Hard to love – but Shirley Manson is terrific: Garbage, at Usher Hall, reviewed

There’s nothing quite like the drama of a prodigal’s return. ‘I’ve been singing in this venue since I was ten years old,’ announces Shirley Manson, staring down nearly half a century of personal history at Edinburgh’s ornate Usher Hall.

The fact that Garbage’s lead singer made the United States her primary residence many years ago lends this homecoming concert added potency. There are shout-outs to her dad, a ‘Happy Birthday’ serenade for her sister and what looks like a tear or two at the start of the encore.

For all the sentiment, it was obvious that Manson was right to leave not just Edinburgh, but the UK. In the mid-1990s, instead of joining her peers to splash around in the shallows of Britpop, she decamped to the US to form Garbage with three American producers/musos, Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson.

Manson swapped the chance of becoming a bit-part player in Cool Britannia for the more sustained rewards of global success – and it paid off, even if the transaction has left her without any tangible constituency. Garbage are perhaps the ultimate no-scene band. During their heyday, they avoided any meaningful cultural affiliations – and still seem oddly disconnected from everything but themselves.

Their stock-in-trade is fussily uglified pop music, a blend of grunge, alternative rock, electronica and punk which is a little too on-point, too shiny and too contrived to fully convince. Likewise, a much trumpeted ‘badass’ attitude is so sleekly applied it feels like the equivalent of a Che Guevara T-shirt hanging in the racks at M&S. In Edinburgh, ‘Bleed Like Me’ is introduced by Manson as the band’s signature anthem for misfits and weirdos, yet the song itself is almost comically orthodox.