me that three is always a bad number."

When Shirley was 15, she told them a lie, "And," she shudders, "my whole life ended there." She won't say exactly what it was.

"I still think it was the single biggest mistake of my life. It was such a terrible, pointless lie. When I was found out, I was just sick-to-my-stomach with dread. And that was It."

Pause.

"No-one in school spoke to me again. I had to hide in the science block every day: showing my face was too provocative. Any little confidence I had disappeared utterly."

To make matters worse, one of Shirley's teachers had it in for her like crocodiles have it in for stray swimmers' legs. Shirley would be repeatedly ridiculed in front of the whole class, "Until, I think, everyone in that school thought I was less than human. I felt ugly, weak, overwhelmed - I couldn't imagine being capable of doing anything. I certainly never thought I could be in a band. This was a dream it didn't even occur to me to dream about."

These feelings were manifested in 'delicate cutting', snipping the safety guards off Bic razors and scoring a furious lattice work of red threads on her arms. It is what girls and women do when they are trying to teach themselves the physical lesson 'Never, ever allow yourself to be this unhappy again.'

Books and music were her Narnia at the back of the wardrobe, Siouxsie Sioux and Chrissie Hynde the Ice Queens therein. "When Fiona Apple wrote that line, 'When I'm strong like music', I could've killed her, I was so jealous. That's exactly what it is," Shirley says. "Exactly."

When mutual lust dragged her into the local hunk's band, she doubled-up jobs and worked at Dorothy Perkins to support them both. And when both the relationship and Goodbye Mr Mackenzie eventually fell apart, she stayed with music. Her new band, Angelfish, got some airplay on MIY, and it was there, "like some weird kind of tele-dating," she smirks, that The Boys saw her, rang her, and asked her to run away from everything she'd ever known and join them in Madison [,Wisconsin].

August 1904 - backing vocals (1982-1983)
The Wild Indians - backing vocals (1983)
Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie - backing vocals, keyboards (1984-1993)
Angelfish - vocals (1993-1994)
Garbage - vocals, guitar (1994 - )

Shirley joined Garbage in 1994 after the video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me" was caught by Steve Marker on late-night MTV. He quickly tracked her down. "I didn't know who they were," she says. "I told my record company, 'This guy Butch Vig called' and they just about dropped the phone.".

While Angelfish were touring the USA, Manson flew over to Madison, WI for an introductory session. Their first meeting was, according to Shirley, "hideous". There was no isolation booth, so she was set in front of a mic upstairs with Steve's two cats glaring at her, whilst downstairs the boys drank beer and listened. "I remember thinking I was cheap and disgusting," recalls Shirley with a shudder, "because it felt like an audition and I'm not a session singer, even though when I first met them in London and we hung out, I loved them all as people... But the audition was an absolute disaster."

Shirley had another bash, and somehow or other, a connection was made. It was when she ad-libbed "Joan of Arc coming back for more" on "Vow" that she clinched it.

"I thought, this is cool, there's something going on here," remembers Butch. "That was the line she sang that really connected with me. I can't imagine having made the first record without Shirley. We didn't know what we wanted to do but, after she joined us, we became a band."

Quotes

On meeting Butch, Duke and Steve for the first time...
"I thought they would be creepy, mid-western geeks who had probably done a Gloria Estefan B-side four years ago and all they wanted was some novelty Scottish bagpipe song." On her habit of eating burnt matches... "It's just one of my perversions. I've got loads." On leaving a journalist alone in her room for a while... "Don't wank on my sheets."