Garbage’s Shirley Manson: “We’re losing bands from working class beginnings and risk-takers”

nme.com:

Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has spoken to NME about the reissue of their 2005 album ‘Bleed Like Me’, the worsening conditions of the music industry, and the band’s plans for new material.This week sees the alt-rock veterans drop their fourth album on vinyl for the first time, along with a raft of b-sides, remixes and rarities hitting streaming for the first time.

While containing the singles and fan favourites ‘Sex Is Not The Enemy’, ‘Why Do You Love Me’ and ‘Run Baby Run’, the album arrived to mixed reviews and didn’t perform as well as its hugely commercially successful predecessors.“To be a frank, I never had a particularly good relationship with that record until relatively recently,” Manson told NME. “We released it at a time of immense strife within the band, and dwindling interest from our record label and the general public.”While the rock-leaning record has since become a cult favourite and sits warmly in the hearts of Garbage and their fans, ‘Bleed Like Me’ was made during a period of much inner-band tension and “unpleasant interference” from their label, Interscope Records.“We were nobody’s child at that record label because they hadn’t wanted us there necessarily,” Manson admitted. “They had bought our label Almo, who had been a small independent label, and we had been sucked into this situation where we were a tiny fish in a massive pond.

Interscope at the time were arguably the biggest player in the industry, and there we were stuck without an A&R that was interested in us.“It was really stressful.

They kept on pushing for us to work with people that we didn’t feel were the right fit. As a result of our resistance to that, they decided that we were being really difficult.