Garbage - The Noise11 Interview Archive Series (2002)

Garbage, Paul Cashmere speaks with Butch Vig and Duke Erikson in the Noise11 Interview Archive Series.

When Garbage came along in 1995, the focus was very much on drummer Butch Vig. It was just a few years since he had re-written rock history as producer of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Smashing Pumpkins “.

Behind Vig’s name though were two more sound geniuses, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, who crafted the musicianship for the new band based on their years of studio experience as partners with Vig in Wisconcin’s Smart Studios.

The icing on the cake was an unknown Scottish lass who became the voice of the band, fronting Garbage. Her name was Shirley Manson.

From the start Vig, played a low key role against his high profile resume and allowed the band to evolve into four equal parts. Garbage in 2002 is very much a partnership with equal voices. They all write, they all produce and they all talk openingly.

Paul Cashmere spent time with Butch Vig and Duke Erikson only to find out what they had to say is anything but Garbage.

Paul Cashmere: Duke Erikson, Butch Vig, welcome. Butch it is good to see you back in action after your health scare recently. What happened?

Butch Vig: I came down with a nasty bug from eating a bad oyster and I feel fine now. Basically, under doctors orders I had to stop playing and rest for about two months but I feel fine. The show yesterday was fantastic.

Paul Cashmere: One of the surprises of the show was the guest appearance of Miss Kylie Manson singing “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”.

Duke Erikson: We had to coax her to come out but she came out anyway. We had kinda worked that up just as a kind of a joke. We love that song, we love Kylie, but Garbage doing Kylie is a bit of a stretch.

Paul Cashmere: But the crowd wild.

Duke Erikson: Yeah, they did.

Paul Cashmere: So what are you plans for that, a potential B side?

Butch Vig: You never know, you never know. It was funny because we still haven’t figured out the song. It’s a great pop song but it’s a little more complicated. It’s all too complicated for Garbage to sort out all the way through. At one point Shirley went “that’s enough, I don’t know what to do next”. She was having a few problems with her microphone headset, so it’s always good to launch into a Kylie song.

Paul Cashmere: Speaking of B sides. There was a B sides album planned for Garbage. It almost got there and then disappeared. What’s the story?

Duke Erikson: The B side record actually turned in to “Beautifulgarbage”. When we were on tour, we wanted to put out a B sides compilation but we wanted to put a couple of extra tracks on it. So we recorded “Silence Is Golden” and “Till The Day I Die”. We got so excited about them that we decided to hold on to them and make a new record rather than put out something in the interim. The B side thing is still on the back burner. We shall see. Maybe that will turn into the next proper record, we don’t know.

Paul Cashmere: The thing that struck me with “Beautifulgarbage”, the word reinvention comes to mind. Was that a conscious thing going in to record the album?

Duke Erikson: I think we just wanted to try something new. I think we just wanted to do something different than the first two records. The first two records were very similar. They were staking out a certain territory, but I think we mined that turf pretty well. We just wanted to expand and see where we could go. We just started messing around with all these different genres out of curiosity, like what would happen if Garbage recorded a Phil Spector song. That turned into “Cry These Tears Anymore”. That’s pretty much what this record was all about, just trying some new stuff.

Paul Cashmere: That Phil Spector sound was deliberate then.

Duke Erikson: Yes it was, we admit it.

Paul Cashmere: So as a producer yourself, Butch, how do you rank Phil Spector. Back when he was doing it, it was all in glorious mono.

Butch Vig: Well Phil Spector was a mad genius. The records still sound amazing when you hear them. They are epic. They have a certain darkness to them too in the textures like how he layered the sounds and he did it all live. He couldn’t overdub the way we do now. We are influenced by a lot of production. We love Outkast and Missy Elliot as well and going back to George Martin’s work with The Beatles and everything in between. It’s like what Duke was saying, we aren’t afraid to try anything. We have so many influences that all four of us bring into the band. Part of what makes it exciting is that we will try and do a Phil Spector like track, but them we Garbagise it. It is all chopped up in a computer and there’s some weird processing we did in the drums, but we can’t leave it alone. It’s what makes us who we are as a band that we have all these diverse influences.

Paul Cashmere: People talk about a Butch Vig sound but on “Beautifulgarbage” you’ve deliberately broken what was fixed.

Butch Vig: It is not really my sound though. It is all four of us banging our heads on the wall, because all four of us produce. Shirley has as many production ideas as Duke and Steve and me. It’s really sort of a weird, dysfunctional democracy. I don’t think there are many bands who could work like we do. Everybody brings a lot of ideas and inspiration to the table when we are recording. It is a very intimate process. People always ask us how the songs are written and we just go in and we jam. Usually when we get something that sounds cool and it’s starting to happen, Shirley will get inspired and come up with some lyrics or a melody off the top of her head. At least all the songs come from a very organic place with all of us just jamming in the studio.Paul Cashmere: Often bands talk about how when everyone in the band is a songwriter how difficult it is to get your songs on the album. In your case, everyone is a producer. Is that what creates the diversity…

Duke Erikson: …And the tension. It’s definitely the four of us dumping our ideas into the same pot and stirring it up. With the songwriting too, one of us may come with a great idea and be excited about it and the other three will sometimes just say it sucks. Or you come with a song idea that you are really excited about and everybody likes it but by the time everybody has their way with it, it’s not what you came up with in the first place. You have to be willing to accept that and just be a part of that process instead of having too big of an ego, I suppose. I think once you get past that and realise that it is the four of you and not just you, it is exciting just to see where things go. There are songs on here that started out as one thing and turned out to be something totally different. It is fascinating to be part of that.

Paul Cashmere: As producer’s you get to play with the sounds a bit. Is it correct of me to say that around 1 minute 12 seconds into Cherry Lips there is a Microsoft Windows sound?

Butch Vig: Duke added some sound effects following her vocals.

Duke Erikson: Oh God yeah, I forgot about all those little whooshes.

Butch Vig: It’s kind of cheesy but it made sense at the time. That song is almost campy in the production. We’ll have to see if we can’t work that into the live. Put that in the live show

Paul Cashmere: You guys go way back before Garbage and Smart Studios. You actually had your own band together.

Butch Vig: Somewhere in the haze of the 70s we hooked up I guess.

Paul Cashmere: The fact you became Spooner and then you became producers and then you became Garbage, do you feedback ever to those old Spooner days and get sparked creatively as Garbage?

Duke Erikson: I think we learned a lot doing that.

Butch Vig: We made our own records back then too. The production was a part of that. We loved messing with the sounds a bit. We were experimenting with that stuff back then. It was one of the main reasons Smart Studios even got started was to make our own records, and then all these other bands started showing up.

Paul Cashmere: How active is Smart these days.

Butch Vig: It’s very active. It functions as a proper business. We have a whole staff that works there. Even when Garbage works there we pay for studio time. It is very inexpensive compared to recording in Melbourne, or Paris or London or whatever, but we have to pay our way just for the gear and the rent and stuff. It’s cool. The place has two studios, so we would float between the tracking rooms. Downstairs we put in a Trident Air Range, which is an old recording console. It sounds amazing. We recorded all the basic tracks for “Beautifulgarbage” on it but The Eagles ‘Hotel California’ was recorded on it, Led Zeppelin recorded on it. Bowie and T.Rex recorded on it. A lot of bands worked there.

Paul Cashmere: A superstar console

BV : Yeah, it has quite a pedigree.

Duke Erikson: We can’t be too sure what else they did on it.

Butch Vig: We heard some Stevie Nicks rumours but we can’t really say.

Duke Erikson: Edit that out

Paul Cashmere: What about offers for production work. Do you get a lot of offers still?

Butch Vig: I think a lot of people know I’m in Garbage pretty much full time now but I do one-off things, some remixes. I did some tracks for The Offspring. I just did a remix for Limp Bizkit in December. They are only a couple of days here and there because Garbage is pretty much all consuming. We work in the studio, then the record comes out, then there’s videos and promotion, gearing up for a tour. This is going to be a long tour this year. We plan on staying out pretty much all year and go all over the world again, like we did on V2.O. So we may be gone for the entire year.

Paul Cashmere: One of the cool things that Garbage got to do, and not too many artists have got to do this, you performed a James Bond theme.

Duke Erikson: That was an amazing experience, even being invited to do it, let alone working on the song. It was incredible. I don’t know that we still really get it yet that we are actually part of that pantheon.

Paul Cashmere: It’s one of those things that will now live forever for you.

Duke Erikson: Exactly. I think once another Bond movie comes out and ours is put in the past and up on the shelf we will actually see it sitting there and realise we were part of that.

Paul Cashmere: What’s the selection process for finding an act to perform a Bond theme?

Duke Erikson: Obviously some bands were fortunate enough to write a Bond theme but this was David Arnold (who wrote the song). He had been talking to Shirley a lot and he was just a fan of her voice more than anything. Just because of that communication it happened. It started out as a friendly banter and next thing we know we are doing a Bond theme. That’s the way a lot of things happen I guess. I think they wanted to capture fans of the Garbage sound and sort of contemporise it somehow. I think we succeeded.

Paul Cashmere: Bond themes by their very nature tend to be dark and if anything on “Beautifulgarbage” I can hear “Untouchable” and “So Like A Rose” have probably been inspired by your Bond work.

Butch Vig: Probably. I think we’ve been lucky as a band. A lot of directors have approached us at times to work on film music because they say our albums are so cinematic, which we take as a compliment because we are all huge cinema buffs. There is a sort of certain atmosphere and darkness on some of the songs but we sort of liken that as texture like a painting. When we worked on the Bond track we tried to make it sound like a Bond song but also sound like a Garbage song. There was a sort of chemistry between the two that clicked on that.

Paul Cashmere: Shirley thanks Courtney Love on the cover. What was Courtney’s part in Shirley’s “thankyou”?

Duke Erikson: Shirley stole the title of the album from “Celebrity Skin”. It was a line of Courtney’s. She saw it in the lyric sheet and it made sense. That’s what that was all about. Apart from that, Shirley is a huge fan.