Garbage’s small-venue big-gig

We love powerful women in music biz and aren’t talking about ghettoising gender behind slogans like ‘Girl Power’ or diva-concepts. Garbage are fronted by a woman who’s taken males on their own game and come up with her own terms. It could be a club-type show like tonight (and tomorrow) but that only larges the impact of Shirley Manson.

When she comes onstage it is like that unfortunate line from a long-forgotten (we hope) song of Duranduran ‘…Hit me like an atom bomb!’ (Probably a misquote but couldn’t be arsed to dig out the song and re-check, this is the gist of it, anyway.) She comes on like a ‘twister’, an untamed force that sucks everyone in its rotating funnel.

Garbage is a band and the other three guys – Butch Vig still missing after his ill-health bout, replaced by Matt Walker, ex-Smashing Pumpkins – are important but the character, the sound and vision of the band is shaped by this Scottish lass. She’s not a babe in the traditional sense and her latest incarnation is rather boyish but there is a strange sexual magnetism at work here. Shirl is a charismatic performer you can’t take you eyes off onstage!

Well, the way she looked – in hot, hot, hot pants – and at this distance, even more so! As she rightly remarks at one point, it is the smallest gig the band’s played in seven years and it was so good they should certainly do it more often, although obviously non-profitable. The band promise to play some obscure b-sides is fulfilled only to demonstrate the change that’s occurred within the band prior to recording of the new album, ‘beautifulgarbage’: the band dispensed with its poppier ingredient and dug deeper into their collective soul.

They’ve certainly abandoned the easier-appealing elements and turned into the rockers that can produce more power than an average HM band. Even the old songs gain another edge in live situation. And hits arrive with such regularity that it is amazing how many songs one knows (intimately) in the set: ‘Subhuman’, ‘Queer’, ‘Push It’, ‘Stupid Girl’ or, this reviewer’s signature tune, ‘Only Happy When It Rains’…

On the crossroads signposted bulls**t and haven, we head in the right direction. Keep your Alanis, Kylie, Destiny’s Child and the rest of the contemporary females in their playpen, grown man go for the likes of Shirl, the rock’s dominatrix!

There was a ‘Happy Birthday’ singing to Shirley that places her in the Virgo signage. Not a surprise, verdict!