Shirley Manson (Interview) Edit

A whole spate of other horrendous things happened to those we loved. One of our friends lost their six year old kid. My best friend from sort of home lost her young husband. It was just a just a ju...

About women, about our role as artists, about our role and culture. But I don't overly concern myself with a legacy of any sort whatsoever. I really couldn't give a shit.

Actually believe it happened to me. I mean, I sometimes I look back in my own life and think I cannot believe this is my life and this is my story. And so, yeah, I went over and started recording w...

Actually, I can sing and actually I'm pretty good at what I do, but I had no confidence in myself my entire career. Almost. So better late than never though, right? I mean, I finally got there, but...

AI and so on so forth. And he said well would you be interested in auditioning? And I was like yeah, of course. Never thinking in a million years this would ever come to anything. And a couple of w...

Almost anyone. And how long were you in the first man and then how did you come to join Angelfish? I was in Goodbyes McKenzie for about 10 years and we had made three studio records and we were sig...

Am Records, well, excuse me, we got sold by Almo Records to Interscope, which was a massive major label and Jerry Moss who ran Elmo Records did not ask our permission, didn't say, you know, I'm thi...

And I feel so sad for them. I feel like my heart literally breaks and I want to shake them and say, take your power back. It's yours. You've earned it. You know, I feel so passionate about it. I wi...

And I got along with all the other kids and yeah, I had no problems. And then I became really aware of my physicality and I think that sort of made me nuts. You know, I suddenly.

And I wanted a distance. I think I wanted to distance myself from them because I was convinced there was no way in hell this would work. I was just like, there is no way in hell this can possibly f...

And I would just wander up and down corridors and use pennies to to get like packets of crisps and maybe a Babe Ruth from the vending machine in the corridor and then scuttle back to my my bedroom ...

And I'm part of the second generation and we're setting new rules and I felt that massive thread between me and Debbie and whoever came before her and who's ever coming behind us, and it was really...

And so I quickly learned about band economics. It was pretty harsh, but I I earned just enough to survive. But, you know, I didn't have a car or anything like that. So I didn't have massive overhea...

And so it was, yeah, I had a difficult time. I was really, I was really disappointed in myself and I was really hard on myself and.

And that's your job. A lead singer is called a lead singer for a reason, you know? And if a band is functioning well, then the lead singer usually is the one who becomes the interface between the w...

And therefore you know this is. Continues to be very difficult for women's legacies to be even acknowledged, let alone stick around. I think we rear our children to believe that the highest currenc...

And this came up in but just to point out, after September 11th, they stopped playing non conformist women on the radio. I mean that's just a blanket.

And was that just because, like, what, what did you hope to do when you graduated and kind of like went out on your own and you weren't feeling great? I, I had, I had no plans. I mean, I really did...

And women historically have been kind of eradicated from the narrative. In all areas of life, you know, whether it's science, whether it's maths, whether it's arts, whether it's, you know, history,...

And you're not serving anything but your own story. And for some reason, it was the way she told me, shared these lessons with me, the way she expressed what being a true artist is. It just it chan...

Anywhere even we began to feel it and I think we all started to go, Oh my God, this could actually be a reality in the end, but it was really unexpected and it was like wildfire. It just. Caught it...

As the hormones kicked in more and more, I got really messed up. Sunday school teacher. So that also messed me up a little. But I was a very devout child. I mean, I had a relationship with Jesus wh...

Be your authentic self. Not that all the other records haven't been authentic to me, because they have, but they haven't been my raw self. They've been the other parts of myself. You know, we're al...

Because I realized, well, there's nobody else out there doing it. This isn't. This is my terrain. And until you know anyone else steps up. You know, this is my territory and I want other people to ...

Because we weren't getting along. We just didn't even contact one another. And then the years passed and my mother got dangerously ill and.

Believed in me. He was like, I just think that you could end up doing something and so then goodbye Miss Mackenzie. We basically just jiggered everything around I took. Like the the lead role of si...

But for me personally, I have no leanings towards any organised faith whatsoever. I, I, I know what I believe to be right and that's what I adhere to. I believe in a moral life, but I don't believe...

But things then I'm just suddenly remembering what your question was. But then the problem was we got sold by.

Butch has a very young daughter. I have young nephew and niece. We wanted them to know about our lives and that was the reason we made that book. And our management didn't want us to do it. They th...

By this point to the musical landscape had changed and we found ourselves having been the four four sort of sort of very forward thinking band. We found ourselves behind the curve and a lot of of o...

Came and helped he was a friend of an of another member of theatre he came to help on vocals and he had this band called goodbye Mister McKenzie and he was looking for a keyboard player and backing...

Dominated. So there was a lot of things going on. I mean, that very quickly changed. But certainly at the beginning, even the the people that we worked with at the record label were always sort of ...

Fuck everybody. Like I don't care if they say we're shit, let's just do something that makes us feel good. And that's what we focused on. And then we've just sort of rebuilt our career on our own t...

Get to be an actor. And I never thought I was good enough writer to be a journalist. So to be honest, I was so panicked all the way through school, particularly as I was retreating more and more fr...

Got frustrated and decided they didn't want to do angelfish anymore and basically left me in the middle of a tour. We were in New York literally on the day I got a phone call from from Garbage to s...

He says. I'm writing this TV show about Terminator and I was like, I love Terminator because I always have. I've loved the whole notion of killer robots and.

He worked his magic, the most patient man in the universe. I mean, there's no argument there. And no, I don't trust the patriarchy to to give us a good account at all. Neither do, quite honestly, d...

I also benefited from that and my mum was an amateur singer. She sang with a local swing band called the Squadron Heirs. And yeah, just music was always a huge part of of our our growing up. And my...

I didn't know that at the time, but now that I'm older and I'm watching other acts come up, I'm like, oh, they're going through. They're going through exactly what we went through. You know, let's ...

I feel really comfortable now. In my late 30s, I was in pain. And I was very angry and I saw a lot of my peers start to.

I grew up. I was born and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1966 I was a 60s baby.

I guess I just felt selfish and thought, you know your time, literally your time is running out and why don't you just try and be brave and actually.

I had an amazing teacher at my high school and an acting teacher who was very much like Miss Jean Brodie. And she plucked about six or seven girls out of my year at school and invited us to join Ed...

I had been asked to sing a boy song, Life on Mars, to honor Pablo, their son, and I sang at the memorial and it was pretty intense. And Butch was there and I bumped into him and.

I just couldn't hack her pushing on me any longer. And I sort of stood up to her and she was like, you know, I'm going to meet you, say you're going to be. And I took my eating out and put flat sho...

I killed us off as a pop band. That killed us as a pop band, for sure. I'm not entirely sad that happened, to be honest. But at the time it was devastating because you just feel like I'm never goin...

I mentioned, you know how I don't know how much more time I've got, but my time is running out. And then there I was watching another, a woman who's 20 years my senior, do what I do every single ni...

I met him in, we hired him. He was working with us for years and I didn't even notice him. He loved me from the second he met me, alleged. In fact, he loved me apparently before he even met me beca...

I really believed in the concept of Jesus. I really fully invested in it. And then again, as a big, as I matured and sort of turned 10, I started realizing all these people that are at my dad's chu...

I was driving onto the Warner Brothers Law and I had my own little parking space with my name on it and one of the directors chairs with my name on it. And it was literally like, I mean, it was lik...

I was so struck by how unusual it is to see an older woman. With a mass amount of currency still owning her, her history, her accomplishments, her humor, her sex. It was so instructive to me and so...

I was too proud to tell him I had no no money and so on so forth. So it was a very, very uncomfortable environment for me. I didn't drive, so I had to walk to the studio and back every day unless I...

I'm not a big fan of organised religion. I don't. I respect people's faith. I would never, ever dare say to somebody you know, you don't know and I do.

It's a commercial enterprise and IT and it preys on the desires of musicians to have their work heard. And it's a nasty relationship, much like a pimp and A and a street Walker. And it's pretty sim...

Like I said, science and so on so forth. If you've if you've disappeared to have children or you've just stopped trying, then you know female competition gets eradicated and it's the male totem pol...

Manoeuvre everybody's rules and make sure everybody's taken care of and even though it's always a group effort, somebody always gets more attention than the other, so it causes tension. I think ten...

Massive band on a small label. We became a small band on a massive label that was in the business of pop commercial success. And we really floundered there and our career basically tanked because w...

More empathetic kind of adult like you said with the. I don't know. I mean, I am, I don't know. I mean, I am an empathetic person. I don't know whether that was because I, I was bullied or whether ...

Much as though, well, there was a multitude of things going on. One, I felt that I wasn't as talented as my band 2. I certainly wasn't as respected and probably never would be. And three, I felt, I...

No, I worked in Miss Selfridge for a long time, and then when we finally got signed, we made a little money for a couple of years. But I wasn't a writer, so I didn't make any of the advance money, ...

Not many people are telling that story because they're too scared to, because women in particular are scared that they're going to talk themselves out of a career. Because, you know, women aren't s...

Of course it does. You're basically being told by your record label you're not doing good enough. And so it's just this constant feeling of like, we just never felt that we were ever getting anywhe...

Off guard and when we finished the record, our record labels came and heard the record, our managers came and everybody was like, whoa, this is incredible. It's incredible. We sent sort of advanced...

Oh, my friend Jen Vespa is a photographer in Boston. Took insane photos of me. Not being a creeper, singing. It's so he's just like looking at you so adoringly. He didn't know, you know? Yeah. She'...

Opportunity and that record, although it sold 1,000,000 copies, it was seen as a massive commercial failure and that's when the problems began because then the record companies started getting invo...

Or freezing cold. And so I was just physically discomforted all the time. And yeah, it wasn't very fun. And then I would work five days a week and then at weekends they would go home to their famil...

Playwrights and and movies and plays and so on and so forth. And that is kind of what I wanted to do. But I also had, you know, fantasies of being a journalist. But if the truth be told, I never re...

Portrait was me. We have been so lucky and we have loved every single second of it. But I think it's important to talk about the realities of it, you know, of that experience, because it's the same...

Pretending to be good, but they're not actually very good. And I thought, you know, as children are really smart that the way I think, I think they figure out really fast of the sort of hypocrisy t...

Raised into the 70s by my parents, my father was a university professor. My mum was a essentially a housewife, a term that's thankfully gone by the wayside. But back then she was a housewife and I ...

Reasons to be honest, beyond our family lineage. I guess that's grand and grandiose enough, but. Umm.

Rule of thumb, they stopped playing anyone who was in sort of disagreement with the mainstream. They we just were unable to get on the radio. And so that sort of put a full stop to all the alt girl...

So I got talking to the screenwriter about James Elroy and we were sort of like really engaged. And all of a sudden, out of the blue he said have you ever done any acting? And I was like, yes, I us...

So yeah, the band was still getting along during Beautiful Garbage and actually we were really proud of the record we made. We we could have done a retread of Virgin 2.0. We decided to take some ri...

Sort of patriarchal system of control. And I mean, I'm talking a very dramatic terms and I think it's there's also very subtle things at play. But I do think essentially that's what's what has gone...

Sort of tabloid intrusion in my life at that point. I didn't feel like I could talk to anybody about it. I didn't feel I could discuss it with anyone, including my band. I was scared that the tablo...

That's been extraordinary. Sophia will murder me if I don't ask you about Terminator. How did you how did you fall into TV? It's a bloody good question. I mean, it's like a joke. This is my life. I...

The momentum of that record release and we never really regained that release opportunity again. And so by the time the world had sort of reconvened and sort of normalish life, normal service had r...

The music industry to make me think that I'm not as good as whatever is going on here 'cause I know I am and I rarely feel confident, but I can smoke 99.9% of anyone here today. And it just made me...

The next incarnation of A&M records. So we were very independent right from the start. So from that point of view, we were very lucky. We were. No, we were not in the major label system for the fir...

Theatrics take place. Young people put on shows and whatnot, and our group was putting on a show and we needed vocal augmentation. I even needed people who could sing. And this boy, young man.

Therefore, women don't always stick around to compete when they're when their bloom of youth starts to fall away, they they hide and they literally go and hide and they stop trying and they stop co...

Things that have really stuck with me about being an artist, about telling the truth, about how you can only really be your best, most complete self as an artist when you're telling 100% the truth.

Think the visibility of women in rock history in general is very poor. You know, you, you talk about Alice Bag for a random example, this phenomenal, you know, character that I knew very little abo...

To be empowered. I feel so passionate about it. I know so many amazing women who literally fold up their wings and disappear because they can't stand the idea of somebody seeing a flaw on their face.

To do this and I was at a memorial for my friend's son, 6 year old son who lost his life to Wilms tumor and.

To my band, I'm going home. I've had enough, I'm going home. This is not fun and I don't want to make another record because I feel like if we make another record and put it out, it doesn't even ma...

Treated as an object and you know, yeah, I think we've got a long mountain to climb, unfortunately, but I think we're at the beginning of really changing. You know how women are represented in our ...

Two days after September 11th and we woke up on September 11th like the rest of the world, and the world had completely changed. And it's amongst much more important things, IE changing the world a...

Umm, I was confident and I was a good student and she just obviously decided I am going to take this person out and she'd sort of terrorised me for a year and I was really scared and then just one ...

Unexpected, uninvited, really in a way, it was I had never ever chased after the kind of success I've enjoyed. I, I can actually remember saying to somebody once I just, I, if I could just be as bi...

Unfortunate soul, as it turns out, she had a She came from a really rough background. Of course, I didn't know this at the time. You know, you're young, you don't understand the world. All I knew w...

Upbringing, like really sort of, you know, my parents loved each other, they got along, they didn't argue. I didn't see anything weird, you know, I mean, I couldn't have had a more straight upbring...

Was starting to get teased for being a redhead. I was told I was ugly. I started to feel ugly. I started looking at all the other women around me who I considered beautiful and they. Yeah, I just a...

We gave Vow, as it turns out, which was our first single, but the only reason we gave that track out was because it was the only one that was even remotely close to being finished. So we put it out...

We had a horrendous situation where the tax had not been paid by the two main songwriters in the band for all their publishing and their recording advances. There'd be no tax paid. So the tax man c...

We have no agency and it's all over and we're on the rubbish heap and we are of no value to culture and society and I feel like women themselves have bought into this. I think they've allowed thems...

We knew she wasn't going to last much longer. She had a very aggressive form of dementia. And so I didn't even think about making music. I was just sort of trying to get through life. And then when...

We made a book for the children in our lives. It was that it was really came from that a very modest desire to inform our kids like as in, you know.

We sort of looked at one another, and he was like, I want to be making music. And it was so good to hear you sing. And I was like, yeah, I want to be making music, too. Like, why are we not making ...

We've just heard from Buchvig and I'm sort of nodding along thinking who the, who the fuck is speech vague. He's like, we just heard from Beachweg. He's very interest produced, you know, Smashing P...

Well, again it goes back to surf. Edinburgh Youth Theatre was still involved in that, was very passionate about being involved in that group and one year we were performing at the Edinburgh Fringe ...

Well, yeah, I mean, it was really strange to go and work with, you know, people I had never met. I didn't know, you know, I'd been in a band for 10 years. I was really tight with my bandmates, and ...

Whole career is now over. You know, by this point I was my mid 30s and I'm like, I'm screwed as a woman, I'm screwed. You don't women don't get to come back from 35 and I completely disastrous care...

With James Elroy they are a novelist, someone who I was obsessive fan of and My Dark Places is one of my all time favorite books and.

Yeah, I just sort of fumble into music really, in a way. They're really, really good student up until high school. And when the hormones kicked in, I went. I just, I don't know what happened. I los...

Yeah, I mean it. It's strange because everything's a bit of a blur, but we as goodbye Miss Mackenzie had been really poorly managed. And.

Yeah, OK. I mean, I didn't have any like real enthusiasm for that either. Yeah, OK, I'll, I'll do that. And then again, I ended up being in that band for 10 years. Did you know, were you confident ...

You know, augment themselves and change themselves. And I got really confused and angry and upset and. And then I somehow have just managed to make my peace with it and now I feel empowered by it.

You know, I feel like I can encourage other women to hold on to their agency. It's really important to me. I want that for every woman I know, every woman I love, every young woman I meet, every ch...

You know, topping charts. I mean, it was crazy. And the thing that I don't think people quite understand about that trajectory for us was that whole period in the 90s was the first time alternative...

You know, upfront individual. So I managed to save myself in the end, but I think if I'd been a more gentle, more reticent female, I probably would have been drowned out. And therefore if you don't...

You know, was on the cusp of of, of having a nervous breakdown. I was under a lot of pressure. You know, I was a huge pop star at this point, you know, and.

You know, you need to have a good Peacock and I was a really effective Peacock actually on a major label when we first came out. We signed to an independent label called Mushroom Records in the UK ...

You want to be creative. And I really started to miss the band and miss the fun. And finally I went to Coachella and I watched a whole day of Coachella and I was looking at the bands and thinking, ...

1000 copies of anything. It would be wow. Yeah. I mean, we were the same. I mean, we were selling millions of records and we were like cockah hoop. We were like, holy fuck, this is I've gone. For a...