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.
A ‘badass’ attitude is so sleekly applied it seems like a Che Guevara T-shirt in the racks at M&S
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.
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