Butch Vig - Garbage 'There Is Ageism In Pop Culture'

Say the name Butch Vig to your folks and see what happens. They may just start rifling through their record collection, retelling glory stories of days long passed while putting on the soundtrack to their youth - a collection of some of the best of what the alternative rock scene had to offer from the late 80’s and early 90’s, all the way through to the present day.

You see, Butch Vig's DNA is riddled throughout some of the biggest and most influential releases of the last 40 years including (but not limited to) Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Betty by Helmet, 21st Century Breakdown by Green Day, and most famously Nevermind by Nirvana.

But in 1995, after close to a decade of producing a long and sublime list of drum/guitar/bass albums, Butch decided to step outside the norm and alongside Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and Shirley Manson would form the electropop/rock band, Garbage.

30 years later, the same four founding members of Garbage have combined and released their eighth impressive opus, Let All That We Imagine Be The Light, and the production of this album is a tale in itself. With Shirley’s long recovery from multiple surgeries, three studios locations and the combined knowledge of two of the best producers on the planet (Shirley’s husband Billy Bush produced the album), the story behind the music is a fascinating one. One that adds considerable weight to this dark, yet joyous release.

Wall of Sound's resident bogan Duane James and Butch Vig aficionado Pauline Surridge were fortunate to have a good yarn with the great man live from his home studio Grunge Is Dead about making a Garbage album in this day and age, his take on ageism in pop culture and modern musicians taking a political stand at a time when doing so can potentially end their careers overnight...

Watch the interview below or read on for the best bits...

First and foremost, Let All That We Imagine Be The Light has just been released, and while it has been a much talked about album, it did somehow catch us all by surprise.

“Well, it was birthed for a while," says Vig. "All of the Garbage records that we've done have had a process. And this one is really interesting because we had been on tour last year in Europe. We hadn't been to Europe [since] before Covid, and we played some huge shows, like sold out Wembley Arena, 15,000 people or whatever. But in early 2024, Shirley had had a hip replacement and last spring she did a rehab and then it didn't really take because we were on tour and she was in extreme pain. So the last show we did in Europe was at Wembley, and she was wheeled out of the hotel in crutches and got in a wheelchair and had to take painkillers to get through the show.

So we had a bunch of shows in the fall of last year that we cancelled and Shirley, in September, had a complete hip replacement.‍

We were still working on the Garbage record. Some of it in here, you can see the room I'm in, this is my studio, Grunge Is Dead, and it's just a home studio in LA. Our engineer Billy [Bush] has a studio in Atwater Village in LA that we record at a lot. But Shirley did a lot of the vocals in her bed with a handheld mic because she was rehabbing. I think that at the time we thought she'd come back and redo the vocals, redo them proper in the studio with a good microphone and whatever.

But there was sort of an immediacy and an intimacy from a lot of the vocals that we just loved and we kept. So to me, especially a lot of the verses, there's a real intimate quality to the record. And a lot of that's to do with Shirley singing the way she recorded the vocals on the album.

It's very socio-political. But, No God's No Masters, our last record was very dystopian and more aggressive leaning towards like ‘Fuck the Man’. And this record is more about optimism and hope. That you have to get off your butt and try to change your life. So we want there to be a lot of hope in this record. And I think there is.”‍

There is a noticeable difference in tact on this album to their seventh release No Gods No Monsters. While it remains, at least sonically, an album dripping melancholy, the motifs of hope and love persevere throughout each songs. So it surprised me, given the optimism of the album title Let All That We Imagine Be The Light, that the first song out of the gates is ‘There's No Future in Optimism’, a title that on the surface seems to completely disregard and contradict the name of the record.

Butch was more than ready to weigh in and explained, "Yes, you're right. The No Future in Optimism is contradictory because what Shirley was trying to write is there's no future in optimism if you sit on your butt and go, oh, well, there's not much I can do. And if you listen to the lyrics, it's a call to arms, really. It's the first record we've ever started out acapella.

‍Are you ready for love? Are you ready for love? So it's all about hope and positive change, which is interesting because as you pointed out, the lyrics seem to be negative, like this 'Well, what the fuck?' There's no future in hope, but there is future in hope, especially when you realise you can do it on your own. Don't worry about trying to change the government. What can you do in your local community? What can you do in your family? What can you do in your neighbourhood? That's where you have to focus.

We really wanted this record to have optimism, even though the first song is There's No Future In Optimism.”

Given the collective shift in mindset from yelling at clouds to finding the upside in what has been a very difficult period for Shirley and the band, it’s quite impressive how Garbage presents this new outlook on life. It’s also refreshing to hear that 30 years into the game, even a band the calibre of Garbage suffers the slings and arrows afforded the aging masses of western pop culture, and how this group of well respected veterans of the music scene have addressed the naysayers in banger ‘Chinese Fire Horse’.

“I'm glad you got to hear that... Yeah, that's Shirley just saying we're old.

There is ageism in pop culture. You get old and people go, 'well, they're not valid anymore'. Well, fuck that. Fuck that! That's what we have to say.

I just love Shirley singing because she's just like, 'fuck off man'. She doesn't care about what people think about her."

For me personally, the song that is going to grab the most attention though, the one that put a huge exclamation point on the whole album, is the closer ‘The Day That I Met God’. After a series of moving recollections of Shirley’s interaction with God, she sees out the song bellowing out over and over “I found God in Tramadol”. Butch reflected on the statement and further explained the power of Shirley Manson.

The drugs, it's the drugs. She found God through the drugs. That was all written when she was literally in severe pain, somewhat hallucinating from taking Tramadol from her hip surgery.

“We wrote the music to it before Shirley sang on it. So Duke and Steve and I recorded the track here in my studio, right in this room. We recorded the song and it started with that, like a sequencer loop. And we sort of wanted to give it a little bit of a Pink Floyd vibe.

So we sent this really weird song to Shirley when she was recuperating from her hip surgery, and the next day we got a track back and she sang it with a handheld mic. We were fucking blown away. I didn't know that was going to be the title, and I didn't know we were going to sing this and we just fell in love with it.

There's sort of a thing in all the Garbage records, we try to end with a song that is sort of meditative or we just feel like it's a closer.”

With Shirley's isolation from the rest of the band during the recording process, it’d be fascinating to be a fly on the wall when Steve, Duke and Butch get the song back with the new vocal track. Would there be any concerns about the content and any fears of putting out any of the music, given the subject matter?

“Well, I'm not scared, but we're always shocked. Because you don't know we're in a void. We record a track here and I mix it down and I sent it to her and then the next day we got a track back with her singing on, because she was literally laying in her bed with a handheld mic and we're like, holy fuck, this is good.

That happened on a lot of the songs on the record that she did them with a handheld microphone. So there's a real intimacy, an immediacy to the vocals on the record.

But surely a producer of Mr. Vig’s esteem would be keen on polishing up the record with Shirley in the studio, ensuring that the album made the requisite sales to keep all and sundry happy about proceedings!?

“We're making records for ourselves and hopefully our fans like it. We've realised, and this goes back to Chinese Fire Horse, we've realised for a long time now that we're not going to get played on pop radio.

Even if we wrote a smash hit, they go, oh, Garbage, they're an old band.

We've been around 30 years and the radio knows that they're going to go, 'oh, okay, cool'. And it's okay. We understand, that in a way it's completely liberating. So we're just making records that we want to make and hopefully our fanbase loves the songs too. We're also very lucky that we have a fanbase.

We just played these shows in Europe last summer. We played Wembley Arena for 15,000 people. It was incredible. And we just got back from a South American tour for two weeks in Mexico. We headlined to 150,000 people in Concepción, Chile and the whole crowd knew all the lyrics. It was like these football chants for Stupid Girl and Only Happy When It Rains coming back to us.”

Speaking of touring, Garbage have a North American tour coming up. So what’s the chances of seeing the gang in Australia in the near future?

“For real. We are working on it. We haven't been there for a long time and I love coming down there. We love it there.

It's kind of where we started out, man. Our first Garbage tour we played Australia and they were some of the fans who embraced us from day one.

Part of it was that Michael Gudinski signed us with Mushroom in Australia and the UK. Before even when we were signed in America. No one knew who we were. We have a long history and our fans are incredible down there.”

Something to look forward to for sure and hopefully not too long a wait. Now Garbage have long been a band that tackles political topics and in this day and age, many artists have chosen to not make a stand for fear of alienating part of their fanbase, losing the support of their record labels, or worse, being cancelled outright. One band that definitely hasn’t chosen this path is Irish punk rap trio, Kneecap.

After their set at Coachella, in which their backdrop glowed with the words “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine”, Sharon Osbourne made calls for their American work Visas to be revoked and for their spot on Glastonbury to be cancelled. With Butch’s longstanding career in the music industry and Garbage’s penchants for making political statements through their music, it stands to wonder how he feels about this particular incident, and whether or not its acceptable for music to be used as a political tool, or simply a means to make people happy.

“I fucking love Kneecap. I've seen their film three times and I have not seen them live yet. But I know some friends of mine have seen [them] and they fucking go off. It's fucking great.”

As for the call for them to be banned from festivals and for their Visas to be cancelled, Vig pondered the question before stating. “I have mixed feelings on that because I will say this, I've seen music and heard music since punk, since the late seventies. And some of the most powerful and cathartic records I've heard, like by the Clash are social, political, and they make you think.

I understand that fans get upset sometimes if a artist says, 'we want you to think this way or vote for this person or don't vote for that person'. So in Garbage, I think we want people to think. We're not necessarily telling people what to do, but at least to, if they hear a song, maybe they'll think a little bit about the choices they make in their life.

I feel like when music is really good, in fact, not just music, art, it reflects the world that we live in. And the world is pretty crazy right now. So I have a feeling that the music that's coming in the next year or so is going to be looking at the world we're living in. Not for everybody of course.

There’s a lot of bands and artists who don't want to call attention to themselves now. They’re scared because your career could get effed up if you piss off the wrong person.

‍So you just kind of have to have big balls if you're gonna go out there and really lay a statement out. But I think you can do it. You can write about change or about your opinions or even about how you feel about the world poetically. You can do that in music and you can do that also in books and in art and culture and paintings and everything. And I believe we're going to see a groundswell of that."

This notion is prevalent in the modern punk and metal scene, especially with acts who call the United States home, something Butch acknowledged from a personal level too as he continued.

"I'm in the United States, it's pretty crazy here right now. A lot of people are kind of scared about what's going to happen to democracy and I can already feel a groundswell of people kicking back. So we'll see what happens."

Australia recently had their federal election and, like America, both sides went extreme. So it's either the left or the right. There's not much in the middle anymore.

“Which is weird. Why is that? I grew up in Wisconsin, which is always a very progressive state in the US. It was like there's a middle ground and it wasn't like extreme right and left. This is common sense, that sort of the progressive party. It seems like that does not happen anywhere. Now it's either you're this way or that way and whole middle has been taken away him. That's not good.” 

Definitely not, but it may just make for interesting time, not just for music, but for art as well. But, if nothing else, we can all agree on one thing.

“Hail Black Sabbath, man.”

Tough territory to wade through as an artist, but Garbage have done so impeccably and without fear. The new album is out now and well worth checking out, for fans old and new. As for whether we’ll see them anytime soon, cross those fingers and watch this space. Hopefully we’ll see them sooner rather than later.

Interview by Duane James @duanejamestattoo

Garbage's new album Let All That We Imagine Be The Light is out today via BMG. Get it here here

Garbage - Let All That We Imagine Be The Light tracklisting‍

1. There’s No Future In Optimism
2. Chinese Fire Horse
3. Hold
4. Have We Met (The Void)
5. Sisyphus
6. Radical
7. Love To Give
8. Get Out My Face AKA Bad Kitty
9. R U Happy Now
10. The Day That I Met God