Let me dirty up your mind
A couple of weekends back I got a message from davefish: he had the Whitby lurgy, and would I care to ensure that his ticket to see Garbage didn't go to waste?
Why yes, yes I would. At which point I got a volley of text messages from mrph and dmh addressing me as Backup Dave.
It's ages since I've been to Brixton, but they seem to have acquired a Craft Beer Co so I tried it out while I waited for the trains to align and the others to arrive. Their maple IPA is quite a thing, but blimey was I glad I only ordered a half.
Mrph suggested various venues in Brixton Village for tea, but it turned out to be all closed up. Protesting faintly, Mischa, DMH and I followed him down an unpromising-looking, dark side-street where he assured us there would be a food market. It seemed very unlikely. But lo! Shipping containers appeared in the horizon, and there was Popup Brixton with food stalls aplenty and mdf furniture to eat it at.
Now, I am broadly speaking a terrible replacement for Davefish: I'm about the right size, but my hair's the wrong colour and I can't do the accent. However, I did my best by ordering an ambitiously complicated noodle dish, and then drinking cider when we got to the venue. (Later, as people departed, I wished them "safe home". That is as good as my impressions get.)
I went to see Garbage years and years ago - at Wembley Arena, which was the first time I'd been to a stadium gig. Also, therefore, the point at which I discovered I didn't like stadium gigs much. Brixton Academy is large, but not silly, and they actually have a raked floor so even being a bit short I got a decent view. Shirley Manson, rather than being a tiny, tiny figure all the way over there was a lifesize cartoon, with pink hair and a pink dress and boundless energy. Watching her, she could have been seventeen or she could have been forty, real-life pop art throwing itself around the stage.
But this was Garbage's "20 Years Queer" tour, celebrating twenty years since the release of their first album (meaning, alarmingly, Manson is almost fifty). Having not really been prepared for the gig, I hadn't realised that they were playing only songs from 1995. "So if you're hoping to hear anything else, you should go home."
(Actually, I had been hoping for something else, my favourite When I Grow Upwhich had been lodged in my head all week. I stayed, though.)
For twenty-year-old songs they stand up pretty well, even the B-sides that I didn't know ( andan excellent cover version of The Butterfly Collector). Manson's voice remains amazing, not a classically beautiful voice but ferocious and powerful and occasionally filthy. Some songs are practically shouted, others have a slow, languorous delivery and chilled out guitar that reminded me of Portishead[*].
There are some self-indulgent bits, where the Manson eulogises the rest of the band (whilst also mentioning that a lot of the time they're also "fucking annoying"), or dedicates a song to her dad in the balcony.
But, you know, we'll let them off. They've been awesome for twenty years.
[*] For the record, I listened to Dummythe day after and I now recognise that this claim is arrant nonsense.