Shirley Manson on The Chemicals

Q&A with Garbage’s Shirley Manson

I’m loving “The Chemicals.” Can you tell me about your collaboration with Brian Aubert?

It’s something we’ve sort of begun as a tradition from our days of doing duets with people we really love and admire, and this time around we wanted to collaborate with Brian just because we’ve had the pleasure of bumping into him on the circuit. He and I met doing a benefit at the Pablove Foundation a few years ago now, and we just love him. We love his energy and he’s really funny and an amazing talent and an incredible singer. And we love that he sounds androgynous — you don’t know what he is. You don’t know whether he’s a girl or a boy a lot of the time, and I love that.

Definitely a higher pitch.

Yeah he can sound — he actually is an amazing singer. He can do anything, which is actually a kind of annoying thing about Brian [laughs]. But when you listen to “The Chemicals” you can’t really tell who’s singing what part — because I’m female, you’d think I was singing the top line, but actually I’m singing the low part. So we just enjoyed playing around with that. It’s not often you get to do that with a young vocalist.

You’ve worked with director Sophie Muller many times before — since the ’90s. How did the concept for this video come about?

— we’ve always been talking about the beauty of small punk clubs.

Well a lot of the people in the video are Sophie’s relatives and I know some of them, so we just thought it would be We were sort of rueing the loss of a lot of those clubs we’ve always been talking about the beauty of small punk clubs. We were sort of rueing the loss of a lot of those clubs that Sophie and I grew up in — that sort of sweaty excitement and the sensuality that comes when you cram people in such a tiny space. And we just thought it would go really well with the track. She had the footage and showed it to me and said, “I’ve got this footage, and if you love it I’ll cut it to ‘The Chemicals,'” and that’s about what she did.

We’re very blessed to be so close with a great filmmaker. We wouldn’t have been able to have a beautiful visual piece to accompany this track without her, so we really are so grateful to her. She’s been such a great collaborator to us and really generous.

So she filmed this independently? Where was this?

Yeah, she shot it in this tiny little club in London, and got her niece and nephew and all their little pals to come over and just let her film them for an afternoon.

It’s very evocative — that’s what I love about it. It just seems to go with all the lyrics really well. We just got really lucky.

You’ve released singles for the past few Record Store Days (this’ll be the fourth, I believe) collaborating with other artists. How did this tradition arise?

We took some time to get away from all our contractual obligations and we started up our own label. We decided we wanted to do things purely for the joy of doing them. We felt that being in the major record label system, we had been robbed of a lot of our joy. That sounds dramatic, but it’s true.

So when we started up our label, we decided the first thing we wanted to do was a Record Store Day piece because we have catered for many years to record company execs saying, “Well you can’t do that, there’s no money in that, so you’re not doing that.” It’s all become about money and money generating, and we just decided we were going to release ourselves from all that nonsense we got literally caged by. We just decided we’d pursue it for the love of it.

And we’re all big vinyl fans. That’s how we listened to music as we were growing up, so we decided that we wanted to do something special for Record Store Day, and because we’ve all got incredibly low self-esteem [laughs], we decided it wouldn’t be special enough if it was just us. Therefore, we thought it would be amazing if we worked with really great artists and did something that we never did on our major record label, which was to get to perform just for the sake of hanging out for an afternoon and recording a song together. So that’s where that idea came from and then we just stuck with it.

Makes a lot of sense. You mentioned vinyl being of importance — do you think we’ve lost something along the way with newer music formats like MP3s and streaming?

there is something incredibly focused about listening to vinyl.

You know, who needs another artist harping on about streaming vs. digital and the value of vinyl? I feel like the digital realm has brought a lot of great things to our world but[laughs] there is something incredibly focused about listening to vinyl. It demands that you pay attention; it demands that you immerse yourself in that sort of dynamic with the music. You can’t just sort of put a piece of vinyl on and zone out. For whatever reason, it forces you to pay attention the entire way through, then physically get up to change the side.

There’s something weird about that — I don’t know what it is, but it creates a certain dynamic that’s unique and really magical. Because we’re all older, that’s how we first experienced music and we’re all tied to that. We will always be married to that romance for the rest of our lives whether we like it or not. We don’t know any better, or different.

Full article: Mashable