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"Garbage: Nevermind where they bin' where they goin'?"

Described as the go-go's mixed with NIN and the curve, the self mockingly named Garbage are gonna' be huge!

In fact they already are!

The band was formed by Butch Vig, the man who sat at the controls during the recording of the greatest rock record of the decade, Nirvana's Nevermind. Butch Vig may not have invented grunge, but he played a huge role in popularising it. Smashing Pumpkins, L7, Sonic Youth and more recently Soul Asylum have all joined Nirvana in enlisting his services. And now his at it again! But this time he's gone and joined a band of his own. As a drummer no less! The lineup is completed by guitarist/bassist Duke Erikson; Sampler Steve Marker and the enigmatic focal point and vocalist Shirley Manson.

Butch Vig insists, that they're not a producer supergroup.

"We really, really aren't that. The last thing I wanna hear about is some big producer guy starting his own band. It smacks of f**kin' egomania or something. That's not what we're tryin' to do. I certainly don't want Garbage to be known as Butch Vig's band."

Vig's first stab a rock'n'roll stardom was as a drummer with Spooner, a band that later developed into Firetown in the late '80s. Vig's interests though extended beyond drumming. In 1987, with his partner Steve Marker, he built Smart Studios, where he would later record the demos for Nevermind.

Vig's interest in Shirley Manson's voice, one time member of Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie, was its "certain sensibility" a phrase he also used to explain what interested him in Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan.

"The last thing we wanted was somebody we could manipulate," says Vig. "Shirley's pretty intense, she'll tell us to f**k off. Some of the lyrics that we had at the start were a little pretentious. She'd just go, 'I can't sing this bloody crap!' Sometimes she'd lay into us. She has this thing called the Dead Arm. When we were recording our arms were black and blue."

Shirley was seen by Steve with her most recent band, Angel Fish, on MTV. So after suitably impressing them with her spooky, intense vocals and quirky personality, she was in! She has remained based in Edinburgh and spends half her time flying across the world to Madison in the USA to meet up with the rest of the band.

The early lyrics were penned during group sessions at a fishing cabin in the woods of Wisconsin. Back at the studio, Manson would sing them over and over until the band invariably decided she'd done it best the first time. Further effort was spent getting the guitar and the keyboard perfect by utilising the latest in expensive digital gear - and then it was scrapped in favour of some outdated analog equipment, a 1965 Epiphone guitar and a synthesiser of unknown age, prone to emitting random squeals at inopportune moments. In fact, an unplanned sample of a digital tape deck in its death throes inspired the melody of one song and another opens with the sound of Vig accidentally wiring the mixing desk into the air conditioning

"But," says Erikson, "whatever weird sounds there are have to serve the song. Whatever takes away from it is cut. The song is what's important."

"Nothing's sacred," adds Vig. "The day after pouring your guts into recording, you have to be able to 'erase it'. In the end they're just magnetic impulses."

All members of Garbage contribute to the lyrics - but the lyrics are anything but introspective. Vow and Queer are dark evil stories. The chorus of Vow goes "I'm gonna' tear you up/I'm gonna track you down."

"We're all worriers," says Butch. "But stuff comes from books and films. With Queer, I was reading this novel about this women who was hired to go and make this guy's son a 'man'. The kid is missing a few marbles. But then he realizes that the women who came to his room is also f**king his father. Vow partly came from a newspaper article about a sado-masochistic couple who couldn't keep away from each other. But the songs aren't that literal. I don't want to spell it out but I want to make eclectic pop records that aren't what they seem."

Garbage according to many in the know, are going to be huge. Absolutely. Definitely.

"Well, people have told me that Vow is really instant , which I presume is a good thing," shrugs Manson. "But I don't feel any pressure at all. Basically, I don't come with any baggage...cos no one knows who I am!"