«It was stressful. They kept pushing us to work with people we didn't think were suitable. As a result of our resistance to doing so, they decided we were tough guys. They forced us to eat shit sandwiches."
Shirley Manson said this to the NME on the occasion of the re-release of Garbage's 2005 album Bleed Like Me. Manson says that the album was made in a "period of tension" for the band and of "unpleasant interference" from the record label Interscope who was looking for what Manson calls artists "more flexible than us". Shortly after Bleed Like Me, the label decided to focus on No Doubt. «We love them», explains Manson, but there was «the feeling that the music industry only had room for one female rock band».
In those years the music market was changing radically due to the advent of piracy and file sharing services. «We who emerged in the 1990s saw a horror story unfold. Those were the times of Napster, today we are used to it, but in that period the music exhibition was literally stolen from us." Manson recalls the 2000 legal battle against Napster and how Metallica's Lars Ulrich was criticized at the time and portrayed as a "greedy capitalist" for suing the service. The band had asked Napster to remove Metallica's entire catalogue, also requesting that users who had downloaded their music - around 330,000 members - be banned from the platform. «It's not my job to talk about Lars and this story, but perhaps he was right and ahead of everyone else»
