Butch Vig, co-founder of Garbage and legendary producer who worked on Nirvana’s generation-defining record Nevermind, recently took part in a radio interview that saw him reflect on the death of Kurt Cobain and the genesis of garbage.
During the interview, Butch Vig was asked about his first impression of Garbage vocalist Shirley Manson.
“Well, Duke [Erikson] and Steve [Marker] and I had been working on some Garbage music for about four or five months, and we knew we wanted to find a female singer and hadn’t really found the right person or the right fit,” he explained.
“And Steve happened to tape 120 minutes of MTV every Sunday night, and he came in on Monday and said, ‘Here is the singer from this band Angelfish,’ and I really liked this track, and we watched it on the videotape, it was the song ‘Suffocate Me.’
“We were all struck by how intense it was, how understated it was. Like, instead of screaming and blowing your voice out like a lot of alternative singers were doing at the time, she did the complete opposite.”
The band got in contact with Manson to set up a meeting, to see if they meshed.
“So we called her up and said, ‘Hey, we got these songs, do you want to maybe meet and see if there’s some chemistry?’ We had no plans of even doing a full album at that time, and so we flew to England and we weren’t staying there,” he explains.
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“Shirley thought we were staying at some posh hotel, but that’s where we met for tea and some gin and tonics; we had a really great three or four-hour meeting, talking about books and music and food and culture and politics, and we invited her to record.”
After meeting with Manson, Vig returned to his hotel — where he found out that Kurt Cobain had passed away.
“I went back to the hotel, and then I went out to meet a bunch of other producers and engineers, I was just going to enjoy a night out,” he details. “When I got there, they were all staring at me and they said, ‘Did you hear what happened?’
“I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Kurt Cobain is dead.’ And I just kind of freaked out, I had to go back to the hotel and just immediately fly back to the States.
Vig mused that the death felt like a watershed moment in his life.
“And looking back, it’s pretty weird, but that was a big turning point in my career. Literally, it’s like one part of my career changed into another part on the same day.
“It was like the passing of the torch happened, and I guess I didn’t even realize that at the time, but it did.”
Check out Butch Vig talking about producing Nirvana, the genesis of Garbage and more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-icPjmW02mU
