Eventually, when I finished university, I started a recording studio with Steve, the other guitarist in Garbage, and that led to tons of things, from recording punk bands to Killdozer and eventually on to The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana."
#BUTCH VIG VOCALS STAND ALONE HOW TO#
But when punk and new wave came out, I thought, ‘I could do that.’ The band that Duke and I started, Spooner, started writing our own music straight away, and started figuring out how to record, and that led to us making records for a local label in the Madison area. "Well, when I was growing up, I looked at bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin as these untouchable iconic rock gods, while I was just a normal human being. As we’ll discover over the course of a 45-minute conversation, it’s just the latest chapter in a fascinating life which Butch himself seems scarcely able to believe at times.ĭid making a career out of music seem possible then? But before then Butch has more new music to bring to the world, in the form of Divine Accidents, the eclectic and beautifully atmospheric second album from his side-project 5 Billion In Diamonds, a collaboration with British producer Andy Jenks and DJ James Grillo, which plays out like the coolest film soundtrack you’ve never heard. Next year, the group will release their seventh studio album, which is already recorded and mixed. It’s now 25 years since Garbage’s self-titled debut album breached the UK Top 10: every successive album from the quartet, from 1998’s UK chart-topping Version 2.0 through to 2016’s Strange Little Birds, has been a global success, too. Nirvana was a big part of my life, and though I didn’t know it at the time, Garbage, with Shirley, was about to become a big part of my life. That, literally, was the change of guard in my life. “On the same day, then, I met Shirley for the first time and found out that Kurt was dead. I left my pint, took a cab back to our hotel, went to Heathrow airport, and got the next flight back to America. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And they said, ‘Did you hear that Kurt Cobain is dead?’ I was just shellshocked. “I sat down and they were all looking at me,” he recalls, speaking to Kerrang! via a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles’ fashionable Silverlake district on the morning of the U.S.
From the moment Butch greeted his friends, however, he sensed that something was amiss. Indeed, he might have stayed longer with the smart, effervescent Scot if he hadn’t already scheduled Friday night drinks with producer pals Flood and Alan Moulder, best known for their work with U2/Depeche Mode and My Bloody Valentine, respectively, in a pub elsewhere in the capital. Steve felt sure that Shirley’s voice could perfectly complement the instrumental tracks he, Butch and Duke were writing, and the 27-year-old Edinburgh-born vocalist was sufficiently intrigued by the prospect of collaborating with the American trio to accept an invitation to lunch in London on April 8 for an initial meeting.īutch remembers walking away from that lunch feeling excited about the prospect of working with Shirley. Earlier in the year, while watching MTV’s alternative rock showcase 120 Minutes, Steve Marker had come across a video by a new Scottish band called Angelfish and been struck by the sultry vocals and charismatic presence of the group’s singer Shirley Manson. The trio also had related business to attend to in London. If Butch and his friends could parlay even a fraction of that success into their own project, Infectious Records could potentially have a hit record on their hands, as Korda Marshall understood. Ordinarily, the idea of three faceless studio technicians pitching for their own shot at the limelight would have seemed fanciful, but there wasn’t a record executive in the world who was unaware of Butch Vig’s recent CV, given that the unassuming mid-westerner had produced hugely successful albums for Nirvana (Nevermind), Smashing Pumpkins (Gish, Siamese Dream), L7 (Bricks Are Heavy) and Sonic Youth (Dirty, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star). Friends for over a decade, Butch, Steve and Duke had been producing and engineering albums at their own Smart Studios recording facility in Madison, Wisconsin since 1983, and had started receiving commissions to remix tracks by music industry heavyweights including Nine Inch Nails, The Cult, Depeche Mode and Beck, which, in turn, led to discussions with Infectious about the trio initiating their own musical project. In April 1994, Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson came to London for a meeting with Korda Marshall, the founder of Infectious Records, a boutique indie record label then best known as the home of Ash and Pop Will Eat Itself.
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