GarbageIveagh Gardens, Dublin★★★★☆
There’s a slightly rubbish moment early in Garbage’s exhilarating show at Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, when singer Shirley Manson intimates that this might be the band’s final ever performance. Explaining that the concert marks the end of the grunge-pop trailblazer’s European tour, she adds that it might also be the end of Garbage.
“This particular evening feels both heavy and glorious at the same time – the duality of which is not lost on anyone on the stage tonight,” Manson says, shortly after Garbage kick off the night with dystopian floor-filler There’s No Future In Optimism.
“We don’t really know what’s going to happen with Garbage moving forward – for a lot of different reasons. Most pertinently of course are the changes to the music industry, which causes a lot of problems for what I call the middle-class band. We have been very successful. But not like the oligarch kind of successful that the music both supports and applauds and makes the most space for. I’m not trying to sound sad – we are not sad.”
She gulps back a sob as the audience gasps (those who are paying attention: many are alas here largely for a drink and a natter). But if her remarks are a shock, they will not come as a surprise to Garbage fans who have been keeping tabs on the group. They follow on from comments Manson made last year that Garbage would no longer tour the US, due to “the thievery of the record industry”.
If this is a farewell for a band that have sold more than 17 million albums and headlined festivals around the world, it is, at least, a searing sign-off. While not quite chock-full of hits – there are five songs from their solid latest album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light – it is, in every other sense, a celebration of Garbage’s 30-year history of romping, stomping pop-rock.
Monster-truck riffs rev their engines around Manson’s take-no-prisoners voice, and both the bangers and the ballads are fuelled by the group’s mastery of huge, shin-kicking choruses. It is a dazzling onslaught built on Garbage’s unique history as an alliance between three champion knob-twiddlers and a charismatic singer from half the world away.
The story of Garbage is one of unlikely connections and a collaboration forged in the glory days of 1990s alternative rock. At the time the band released their first album in August 1995, drummer Butch Vig was a megastar producer for Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, while bandmates Duke Erikson and Steve Marker were studio hotshots in their own right. They were, in other words, the Stock Aitken Waterman of grunge – which sort of made Edinburgh-born Manson, who they had spotted singing on MTV with her band, Angelfish, the goth-pop Kylie.
A pop band that rocked like mosh pit heavies but had tunes by the bucketful? We should be so lucky – and that is what Garbage deliver as they plunge into early smash Stupid Girl, brought to life at Iveagh Gardens by Vig’s effervescent drum shuffle intro.
Vig and his bandmates are the engine behind Garbage’s cyberpunk glam groove. But Manson is the star. She sports a sort of torture-dungeon kilt, paired with spiked red boots, while her fantastically punchy voice is filtered through rage and ennui.
With the end of the tour – and potentially the end of Garbage – looming, the singer and her bandmates are determined to make it an evening to remember. Manson apologises for it being a “messy” show, then invites the rest of the group to recall the fondest memories from playing Dublin: Vig talks about bumping into Bono, staying up until 5am, and waking up with the worst hangover of his life.
But there are serious moments, too. Manson introduces the defiantly chugging Right Between the Eyes by explaining that it was initially written about Courtney Love and the misogyny she faced in the 1990s (there was plenty of sexist vitriol aimed at Manson too) but adds that today, in this age of influencers such as Andrew Tate, the lyrics speak to the hate directed at women everywhere.
She circles back around to that theme of men mistreating women with the goth-rock synth epic Have We Met (The Void), which unpacks a real-life incident in which Manson was spending the night with her boyfriend in Spain when his mistress appeared at the door, dressed all in ghostly white and crying.
With a curfew approaching, there isn’t time for any extended farewells. But they sign off in style with Only Happy When It Rains – the 1995 hit that unleashes a deluge of emotion as Dublin and Garbage say goodbye – perhaps for the last time. As the light fades, Manson departs smiling. But it is the suggestion of tears earlier in the evening that tells the true story of this brilliantly bittersweet performance.