GIG REVIEWS

Garbage
@ The Apollo, Manchester
6th April 2002
www.vanguard-online.co.uk

 So here we have Garbage in a natural setting, after the stadium tour. It's a marvellous old building, big but intimate. They're a two-headed monster, with heavily produced pop sparkles on disc, while here on stage they are blisteringly loud and rock and roll. Shirley Manson LOVES the stage and runs around to great advantage, pausing to swivel her hips or big-up the girls. And the audience LOVES Garbage, but mostly Shirley. The bouncing zone is big and everyone else is rapt and so they should be - this is a band, polished and practised, consummately professional but, apparently, having a good time too. They kick off with old album tracks and singles before hitting the new stuff. But everyone knows the new stuff too, so there are a lot of songs to sing and bounce too. I say 'bounce' because the crowd is so well behaved that they don't mosh, no-one gets bruised, they bounce energetically but carefully.

I find a lot of little borrowings in Garbage and I wonder how much they are conscious tips of the hat and how much reflects their influences. I not only heard some of House Of The Rising Sun but even some Bend Me, Shape Me amongst other quotes and borrowings.

Garbage are a pop band playing rock or a rock band playing pop. They blister ahead but skip some of the clichE9s - what little guitar strangling there is is in a different tone, switching the signifiers. Similarly semiotically perverse, this is a pop band with three men yet Shirley plays up the Riot Gurrrls thing to her (more than normally) female audience and name checks Courtney Love. The forgotten men turn out a great sound from drums of Butch Vig to the energetic rhythm guitar of Steve Marker and Duke Erikson's strange but appropriate lead guitar noises. Shirley picks up a guitar for So Like A Rose and plays barely adequately while Duke throws hammer-ons and all sorts of trickery around. In a show of telepathy she spends a long time telling us she doesn't care how bad she plays. She's really good at working the audience, stopping often for chats, flattering us, sharing insights. She tells us about JT Leroy and how Cherry Lips was written for him. She swaps bangles with the crowd and advises someone not to lose their watch. I felt transported back to when I saw Patti Smith at the same venue - Shirley Manson will make a great rock n roll matriarch in a couple of decades. The image is complete when Shirley sings "I feel upset, let's do something wicked" in an almost exact lift of Patti's "Revenge" (it's on Wave - go and listen to it - it's great).

How much of Garbage is studied craft and market targeting, how much is love of what's gone before and homage? I never get involved in the concert though I'm down near the front, I feel like someone watching a (very good) band. Detached. They work hard and sweat so maybe it is the material, which has a postmodernist stake through its heart. This view is almost confirmed by their cover of The Rolling Stones' Wild Horses being the most emotionally involving song of the evening, though the whole room was singing along to Happy When It Rains at the end of the night. Nearly two hours of stagecraft and musical invention. A more than happy crowd. So how come there was admiration in my head but not elation in my chest or lift in my feet when I left?

Ross McGibbon