Shirley Manson Slams Record Label for Prioritizing No Doubt Over Garbage

Garbage's Shirley Manson has revisited the time when her record label decided that it was supporting No Doubt over her band.

In a recent interview with NME, Manson opened up about the circumstances surrounding the reissue of 2005's Bleed Like Me. "To be frank, I never had a particularly good relationship with that record until relatively recently," she explained. "We released it at a time of immense strife within the band, and dwindling interest from our record label and the general public."

Relations with Interscope went very south, she said, when Manson had "a fortunate or unfortunate incident" on a flight from Los Angeles to London. Sitting next to "a really famous rockstar" who let slip that Interscope had prioritized No Doubt over Garbage stunned and saddened her.

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"He told me that he’d been present at an Interscope meeting where our future as a band had been discussed and there was a vote taken at the table where they decided if they were going to spend money on No Doubt or on Garbage. They decided to invest in No Doubt."

With that news, Manson, who says she has no qualms with Gwen Stefani, says she decided: "I wasn’t going to do f--k all for that record label ever again."

The band is rereleasing Bleed Like Me in deluxe form, but Manson told NME that the feeling of being pitted against another female-fronted band gave the entire era a sour taste. “We were meeting the same resistance at radio stations too; they were also saying, ‘Well we’ll be playing No Doubt, we won’t be playing Garbage.' The domino effect was devastating. It caused us to turn in on each other because we were so frustrated". Tensions within the band – Manson, Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and Butch Vig – grew so strained that during the Bleed Like Me tour, they all agreed to an indefinite hiatus.

Officially reforming in 2011, the group has continued to self-release albums on their own StunVolume label. They released No Gods No Masters in 2021 and Anthology, a greatest hits/remastered album in 2022, with tours in between, most notably co-headling a North American tour with Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds last year.

And now after a five-year hiatus, the band are returning to the UK and Europe this summer. Tickets for all their dates can be found here. Garbage has also announced that they will be playing the Ohana Festival on September 27 in Dana Point, Calif. Registration for a pre-sale passcode is recommended for the three-day event and can be found here.