Garbage have announced the details of their 20th anniversary reissue of the band’s third studio album, Beautiful Garbage. The reissue will be released on October 1st, exactly 20 years after the album was first released. Riding our archives, we found an interview with Butch Vig discussing the album with MURRAY ENGLEHEART prior to playing The Big Day Out.

Ahead of the album re-release, Garbage have released a previously unheard version of ‘Androgyny’. ‘Androgyny’ features lyrical content and a message that was ahead of its time upon its release in 2001, and was reflective of Garbage’s new pop-leaning sound.

Speaking of the Beautiful Garbage reissue, Shirley Manson says, “we wanted to celebrate the release of our third album in the same manner as we have celebrated the 20th anniversaries of our previous two records, as we cherish this third child of ours just as much as its predecessors. Over time it has garnered more and more respect from our fans, with many of the songs remaining in rotation in our live sets to this day. We’ve always felt incredibly proud of this record and felt it was in many ways very much ahead of its time.

“Twenty years down the line, we are all exceedingly grateful to have such well-crafted songs in our discography and are very proud that against all the odds we are still standing and can give our beloved album the tribute it so very much deserves.”  

Garbage 

by Murray Engleheart

Marking a departure from the sound that Garbage had established on their first two releases, Beautiful Garbage was written and recorded over the course of a year. Shirley Manson chronicled the band’s efforts weekly online becoming one of the first high-profile musicians to keep an internet blog in the pro-cess. The album expanded on the band’s acclaimed musical variety with more direct lyrics and sounds that mixed rock with electronic, new wave, hip-hop and girl group influences. Beautiful Garbage reached #1 on the ARIA Chart when it was released in 2001, was immediately certified gold, and went on to spend four weeks in the top-10. 20 years later, the album is certified double platinum in Australia.

If anyone has a right to put forward the view that rock as we know or knew it is dead, it’s probably Garbage’s Butch Vig.

Producing such landmark recordings as Nirvana’s Nevermind and to a lesser degree the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream affords him that. Pop, however, goes on forever.

“Pop is all-encompassing,” Butch Vig says, lying in bed in a London hotel suite waiting for a pot of the day’s first coffee. “I mean R.E.M. is pop, Eminem is pop, I love Dre’s production. Hardcore hip-hop is the most mainstream pop there is in America right now and it’s also the most cutting edge production. It kind of blows my mind.

“The alternative – what used to be cutting edge rock bands – has become really boring. Guitar, bass, drums – it’s very one-dimensional. Then you hear these tracks by Missy Elliott and they’re so fractured and weird and cut-up, to me it’s incredibly inspiring.”

Garbage’s third album, Beautiful Garbage, has that state-of-the-culture sonic ethos woven all over and through it. Recorded between April 1999 and May 2000, it’s a representation of the band’s uniquely skewed pop that has as much to do with Brian Wilson and Sparks as it does Siouxie and The Banshees and The Beatles.

Typically, there’s plenty of razors and subversion among the musical flower arrangements. ‘Cherry Lips’, for example, is about a male prostitute who had a sex change operation in an attempt to transform his personal hell. And yes, Shirley Manson is still effortlessly capable of making you lose your train of… um… thought.

“We wanted this to feel more like a band and we wanted to keep the record simpler,” Vig says. “There’s a lot more live playing on this. All the songs came from us sitting in a room and knocking heads together just writing music. They all came from a very free form, almost improvisational beginning and that’s the first time that’s ever happened. I don’t think we had the confidence just to sort of write from that standpoint [in the past]. “On Version 2.0, we polished everything and we’d keep adding layers and we’d go back and Shirley would rewrite a verse. But on this there’s a lot of first takes. There’s like five songs that are basically one take and ‘So Like A Rose’ and ‘Silence Is Golden’ that’s a live vocal take, one pass and that’s it.”

Being able to successfully work in such a manner is a powerful testament to the unit’s newfound creative capabilities.

“We have immense confidence now of our abilities,” Vig continues. “I think people assumed when they heard the first record that we really had this master plan and we knew what we were doing, but we never did. The chemistry was extremely awkward between us. We sort of grew up as a band when we toured for Version 2.0 because we lived in a tour bus together for almost two years and walking onstage every night you develop a sort of camaraderie, a certain confidence that your mates aren’t going to let you down and also how you communicate. We weren’t afraid to yell at each other or to bitch each other out or encourage each other and that really did sort of translate into how we worked in the studio this time.

“On Version 2.0, we’d work on a song together, but then all of us really fought to bring in our own ideas. This time it wasn’t the ego thing. We’d be playing live at the same time and as Shirley was singing we’d morph the song around her melodies and her phrasing. There’s still some songs that are very layered and produced on the record, like ‘Parade’ or ‘Shut Your Mouth’ and they came from a very simple place.”

The gorgeous ‘Can’t Cry These Tears’ might have had a simple beginning, but the sweep of finished product is anything but basic.

“We wanted to try and write a Phil Spector song,” Vig says. “I got a box set a couple of years ago by Phil Spector and as I started going back and listening to it, it just blew my mind that he created this sonic universe.”

Is Vig driven to continually attempt to break musical barriers, as his background suggests?

“I know on the first record I felt like I had everything to lose because no-one really knew Duke or Shirley or Steve. They had worked as producers and Shirley had been in a band, but they were way under the radar. I felt like ‘If this band fails I’m going to be the one who goes down with it’ so I was unbelievably obsessive working on that first record. I felt some pressure making [Version 2.0] but not as much. People would tell me we put that on as a reference while we’re mixing just sonically or to show how you can take songs and you can challenge the listener with what you’re doing with an arrangement.

“We gave that up or I gave some of that up on this record. I didn’t feel that kind of pressure. We did try to stretch the songs arrangement-wise and try a lot of new different things. This is the most diverse record that we’ve done. ‘Silence is Golden’ doesn’t sound anything like ‘Cherry Lips’ and ‘Cherry Lips’ doesn’t sound anything like ‘Cup of Coffee’ and I don’t think there are many bands that could do that or would want to do that.”

The 2021 release of Beautiful Garbage has been remastered from the original recordings. The album will be released across deluxe 3LP (with stickers, a poster and a setlist), white double vinyl, black double vinyl, deluxe 3CD, and deluxe digital formats. The deluxe packages include b-sides, demos, and remixes.