The new album by Garbage, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, has the kind of sound that makes you think you have always known it. You somehow know the words as they land; you have the tune in your head on a single listen. But try saying that to the Edinburgh-born singer Shirley Manson, who – although she has lived mainly in the US for almost 30 years – is incredibly Scottish about flattery, which is to say she doesn’t like it. “I think possibly you just relate deeply to the lyrics of Chinese Fire Horse,” she says wryly, down the line from Los Angeles. That track is about life chewing you up and spitting you out because you are too old. No, I say firmly, one fiftysomething to another (she is 58), I don’t relate to that at all.
Let All That We Imagine has its roots in 2016, when Manson fell off stage on the first day of the tour for Strange Little Birds, the last album but one. “I’m not blaming myself for my physical exuberance,” she says. “I was thinking about lyrics, I was thinking about my body, and I tumbled into the security barrier. I smashed my hip pretty badly, but it took five years for it to disintegrate.”
