While speaking to NME in a recent interview, Shirley Manson was asked to look back on her “younger days,” with the Garbage frontwoman revealing that she had a really difficult time in the early days of the band.
“I really was troubled, especially in the first few years of our career,” Manson said. “I didn’t enjoy fame. It’s uninteresting to me entirely. I don’t like celebrity culture. It’s starting to look even more obscene than it used to. I didn’t do well when the band were at the height of our mainstream cultural appeal. I’m just not the right personality. My life is exactly how I want it to be now. I feel authentic. This is what it feels like to be a nearly-60-year-old Scottish woman.”
She continued, adding that she’s enjoying growing older more than she thought she would:
“Being older is fantastic. That’s the thing I didn’t understand when I was young. I was always told that it was going to be horrible. Instead, I’ve found nothing but comfort. I just feel like my brain has been switched on. I was dead when I was young. I was so busy hustling, doing dr*gs, having sex, drinking alcohol, and being wild that I didn’t notice nature, I didn’t notice architecture. I read a lot but I wasn’t really interested in the history of literature, poetry or art. Now my brain is on fire. It feels like I’m running out of time so I need to ingest all of this. It’s exciting to me – all these ideas out there.”
