Volume 12, Winter' 1994

  Volume - 12

pays magazine: Angleterre
date décembre 1994
CD de 18 chansons + livret 192 pages
Article de 8 pages sur Garbage: la première interview du groupe

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CD
1. Olivine – Node
2 .Good times – Spiritualized
3. Foetus – Goya Dress
4. Vow – Garbage
5. Visa for violet and van – Prolapse 
6. Girl meets girl – Shriek
7. Son of John Doe – Pet Lamb
8. What love – Moby
9. Tomorrow night – G. Love & Special Sauce
10. Karma coma – Massive Attack
11. Space theme (Tribute to John Cage in C A G and E) – Experimental Audio Research
12. Lower than stars – Laika
13. Only now – Ride
14. Dream on – Catatonia
15. Wake up – Love Spit Love
16. Pond life – Novocaine
17. Days – Flinch
18. In decline – Nitzer Ebb

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Magazine
words by Ann Scanlon

"Is grunge dead over there, too?" asks Butch Vig who, as the producer of everything from early Killdozer records to 1991's mainstream-smashing 'Nevermind', played a major role in creating the whole genre. "I guess it probably is. Grunge died before it was even really born - may it rest in peace."

Currently holed up in their Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, Vig has just finished recording an album of his own, with a band who have given themselves the ultimate post-grunge name of Garbage.

"This friend came to the studio to play some percussion on the remix of a Nine Inch Nails track," Vig says, by way of explanation, "and when he saw all the loops that I had going around the desk he said, Man, this fuckin' shit looks like garbage to me, do you know what you're doing? So I said, I'm not sure, but we're gonna turn this garbage into a song at some point. We kind of liked the name because it could just be a blend of all sorts of trash and stuff."

Trash is definitely a key element in the dark, industrial pop songs that Garbage intend to release as their debut album in 1995. The idea behind the group dates back to 1984 when Vig and fellow University of Wisconsin film student Steve Marker set up Smart Studios and decided that they wanted to record their own material as well as local punk bands.

"Unfortunately," Vig explains, "when you build your own studio you basically work your ass off just to pay the bill and buy more gear and so we ended up doing any project that we were offered."

The phenomenal success of Nirvana's 'Nevermind' changed all that, and not only did Vig find himself working with increasingly successful bands like Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins but he was also offered big bucks to remix singles by the likes of U2 and Depeche Mode. Having completed albums by Sonic Youth and Freedy Johnston at the beginning of 1994, Vig and Marker (who is a successful producer and remixer in his own right) formed Garbage with Duke Erikson, who frequently co-produces with Vig and also played in Spooner and Firetown with him in the early '80s.

"We decided that although I would play drums," Vig says, "Steve would be on guitar and Duke on bass, we'd fuck around with all of them and try to incorporate different styles and genres, throw it all into a big melting pot and see what would happen."

"Basically," Steve Marker adds, "we're trying to get real trashy, lo-fi guitar sounds. We want to take pop music and make it as horrible sounding as we can."

Although the combination of Vig, Marker and Erikson makes Garbage something of a producer supergroup, the three of them had long since decided that they wanted a woman to front the band and that production skills weren't a particular requisite.

"I really enjoyed working with women like L7," says Vig, who produced the band's 1992 'Bricks Are Heavy' LP. "There's a different kind of psychology going on in the studio when you're working with women. We also thought it would really be cool to have all these different elements of pop and noise, and trash and groovy rhythms, but have it coming from more of a woman's perspective."

Garbage found the woman they were looking for when they saw a clip of Scottish singer Shirley Manson fronting a band called Angelfish on MTV.

"To me," Steve Marker explains, "Shirley had a darkness and a depth to her that you don't get out of many bands that are around right now - it really, really struck me the first time I heard her."

Manson, who had previously played in Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie, was impressed by Vig, Marker and Erikson's production CVs and didn't need much persuading to put Angelfish on the backburner and work with Garbage.

"It sounds kind of moronic," she says, "but everything that I've heard that they've done, I love, so working with them was an honour - although I don't think I would have got involved if I hadn't felt they were like-minded people when I met them."

During her three months in Vig and Steve's Madison studio, Manson adapted the songs that had already been written to suit herself.

"When we started writing lyrics," Vig explains, "we tried to write a lot of them from a woman's perspective and I think, initially, some of them were a little pretentious. But as soon as Shirley came on board she simplified the lyrics so that they were a lot more subtle and worked better as songs.

"We all throw ideas around and yell and argue about stuff and Shirley is very feisty - she's got a mean right hook. When she gets pissed off she goes, Fuck you, you deserve a dead arm!, so both my arms are black and blue. Duke and Steve are the same, we're all bruised up!"

The ability to deliver a mean right hook is probably an advantage for someone who sings dark, vengeful pop songs like the featured Volume track, 'Vow'.

"That was one of the first tracks that we had musically," Vig says. "The idea for it came from a newspaper article that I read about a woman who had gone back to get revenge on an abusive husband, so we thought it would be cool to get a bit of retribution in there."

Although tracks like 'Only Happy When It Rains' and 'Subhuman', which will appear on the band's untitled debut album, share 'Vow''s dark sensibility and bouts of Trent Reznoresque depression, Garbage definitely beat with a pop heart.

"I played Billy (Corgan) from Smashing Pumpkins a few rough mixes and he said that it was pretty poppy," Vig says, "which didn't surprise him at all, because he knows that I'm a pop geek. I love pop music. I like hooks mixed up with noise and if you listen to the Pumpkins or Nirvana or even Sonic Youth you can hear that dichotomy of noise and melody blended together. That's the kind of thing that I hope we're doing in Garbage - although it's hard for me to keep a perspective on it right now because we're still working on it."

Billy Corgan formally thanked Vig on the sleeve of Smashing Pumpkins' debut album, 'Gish', for his patience, which had made that record and its arduous follow-up, 'Siamese Dream', possible. With two other people to share production duties in Garbage, Vig found that recording his own album was actually less intense than doing other people's.

"It's been interesting and fun for me to be able to become part of a band versus having to be the main dude and making all the decisions," Vig says. "Although in some ways, early on, it was kind of hard because I'm used to overseeing everything and getting my own way and I had to deliberately force myself to take a back seat and go, This is okay. I can't be so verbal about things and be a dickhead, I have to let everybody get in on this."

Garbage are currently very much a studio band, but Vig says: "While we rely on loops and samples, we are looking at the possibilities of translating it on a live front, should the opportunity arrive."

Both Erikson and Vig have previously toured with Spooner and Firetown and have a burning desire, says Vig, to see if the Holiday Inns have changed their decor.

As yet, Vig hasn't lined up any projects for 1995 (though he may work with Soul Asylum and Veruca Salt), but he's relieved that very few bands still ask him to make them "sound like Nirvana".

"I still get a lot of tapes coming in, but I never wanted to just make rock records," Vig says. "I like guitar, bass and drums kind of records but I grew up listening to everything from pop radio and opera to country music and polka, so I really though that Garbage would be an interesting and eclectic thing to do.

"It wasn't that I wanted to make some kind of statement, I just really wanted to have fun in the studio and collaborate with Steve and Duke. What would I like people to get from Garbage's music?

"I guess that I could be kind of crass and say that I hope it's good music to fuck to, but that's probably not appropriate. I mean, I don't think it would be a good idea for someone to fuck to a vengeful little song like 'Vow'."

VOW
(track 4 on accompanying compact disc)
new recording
produced by Garbage
mastered by Howie Weinberg at Smart Studios, Madison, Wisconsin.

GARBAGE
Shirley Manson - vocals
Steve Marker - acoustic & electric guitar, loops, samples
Duke Erikson - electric guitar, bass, keyboards
Butch Vig - drums, loops, sound processing