GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Oliver Peoples 2010 Campaign (2009)
- Photoshoots: Meeting Garbage (2002)
- Photoshoots: Shoot #03 (2005)

Thanks to Lorna!

GALLERY LINK:
- Magazine & Newspaper Scans: The Sun (UK) – June 1, 2010

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots: Elle (March 2009)

ROCKER Shirley Manson has told how artist Tracey Emin’s work left her sobbing in an art gallery.

The Garbage singer broke down at the show just before she went to see her ill mum Muriel for the final time before her death in 2008.

Among the controversial artist’s work at Edinburgh’s Modern Art Gallery was May Dodge, My Nan – made up of family objects collected by Emin as she grew up.

Shirley told how it summed up her own situation and left her sobbing in the middle of the gallery.

This week, she posted “An Open Letter to Tracey Emin” on her Facebook page.

It reads: “The last time I ever saw my mum I had just come from seeing your retrospective at the Modern Art Gallery in Edinburgh, November 2008.

“The very moment I walked into that exhibition I stood looking at My Nan and tears started to roll down my cheeks. Funny the role an artist can play isn’t it? You put your arms around people you don’t even know.”

Emin became notorious when she was nominated for a Turner Prize with My Bed, an art installation made up of her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear.

May Dodge, My Nan features five framed mementoes – two family album photos, two handmade objects and a page of text.

Shirley, who turned to acting in US drama Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, told Emin: “I needed to howl but I didn’t have the room.

“But there was you, doing it for me. I love you Tracey Emin. Never let me go.”

The loss of her mother is still a source of hurt and pain in the singer’s life.

She later told of the last moments she spent with her singer mum.

She said: “I got down on my knees and held her hand. Stroked her forehead and kissed her cheek.

“I love you mum. I love you so much. Forever and ever… I promise.

“Such a good mum. The best mum. My mum.”

Source

Like serial killers and retired movie stars, musicians tend to like making visual art, and this summer a bunch of the latter will combine forces at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Hollywood to show their work while they celebrate the 25th anniversary of Alternative Press, the alt-rock music magazine whose posters you see pasted around Los Angeles near the publication date of each new issue.

Among the musicians whose work will be featured at the show, which opens to the public July 10, are:

Adam Jones (Tool), Black Francis (the Pixies), Joby J. Ford (the Bronx), John Gourley (Portugal. The Man), Liz McGrath (Miss Derringer), Marilyn Manson, Matt Skiba (Alkaline Trio), Pete Wentz (Fall Out Boy), Shirley Manson (Garbage), Tim Armstrong (Rancid), Travis McCoy (Gym Class Heroes), and — who else? — Shepard Fairey.

A VIP reception will happen the night before, on July 9, which will no doubt be a star-studded event filled with the musicians who made the art (and no one is stopping you from at least hanging out on La Brea near the entrance).

Alternative Press’s 25th anniversary issue arrives on newsstands June 1 and will feature a bunch of Alt Press-approved new bands posing in photographs similar to ones of hot old bands from Alt Press. For example: Hayley Williams of Paramore has been photographed to look like Shirley Manson from Garbage, and Underoath has been shot looking like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

Details: The Los Angeles art show will open Friday, July 9 from 7:30-11:00 p.m. (VIP opening reception) and Saturday, July 10 from 8:00-11:00 p.m. (public opening reception) at the Merry Karnowksy Gallery (170 S. La Brea, Los Angeles, CA 90036).

– Randall Roberts

Source

Two new pics – thanks to Karin!

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots: Oliver Peoples 2010 Campaign (2009)

Manson and Gordon are friends met at the 2008 Style Awards at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, where Gordon served as a judge and Manson won an award for “Most Stylish Female” (a Garbage fan board even features what appears to be a picture of Manson sticking her tongue in the artist’s mouth). The two recently paired up for a BBC program titled, creatively, “When Shirley Manson met Douglas Gordon,” which had the pair “discuss images, ideas, influences and inspiration.” Lamentably, the program is not currently available to watch online. Gordon is also one of the many visual artists the rock star lists as an influence on her Facebook page; although the list is something of a grab bag that also includes Marlene Dumas, Barbara Kruger, Helmut Newton and Robert Wilson.

Source

Edinburgh-born Shirley said she was “amazed” when she found out somebody had bid over $1,000 for a t-shirt she painted on.

And Travis frontman Fran Healy’s handiwork with a paintbrush raised $152 for the cause.

The Scottish musicians teamed up with the likes of Neil Young, Kings of Leon, Mark Ronson and Christina Aguilera to raise over £30,000 by auctioning off their hand-made goods. The cash is now on its way to help the survivors of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed over 200,000 people.

Garbage singer Shirley – who recently announced she is back in the studio with her band after a split – donated two t-shirts, with one selling for $1,001.

She said: “To the person who spent an absolute fortune on the two t-shirts I created for the auction, may I simply say that words cannot express how deeply grateful we are to you for your show of generosity.

“You have done something very pure, very wonderful.”

Source

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots: Oliver Peoples 2010 Campaign – Captures

Shirley was one of several artists contributing to Crafts For A Cause. You can bid on two t-shirts decorated and signed by her here and here, starting tomorrow. All proceeds will go to Artists for Peace and Justice.

GALLERY LINK:
- Misc.: Crafts for a Cause (2010)

Big thanks to Lorna!

GALLERY LINK:
- Magazine & Newspaper Scans: Elle (UK) – April 2010

Thanks to Lorna!

GALLERY LINK:
- Magazine & Newspaper Scans: Daily Record (UK) – March 6, 2010

Thanks to Lorna!

GALLERY LINK:
- Magazine & Newspaper Scans: Daily Star (UK) – March 1, 2010

Flame-haired frontwoman and occasional actress Shirley Manson has revealed she’s back in the studio with her Garbage bandmates. The four-piece has been dormant for some time now, but 2010 could see a new album.

Manson broke the news in an excited post on Facebook, soon after drummer Butch Vig picked up a Grammy for his producing prowess.

“Guess who I just spent a week in the studio with?” the singer concludes. “Would you be pleased if I said one of them was called Steve and one of them was called Duke and another was a Grammy-winning producer?”

While the band’s most recent albums couldn’t match the success of Garbage and Version 2.0, time has no doubt made the hearts of fans grow ever-fonder. Or something.

If you haven’t yet you can read the mentioned Facebook post here.

This was especially true when Vig and Marker’s band Garbage hit the big time in 1995, after joining forces with Scottish vocalist Shirley Manson. There was a period when Rolling Stone followed the band around town, speculating that Madison would be the site of the next musical revolution.

Zirkel, who started at the studio around the time Garbage formed, remembers when Manson came to town to audition. When the iconic singer took up residence here, the city seemed poised for a glamorous makeover.

When you’re barreling down East Washington Avenue, it’s easy to speed past the brick building on the northwest corner of Baldwin Street. There are no signs, few parked cars and a handful of boarded-up windows. It seems ripe for a haunting, not a historic happening.

But that building, the legendary Smart Studios, is one of the liveliest places in town. It has been for more than 25 years, even when it was just two guys, an eight-track tape recorder and a tiny collection of microphones. Over the years, Smart was a rock ‘n’ roll refuge for more than 1,000 bands who recorded there.

The studio just announced that it will close its doors this spring amid a dramatic downturn in the music industry. The tentative closing date is March 1.

Smart Studios got started on the south side of East Wash in 1983, when Butch Vig and Steve Marker moved their gear into a dusty old factory space. It was a step up from recording on a four-track in Marker’s basement, which they’d been doing since their student days at UW-Madison.

“We started Smart because we wanted a place to hang out and make music, like a clubhouse,” Vig explains. “I’ve always looked at it as a sanctuary.”

Although the studio is closing, Vig says there’s cause for celebration.

“We rocked Smart for 25 years, and we rocked Madison, too,” he says. “Two-thirds of our client list was local and regional bands, and Steve and [chief engineer] Mike [Zirkel] and I are probably even prouder of those projects than the [Smashing] Pumpkins and Sparklehorse and Freedy Johnston. We tried to help as many local bands and labels as we could.”

Gimme shelter

Early on, helping the local music scene meant recording punk bands on the eight-track for five bucks an hour, when Milwaukee and Chicago studios told Vig and Marker to charge 20 times more. Ironically, inexpensive recording technology is now driving musicians away from professional studios and back into their basements.

“You can look at the closing of Smart as a direct reflection of what’s been happening in the music business and the technology changes that have happened over the last 10 years,” says Vig. “Now anyone can get a laptop and make recordings in their basement for next to nothing. I know Grammy-winning engineers in L.A. who are struggling to find work.”

Plus, the labels that normally would pay for studio time have slashed their budgets to half or a third of their usual size, Vig says. It seemed like the right time to throw in the towel.

“We were never in this to make money,” he says. “In fact, it’s a miracle that Smart stayed open as long as it did considering it was run by two guys with almost no business sense.”

For Vig and Marker, treating other musicians like family, whether they were from Sun Prairie or Sunset Boulevard, was the key to their happiness and success.

Isaac Schulze, singer/guitarist for local cowpunk trio Mad Trucker Gone Mad, says being able to barbecue a turkey on Smart’s deck and play videogames at the studios made him feel at home — and perhaps led to a better record.

Meanwhile, Keith Brammer, bassist for Milwaukee hardcore and alt-rock torchbearers Die Kreuzen, recalls Smart as a place that didn’t cop a ‘tude, no matter what.

“You were never made to feel like a second-class citizen if you weren’t on Warner Brothers, and there was none of the ‘You gotta get out of here because such-and-so is coming in’ crap,” he says. “It was ‘You’re here, that’s what matters, and we’re gonna take care of you.’ You always felt comfortable there, and you knew those guys were in it for the right reasons.”

Smart’s all-in-the-family approach also meant working with local bands’ budgets. Eric Hartz, drummer for Hum Machine, a local alt-rock band whose album The Trance Voltage Solution ruled college radio in the late 1990s, remembers just how far the Smart staff could stretch a dollar.

“You got this really high-quality recording service and access to a lot of expensive equipment most people never even get a chance to use. And besides the recording, you got access to this great network of people who would share tips, including some pretty big-name musicians. Those people aren’t going to be coming around now that Smart is closing.”

Naked singers

It was the combination of comfy and crazy that drew many famous artists to Smart.

Members of L7, the all-girl grunge-and-punk band that paved the way for the riot grrrl movement, loved Smart for its geeky charm and the giant tubs of ice cream it supplied. They also loved the superb sound of Bricks Are Heavy, the album Vig produced during their 1991 Madison visit, shortly after working on Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Singer/guitarist Donita Sparks laughs when she recalls meeting Smart’s engineers. “At first I thought the guys were a little shy or terrified of us, one of the two. They’d be polite and say hello but not make a lot of eye contact.”

The Smart staff got over their dorky crushes before the end of L7′s studio sessions, but Vig kicked his geek factor up a notch when a local TV show decided to stop by. Though the band members were taking a breather amid 12 hours of recording, they decided to make it look like they were blowing the place to smithereens.

“We staged a little scene,” says Sparks. “Butch was at the board looking very serious, and [singer/guitarist] Suzi [Gardner] and I were behind the microphone. I smeared makeup all over my face like I’d just had a nervous breakdown. We looked like complete terrors; it was hilarious.”

Engineer Beau Sorenson says there are plenty of other stories where this one came from, especially tales about naked people.

“One time, the lead singer of this band called Kilroy was having trouble hitting one of his notes,” he recalls. “We convinced him that the only way he was going to hit this note was by stripping down to nothing. It had worked for other people, so we figured it might work for him, too.”

Then there was Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic, who’d stopped by to record some keyboard licks for Monday Night Football.

“He wore these purple velvet gloves, and when he took them off, he’d blow on his hands and say, ‘C’mon babies, don’t let me down!’ He was far out,” Sorenson recalls.

Vig also recalls moments of pure nuttiness. Once, he found engineer Doug Olson staring maniacally at 200 pieces of tape he’d recorded in a single session. Another time, he had to explain to the Edgewater’s manager how Kansas rockers Paw had destroyed the walls of their hotel room in a BB-shooting contest.

But Michael Gerald, singer and bassist for local noise-rock legends Killdozer, may have the best story of all. In the early days, the band would try to replicate sounds such as guns firing and heads being bashed with baseball bats. For their first album, 1984′s Intellectuals Are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite, they set off firecrackers inside a walk-in safe at the original Smart site.

“It sounded too wimpy when we blew it up in the hallway, so Butch and Steve were like, ‘Well, how ’bout that safe in the basement?’ There had been a great amount of drinking involved, so we couldn’t be talked out of it. It was completely stupid and completely fun.”

Improvised genius

Many times, bands simply arrived at Smart with an idea, then came up with the rest off the cuff. Killdozer made at least two of their albums this way, says Gerald.

“There was one album, [1988's] For Ladies Only, where we only knew we wanted to do cover songs, not even what the songs would be,” he recalls. “We were eager to have input from Butch and Steve, who’d do things like say ‘You know, this would be good with an accordion’ or call up their friends. Whoever answered the phone would come in and help out with the chorus, which is what we did in our version of ‘American Pie.’”

Another time, Vig called up Madison string players Chris Wagoner and Mary Gaines to sit in with a then-unknown band called Smashing Pumpkins. So as Smart brought national and international recording artists to Madison, it also introduced Madison musicians to the world.

This was especially true when Vig and Marker’s band Garbage hit the big time in 1995, after joining forces with Scottish vocalist Shirley Manson. There was a period when Rolling Stone followed the band around town, speculating that Madison would be the site of the next musical revolution.

Zirkel, who started at the studio around the time Garbage formed, remembers when Manson came to town to audition. When the iconic singer took up residence here, the city seemed poised for a glamorous makeover.

While Madison didn’t morph into a flashy, star-studded metropolis, Smart’s influence continued to grow in ways never anticipated. Sometimes the musicians who recorded there took home more than a great album. New Yorker Freedy Johnston adopted Madison as his second hometown in 1994 as he recorded his pensive power-pop album This Perfect World here.

Pretty soon Johnston found himself returning to Madison every few months to lay down tracks and play in Vig’s cover band the Know-It-All Boyfriends. He was even at Smart last week when news of the studio’s closing broke.

“Smart reminds me of my first days living here, when I hung out at Genna’s and got to know the friends I’m still hanging out with 15 years later,” Johnston says.

When the studio closes, those who’ve passed through Smart’s doors will also hang onto the stories behind their songs like old friends.

The Madison sound
A selection of albums recorded, or mixed, or both at Smart Studios

Tar Babies: Honey Bubble (1989)
Killdozer: Twelve Point Buck (1989)
Nirvana: Nevermind (1990)
King Snake Roost: Ground Into the Dirt (1990)
Laughing Hyenas: Life of Crime (1990)
Smashing Pumpkins: Gish (1991)
The Young Fresh Fellows: Electric Bird Digest (1991)
L7: Bricks Are Heavy (1992)
Freedy Johnston: This Perfect World (1994)
Everclear: Sparkle and Fade (1994)
Soul Asylum: Let Your Dim Light Shine (1995)
Garbage: Garbage (1995)
The Promise Ring: 30° Everywhere (1996)
Fall Out Boy: Take This to Your Grave (2003)
Death Cab for Cutie: Plans (2005)
Sparklehorse: Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (2006)
Jimmy Eat World: Chase This Light (2007)
Hotel Lights: Firecracker People (2007)
Chief engineer Mike Zirkel encourages those with photos, video and other memories of Smart Studios to share them via a Facebook group called the Smart Studios Appreciation Society, and Vig may green-light a documentary project later this year. Stay tuned to Isthmus and TheDailyPage.com for details.

Source

Happy New Year, everybody!

GALLERY LINK:
- Music Videos: “Stupid Girl” Captures

Former GARBAGE frontwoman SHIRLEY MANSON has spoken out in support of gay rights, slamming American politicians for refusing to allow same-sex marriages in the country.
Gay unions were made legal in California in August 2008, but the decision was overturned just six months later by state legislation Proposition 8, which ruled future same-sex marriages illegal.
Supporters were dealt another blow earlier this month (Dec09) when New York State’s senate rejected a bill that would have allowed same-sex marriage.
And Manson, who is currently carving out an acting career in Hollywood, is fuming about the decision.
She writes in a post on her public Facebook.com page, “So sad to read that the New York State Senate voted down the Gay Marriage Bill. It saddens and sickens me that modern government and society has learned nothing from history but continue the vicious cycle of ignorance and intolerance whilst quoting and twisting from a bible that at its root, preaches love and understanding and equality for all.
“Shame on all those who judge others so harshly that they will rob them of their civil liberties. Shame on those who will attempt to strip others of their dignity and their right to walk among us as equals on this earth. Shame on those who teach our children to discriminate and hate.
“Love is love is love is love. And it is rare and divine. So let all of us attempt to preserve it… in any manner we can. And by all of us, I really do mean all of us. Because lord knows there’s certainly not enough of it flowing around us in this life.”

Source