Shirley Manson interview: Breaking up the garbage girl. What's your favourite Shirley Manson story? The one about the Garbage frontwoman revealing her love for her new orange guitar because it was "the colour of my fanny"? The incident in which she pooed in a boyfriend's cornflakes because he had annoyed her?
Or the time when she abruptly hacked off her signature ginger hair? The latter was partly to spite her record label, the 45-year-old Scotswoman says with a gutsy laugh. From their dollar-shaped viewpoint, there was horror that one of music's biggest female stars could so wilfully sabotage her image. Or what about the rumour that, despite selling 13m albums with the American electronic rock band she joined in 1994 and becoming a tough-talking, smart-mouthed, big-boot-wearing icon to a generation, Manson was too frightened to enter a clothes shop alone until she was aged 30?
She recounts a story concerning Veela, the terrier she keeps at home in Los Angeles. "It was miserable," she recalls of the band's last twilight. The five myths about contemporary classical music. 1.
It all sounds like a squeaky gate There are two sides to this. First, there's the simple fact that much of the music being written now by composers for choirs, opera houses and orchestras has as many, and sometimes more, tunes than anything by Beethoven or Mozart. For sensuous, harmonious reverie, listen to recent music by John Tavener or Arvo Pärt; for sheer, abundant tune-smithery, look no further than those masters of choral, regal and festive vocality Paul Mealor, Eric Whitacre and John Rutter. But none of this is what the "squeaky gate" critics mean. 2. Balderdash. 3. This is one of the real things that puts many listeners off, the idea that to be able to understand Harrison Birtwistle or Judith Weir, Pauline Oliveros or Howard Skempton, you need to have a working knowledge, and preferably a PhD, in music history from plainchant to Prokofiev, and/or you need to be part of a club of contemporary music groupies. 4. 5.
Ah, yes: here's the rub. . * What are the composers' favourites? Grimes: nine days without food, sleep or company gave me Visions. Three weeks barricaded inside a room without food, sleep or company.
It sounds like the kind of thing you'd only put yourself through if you were quitting heroin or training to become a Zen monk. For Grimes, however, it's all part of the essential process of creating hypnotic weirdo pop. "Once you hit day nine, you start accessing some really crazy shit," smiles Claire Boucher, the skittish 24-year-old Canadian behind the deliberately misleading Grimes moniker. "You have no stimulation, so your subconscious starts filling in the blanks.
I started to feel like I was channelling spirits. Welcome to Grimes's world, where a voguish braindump of techno-mystical pop trash signifiers is given lift-off by Claire's insistence on pushing things a little bit further than your average blog idol. It won Claire a deal with 4AD – appropriately enough, since Visions smoulders with the kind of necromantic charm that once powered label mainstays Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance. Doldrums. Readers recommend: songs about procrastination. It's got to be done some time ... songs about procrastination.
Photograph: Max Oppenheim/Image bank/Getty Images Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today? Actually, I can think of quite a few reasons. Musicians are not usually celebrated for their punctuality, and their release schedule has slowed markedly over the last five decades. Bobbie Gentry released four albums in 1968. Anyway, there shouldn't be a shortage of songs written about putting things off, delaying tactics and procrastination. So don't tarry! * Thanks to RR regular Nilpferd for suggesting this week's topic. . * Listen to others' suggestions and add yours to a collaborative Spotify playlist. * Guide to "donds", "zedded", and other strange words used by some of the RR regulars (courtesy of the Marconium). * The Marconium (blog containing a wealth of data on RR, including the songs that are "zedded"). * The 'Spill (blog for the RR community).
THE BACKSTAGE RIDER - Tales of gigs, bands, aftershows, indie rockers and random music stuff. Open thread: What would feature on your ultimate indie playlist? As Richard King writes in the Guardian today, 'indie' is a slippery term.
"A sympathetic understanding of indie music is to see it as a morass of of signifiers: guitars, fringes, young or youngish groups of mainly white people connecting the highlights of their music collection in an ever shifting reconfiguration of the past. " What do you think of when you think of indie music? Last summer our team of Guardian and Observer writers compiled an "ultimate indie playlist" covering 44 years of indie music. You can take a look at the full list here, or check out the playlist here on Spotify. Here's a few highlights, one from each of the five decades covered by the list. 60s: The Byrds - Mr Tamborine Man 70s: Elvis Costello - Less Than Zero 80s: Felt – Ballad of the Band 90s: Oasis - Supersonic 00s: LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk is Playing At My House There's a tiny fraction of the songs featured on the list.