Garbage’s lead singer, Shirley Manson, has revealed the difficult period that her band endured when their label chose to invest in No Doubt instead of them. Speaking to NME in an interview about the reissue of their 2005 album Bleed Like Me, Manson said that the period when the album was released was one of “immense strife within the band, and dwindling interest from our record label and the general public.”
Manson also said that she had discovered that Interscope Records had prioritised No Doubt over Garbage during a flight from Los Angeles to London. She said that she was sat next to a well-known rockstar who had let slip that there had been a vote at an Interscope meeting to decide whether to invest in No Doubt or in Garbage. They had decided to support No Doubt, leaving Garbage feeling left out, frustrated and isolated.
The comments caused Manson to feel like there was only space for one female-fronted rock band in the music industry at the time, saying that they were “meeting the same resistance at radio stations too; they were also saying, ‘Well we’ll be playing No Doubt, we won’t be playing Garbage’”. The experience left Manson and her bandmates feeling stressed and at odds with each other. She said that “it caused a lot of heartbreak.”
Manson said she has only recently come to appreciate Bleed Like Me, an album that “caused a massive civil war inside Garbage.” Despite the challenges, the band has remained together all these years and is currently on a UK and European headlining tour this summer
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