Lifting the lid on Garbage

Shirley Manson (2nd R) says tension within Garbage had been brewing and so Bleed Like Me was a bitch to make.

If it wasn't for Shirley Manson's huge, infectious laugh, it would be easy to mistake her for a cynical bitch.

Ask her how it felt to present Muse with a Brit Award in February and she spits in her Scots accent, "Oh, thrilling. It's just a [expletive] boring drag. They mean nothing until you win something ... and then you wake up in the morning and you realise it's all a crock of shit." Cue huge, infectious guffaw.

It would be too easy to paint Manson as a diva. Contrary to her powerful, sexy, untouchable image as frontwoman of Garbage - the band into which she was recruited by three American studio boffins headed by drummer-producer Butch Vig - Manson is a warm and engaging conversationalist. She's polite, funny and absolutely not scary. In fact, she's very nice.

Manson prefers the description "hyper-sensitive and empathetic".

"That is one of my biggest strengths in the job that I have," she says. "But it's also a pain in the arse.

"People who are hyper-sensitive tend to be firing on all cylinders. They don't just operate on one level. They are aware of undercurrents in conversation and interaction and can be quite over-stimulated. That tends to run into neuroses and anxiety and stress and temper. But it can also mean that you're very tender and very loving."

Perhaps that explains what has kept Manson and her bandmates, Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson, together for so long. This month they release their fourth album, Bleed Like Me, 10 years since their eponymous debut, which sold 4 million albums worldwide.

Back then you could define Garbage's sound as a merging of polished rock guitars and electronic beats, a formula that drew on their studio firepower. (Before Garbage, Vig famously produced Nirvana's Nevermind, Smashing Pumpkins' Gish and albums by Sonic Youth among others.)

Coupled with Manson's intense vocal that spawned a run of hit singles: I'm Only Happy When It Rains, Stupid Girl, Queer, Milk, and from their super slick follow-up, Version 2.0: I Think I'm Paranoid, When I Grow Up and Special.

But since the rise of the MP3 player and the bedroom producer, things needed to change. Although their last album beautifulgarbage produced some interesting ideas, it marked their lack of direction.

"Over the course of 10 years, technology has just engulfed the music world so it's not something that's so interesting to us," says Manson.

"Certainly at this time in our lives, what was of huge interest to us was to make a really straightforward record that sounded the way we do when we go out and play live."

The result is a beefier, stripped-back rock'n'roll album, characterised by the raunchy guitars of opening track Bad Boyfriend featuring guest Dave Grohl's typically fiendish drumming.

There's another reason for that grittier, angrier sound - Bleed Like Me was a bitch to make. Manson says tension within the band had been brewing since beautifulgarbage and things came to a head when they returned to the studio.

"It was a combination of us taking each other for granted and not really respecting what we had as a group and being careless with it," Manson explains. "Nobody really had the desire or the drive to go through what we had done on the last go-around which had been problematic to make."

It took a year of arguing, frustration and creative struggle before they had a "huge blow-up" and Vig walked out, saying he wanted to reassess his life. And that was when Garbage split up.

For four months, Manson didn't know what to do with herself. So she did "sweet [expletive] all".

"I ate, I ran, I watched movies, I read books, I watched basketball and that is about the sum total of the four months I took off. It was [expletive] fantastic."

So why go back?

"I have been offered a lot of opportunities to go solo over the years. It's certainly not something I'm completely ruling out but I have been in bands since I was 15 years old and I'm in love with the whole idea, the whole romance of being with a gang of your own kind. I was such an outsider for so long when I was a kid and I ached to be part of something and I could never seem to fit in anywhere and then when I found my band it was the first time in my life that I thought, 'I belong here, this is my place.'

"And I don't really want to give that up easily. I mean, everything comes to an end at some point but I'm going to ride this pony for as long as I can, until I get thrown off."

Manson won't be drawn into discussing the details of the band's disagreements but one thing's certain - seven years after singing "When I grow up I'll be stable" (When I Grow Up), it hasn't happened.

On the new album's title track she sings of a young woman who finds relief from starving herself and who "takes dad's scissors to her skin". It could be a reference to when she used to cut herself as a teenager. But Manson says the song is about accepting the flaws in others and finding common ground.

"Some people are really freaked out by it and think it's overly aggressive. Other people are totally on my wavelength with it and I think the people who receive that song are people who understand people's pain isn't always expressed in the most obvious manners and that we all express our humanity in different ways.

"To me, the song is coming from the place of me looking at the world and seeing how desperate we've all become and how much conflict there is in the world at large and how scary it is when really, essentially, we're all human beings that share very similar outlooks on life, regardless of our religion, regardless of our colour, regardless of our moral values.

"Essentially, I think human beings are very much alike and that's what the song is about. Regardless of how weird people may seem, actually we're all the same."

She is a fierce supporter of gay marriage and is scathing of the Bush administration's anti-abortion views. Incensed by the furore over Janet Jackson's expose at the Superbowl, she wrote Sex is Not the Enemy about the "strange rise of the moral right in America".

"They had poor old Janet Jackson on the front cover of USA Today three days in a row and meanwhile there was a war going on in Iraq that wasn't getting any coverage in USA Today, certainly not on the front pages. I just thought this was really irresponsible and ridiculous. How could a beautiful titty be more important or more newsworthy than the invasion of another country? I just didn't understand it and I thought it was absolutely laughable. It was so laughable it made me want to cry."

It might not have attracted the same level of attention but when Manson cut off her trademark red hair during her "emotionally wrought" beautifulgarbage period, she couldn't believe the reactions she got.

"It's like any woman - you just do dramatic things to your hair every now and again. But because I have the focus of the spotlight on me it's like [she puts on a dramatic announcer voice]: 'Shirley Manson sports an image change!' No, I just had my [expletive] hair cut, thank you."

The other downside to being a rock chick, she says, is spending most of her time in male company. When Garbage went on tour with No Doubt and the Distillers, she realised how much she'd missed hanging out with women.

"I was on tour with two great alpha females [Gwen Stefani and Brody Dalle] who I had so much in common with. We loved each other and got on so famously. It was really quite amazing.

"And we were all talking about this quite regularly on the tour [saying] wow, this must be what it's like for men all the time. They go on tour and they meet other male musicians that they can bond with and share experiences with and really fortify one another and women don't have that. We're so far and few between on the ground.

"Gwen, me and Brody were like magnets on that tour; we couldn't get enough of each other. It was sick."

The new friendship also led to work. Dalle is the girlfriend of Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, who invited Manson to sing back-up vocals on a track for their new album, Lullabies to Paralyze.

Despite the collaboration only cementing her credibility - because when you think about it, there are few pop stars who could pull that off - the experience was a nerve-racking one.

"Josh just kept on laughing saying, 'Chill out! You're all right mate,' and plying me with vodka," she says. "At the end he was like, that wasn't so bad was it?"

But that's the essence of Shirley Manson. She's a cauldron of contradictions - smart and sassy on one hand, nervous and insecure on the other; a hyper-sensitive and empathetic human who has come to terms with the fact she will never be stable.

"There's always one thing in life that you can rely on and that's trouble's going to come your way," she says. "Nobody gets through life without it. The one absolute that you can be 100 per cent certain to meet is trouble. "It's how you get through that and how you survive it that matters."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Shirley Manson, singer for Garbage

BORN: August 26, 1966, Edinburgh, Scotland

RELEASES: Garbage (1995), Version 2.0 (1998), beautifulgarbage (2001), Bleed Like Me (2005)

BACKGROUND: Manson played keyboards and sang backing vocals in the band Goodbye Mr MacKenzie for 10 years before joining Angelfish. Producers Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson were looking for a singer for their band when they spotted her on MTV in 1994.

TRIVIA: Manson has said she suffers from body dysmorphic disorder, meaning she has a negative preoccupation with her physical appearance. Despite this, she has modelled for Calvin Klein and M.A.C cosmetics.