The Signal: What is it like playing at a big event like Music Midtown; is it a good experience for you as a band, or would you rather play in a smaller venue?
Steve Marker: You know, the wonderful thing about where we are right now is that I don’t have to answer that question because we have a whole spectrum of shows this year, ranging from 300,000 people in Russia-which was a massive crowd-which was so exciting and cool and we couldn’t believe it, and tonight were playing a much smaller club here in Richmond, VA, and that’s gonna be great too, because its all hardcore fans who have waited a long time to come to this show, and it’s a very intimate venue and that’s going to be great, too. We’ve learned to adapt to any situation and we enjoy it all.
TS: Your most recent album Not Your Kind of People is the first album you have put out in 7 years. How do you feel like Garbage has evolved as a band since your first album?
SM: I think we are a lot more confident, and maybe that’s not saying much, but as songwriters we are more confident and, definitely, as performers. We’ve played live a lot, and that makes a big difference when we made the first record; we didn’t even expect to do any shows-it was just a studio thing. And then it kind of took off and we realized we needed to go out and play, and that was really intimidating at first, but now it’s more fun. It’s more a like a celebration that we look forward to every night and I think Shirley is so much more wonderfully confident than she was back then. Especially as a performer, which you will see in Atlanta.
TS: Do you think Garbage has been able to stick to their original sound, or do you think that the band has had to adapt its sound to contemporary music?
SM: You know, to be honest, I don’t think we’ve adapted or changed anything that we do-really, I don’t think, that we are able to. I think it would sound really stupid if we went out and tried to sound like Skrillex or whatever the most current thing on Pitchfork is, this week, or whatever most current on the radio charts. I think we decided a long time ago to sound like Garbage and that’s all we can really do, and I think that works.
TS: Is it true that you got the name “Garbage” from your original studio work, mixing and mashing things up?
SM: It was just a joke. I guess the story is that it was a Nine Inch Nails remix that we were working on-something like that-and then it was just like this huge mess of fuzz-boxes and echoes and flangers and other distortion, and it was sounding like an unbelievable mess, and then, somebody commented that it sounded like garbage. So we said “that’s a pretty good name for a band,” and we’ve regretted that ever since, but there you go.
TS: You recorded your first four albums in Smart Studios, your own studio. What was it like recording your most recent album outside of Smart Studios?
SM: You know, I think it was good in a way to go somewhere else. It’s not like we went to some glamorous place in Hawaii; we basically went to this basement in LA where Butch and Shirley live now, and Billy, our engineer, has this room that’s basically like a little mix room, but its about 10×14 feet-it’s really small. It was good for us to have a change of scenery, because I think we had gotten a little used to [Smart Studios]. We’d spent 10 years in Smart, and you just sort of fall into patterns. You know, that was a bigger building and people could sort of wander off if they weren’t totally into what was going on at the time, and I think that maybe diffused what was our focus a little bit. It was good to be in this little room with basically a computer with two speakers and basically a bunch of guitars and keyboards, there wasn’t any other place to go in this little room that we worked in so everybody had to sit on the couch and be totally present for what was happening and I think that made for better music because you had to kind of react to what was going on right away. You couldn’t say “Oh so-and-so is going to do this for a while, so I’m going to go to the bar for four hours and come back.” It was much more focused, and it made for quicker, faster recording, and, therefore, a better result.
TS: Garbage has been touring off and on, and this is your fourth run through the United States on this tour, correct? Is this one of your longer tours?
SM: Something like that. Not yet, but we’re going to keep going. It might end up being it. When our album “Version 2.0” came out, I think we ended up touring for almost two years, 18 months at least. That was long-that was too long, and I don’t think we can do that anymore. We’re trying to do things a little more sensibly where we get a little bit more time off in between. Bits and pieces of touring this time, and we want to keep doing it, we’re having a fantastic time on the road; we’ve finally learned how to enjoy ourselves and not beat ourselves up so badly touring with everybody being sick and pissed off, and we’re working really hard to avoid that, and, so far, it’s been really fun. It’s amazing, we realize how lucky we are to have people that want to come out and see us, after all this time, and they’re so excited for the shows that we cant help but be excited for the shows, we’re lucky to have that core audience that will still come out and support us-and we really appreciate that.
TS: Garbage has been described as “grunge” or “post-grunge.” Do you think you deserve to fit into that category, or is that term a product of the times for you guys?
SM: To me, that never really fit us. To me, that means more like Mudhoney and The Melvins and Soundgarden, and more sort of a specific Seattle take on metal. We still don’t know what we are, because we’re sort of a pop band, but we’re not really. We’ve got loud guitars but also electronics going on. Who knows? I don’t know but I don’t think its fair to call us grunge.
TS: What was it like getting to work on the James Bond theme for The World Is Not Enough?
MS: It was really interesting. First of all, there’s only a few bands or musicians who have ever gotten to do that; it’s sort of an iconic thing, so to have that once-in-a-lifetime chance is amazing, and even people who are our relations, like my father-in-law, never really understood what we did. “You go play music somewhere? Hmmm, that doesn’t sound very respectable.” But now we can say, “yeah, but we did the James Bond theme.” That’s pretty cool. It was also pretty instructive about how movies work and how many people are involved with every decision; and you don’t really get to do what you want to do, you sort of get to do what you want to do and there’s a lot of compromising and it’s such a bigger industry than what we usually deal with, so it was pretty eye opening. We’re glad we got to do it; we didn’t write the song, but we got to work with a giant orchestra, which was pretty fun.
TS: Is it true that you were the one to first discover Shirley Manson and bring her into the band Garbage?
SM: Yeah, that’s true. We were looking for a voice for a singer, and we didn’t really know what was going to happen, what would fit in with what we were trying to do at the time, and we thought about using some other people and we were kind of lost, and she had this band for a brief time called Angelfish and they made one video, I think, and they showed it once on MTV on 120 minutes, which was on at midnight on a Sunday-for an hour they would play good videos and the rest was terrible. They would play good music and they played that video once and I happened to see it and I loved her voice right away because it wasn’t a high, chirpy, pop chick voice-it was kind of dark and sultry, like a Patty Smith or a Chrissie Hynde-type voice, that immediately I thought “that’s what we need,” and I tracked down the video, I got someone to mail me the VHS tape of the video, and I played it for the guys and it worked out from there. It was a lucky event for us for sure.
TS: You are quoted in an early interview after the release of your first album saying that you wanted to “take pop music and make it as horrible sounding as you could.” What is your take on contemporary pop music now?
SM: Well, first of all, that’s a really dumb quote on my part. I’ve regretted it ever since. I don’t know about pop, though. Years ago, if you said that I’d know exactly what you meant, like the top 10 on the billboard charts, but I don’t even know what that means anymore. There are so many different avenues of what people are hearing, and it isn’t just one thing anymore. It’s not just the top 40 hits on the radio, you’ve got stuff on blogs, and whatever’s popular on Pitchfork, and there’s so many ways that people are getting music. I think its kind of cool; people can seek out what thrills them rather than being told what’s good. There’s some good pop, as always, but there’s a lot of shit too.
TS: Besides being on tour, given your history of producing, are you working with any other artists in the studio at the moment?
SM: Right now it’s just full on with Garbage. We don’t know how long it’s going to be. We’re already trying to book more shows; next year we’re going to Australia in February, and we want to go back to Europe in the summer and keep going. Also, we’re probably going to start working on a new album pretty soon, maybe as soon as January. Right now it’s all Garbage, and there’s not a lot of time to do anything else. If was going to do another project, I’d need a certain block of time to focus on it, and it doesn’t look like there is that kind of time in the near future, so I guess not.
TS: Where are you most excited about visiting on your tour (besides Atlanta, obviously)?
SM: Well, Atlanta is number one, we haven’t been to South America ever, and people have always said it’s amazing and the crowds are awesome and out of control. Were going down there in October and I’m really looking forward to that. We just played in Mexico two nights ago and that was incredible; the fans are very passionate, I’ll say that. It’s really exciting; we love going there. If it was a bad place we wouldn’t go there, so every place I’m looking forward to. We’re going back to Russia in November and playing some places I’ve never even heard of in Russia, which is kind of cool, because 20 years ago I wouldn’t have even been allowed to go there, and now we’re going there to play a rock show. It’s a pretty wild experience, but Atlanta’s number one for sure.
