Married by Scotland’s rock star minister!

• When Mad Men star Christina Hendricks tied the knot in New Orleans, her ceremony came with a surreal plot twist… 

At first glance, it seems like a typical wedding photo: the bride pretty in white, the groom in a smart suit and a celebrant in red reading their vows.

Until, that is, you look closer. Because the bride is Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks, while the ‘minister’ is none other than Scots singer and Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson.

If it seems an odd segue for a woman who since the 1990s has been one of Scotland’s most renowned rock stars, Manson seems delighted with her new role.

Posting online about the wedding, which took place in New Orleans in April, she wrote: ‘Went to the state of Louisiana. Got my licence as an officiant in New Orleans.

 Wedded two beautiful people who are madly in love and it all felt romantic and right.

‘From here on out you can refer to me as Minister Manson as that is my official title. I am available for further hire but I am grotesquely expensive.’

Hendricks, who married husband George Bianchini in a lavish three-day celebration in the city, is a close friend of Manson, and was apparently bowled over that the singer agreed to be their officiant. 

‘It was super-exciting for us because I really think [Manson] is one of the most extraordinary writers and poets,’ she said.

Gosh. But 57-year-old Manson, who is originally from Edinburgh, has no plans to give up the day job. This summer Garbage will play two Scottish dates, one at the Glasgow music festival TRNSMT, the other at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.

The gigs will mark a sort of homecoming for Manson – it will be the first time this decade the band have performed in the country – and will form key dates in a European tour to support their 2022 greatest hits album Anthology.

Recent years have not always proved smooth sailing for Manson. Last year she underwent a hip replacement operation after suffering what she described as ‘excruciating pain’ for seven years, following a fall from the stage during a gig in LA in 2016.

‘My doctor was like, “You need a new hip”,’ she said. ‘It was so humbling. I’ve never had any physical problems, then all of a sudden I find myself using a bedpan.’ In the aftermath Manson had to use both a walker and a walking stick at her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, record producer Billy Bush, and not long afterwards lost her beloved 16-year-old dog Veela.

‘It doesn’t sound like much but it has literally ruined my life,’ she said. ‘The loss of her has coloured everything. Having a body that didn’t work, losing the joy of my life, it’s been a real challenge to try and get myself back up and not be destructive with my depression and my rage. 

They always need to be tempered.’

Indeed, depression and rage have always been part of the Manson brand. She grew up in Stockbridge, a well-heeled part of Edinburgh, and by the age of 21 was playing keyboards for a band called Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, performing in rowdy clubs and with a distinctly punk attitude. 

It wasn’t long before Butch Vig, an American music producer who had produced Nirvana’s seminal 1991 album Nevermind, came calling with an offer: he and two other producers wanted to start a band and needed a frontwoman. 

Would Manson like to join?

It was the opportunity of a lifetime, but it wasn’t plain sailing. Still in her twenties, Manson upped and left Edinburgh to move to the American Midwest, away from friends, family and her first husband, sculptor Eddie Farrell. 

She spent several years living in hotels, mostly in the company of three much older men with whom she had little in common other than music.

‘I’ve always been the odd one out in Garbage,’ she said recently. ‘Even now, I’m the odd one out. I was never part of the gang. 

I’m much younger than the guys in the band. I had a different upbringing. 

They’d been friends for 20 years before I came along, so I always felt out of things in some ways.’

But their edgy music struck a nerve during the post-grunge era of the 1990s and Garbage sailed straight to the top of the charts with huge hits such as Stupid Girl and Only Happy When It Rains, prompting a shift to a major record label, several gruelling world tours and – gallingly for Manson – a lot of sexism.

‘There was a lot of stuff written about me in the music press, and that’s when I started to realise how I’m being diminished, how, in some cases, I’m being completely eradicated from the narrative because I’m female and not a man,’ she told Rolling Stone in 2021.

‘I was talked over by lawyers; I was ignored by managers. 

The list goes on. It’s boring and tedious; there’s no point in me moaning about it now, but certainly that was my awakening.’

And there were also moments of distinct rock and roll excess, even if they were not quite the throwing-televisions-out-windows variety.

‘At the height of my success, I hired a person who would shop for me and then send everything in a big box to my hotel room,’ she said once.

‘I would choose what I wanted and return anything else. 

One day, this beautiful pair of Italian leather boots arrived. It was only when I got back from tour I found out they cost $5,000. I can’t even laugh about it. 

It makes me so crazy. I still have these boots. I’d like to get rid of them just so that I never have to look at them again, but there they are every day, warning me of my own greed.’

Meanwhile her first marriage – Farrell had remained home in Edinburgh while she set up camp in America and toured the world – had foundered, and she was also suffering from body dysmorphia, a condition seemingly at odds with her brash on-stage persona.

‘When I was onstage I didn’t feel scared,’ she said. ‘That’s the perverse converse of how other people experience being onstage.’

In 2005 Manson walked off the stage during a performance in Perth, Australia, and the band went on an extended hiatus. 

The pressure had got to the singer and all the band members, and they were dropped by their record label.

‘It was miserable,’ she said. ‘When we first started out, we were signed to an indie label. We had a lot of freedom. 

Then we got sold like a commodity to a record label that did not give a flying f*** about our music or our career or us as people. And it was a nightmare.

‘They had all these corporate expectations about us. We didn’t care if we weren’t the biggest band in the world. But to this record label, if you’re not the biggest band in the world, then you’re worthless. 

I just do not adhere to that principle.’

Not long afterwards Manson’s mother Muriel was diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a rare form of dementia. Manson spent her time flying between Edinburgh and Los Angeles to care for her, and also moved her career in a new direction, acting in US TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a spin-off of the Terminator film series.

‘It came at a time when I was feeling really powerless,’ she said. ‘My mother was dying of dementia. 

My band had lost its record deal. I was 40 and felt like my career was over.

‘Then I got this incredible role. A Terminator is indestructible, so I fell into this fantasy of being able to fix anything, fix my mum. 

It was crazy, magical thinking, but it brought me a lot of solace.’ Manson’s mum died in 2008. ‘You don’t realise at the time when somebody’s dying how stressful it is. 

But I was losing my memory, I couldn’t construct sentences, I couldn’t find words,’ she said.

‘The kind of illness she had was devastating to watch. That kind of death is… hard.’

In the aftermath of her mother’s death, however, she found herself turning back towards music.

‘I thought, “My mum, of everybody I’ve ever known in my whole life, would be so devastated to think that I was no longer making music”.

‘I think that was partly a spur. Then I started to want to be creative. 

I had ideas and I didn’t have anywhere to put that creative energy.’

She tried to go solo, but her record company wasn’t keen on the music she was trying to make and attempted to rebrand her as an ‘Annie Lennox for [Manson’s] generation’. It wasn’t what Manson wanted.

‘No disrespect to Annie Lennox, because she’s amazing at what she does, but I have no interest in pursuing that kind of career at all. 

I got into my car and burst into tears. I thought, “They’re not gonna let me do what I want to do. So I may as well give up”.’

Instead, she reunited with Garbage in 2012, and the band has gone on to produce three more albums, latterly on their own record label, with a fourth rumoured to be in the works once their European tour is over. 

A four-track EP of previously unreleased songs was put out earlier this month.

Since the band’s original break-up in 2005 Manson has slowed down a little. 

She married her second husband Bush in 2010 and during one of Garbage’s extended breaks went travelling in Asia, and, living as she does in Los Angeles, has accrued a number of celebrity friends, including author Cheryl Strayed and Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon, and she even attended Gwen Stefani’s baby shower.

On trips back to Scotland – which she still adores – Manson heads for North Berwick, where she’s a fan of the Lobster Shack restaurant (she always orders the lobster and chips with a glass of white wine).

When asked by an American journalist what the ‘most Scottish thing’ about her was, she said: ‘I’ve got a lot of grit, and it’s served me really well in my career. I think that is a really Scottish trait.

‘The Scottish people are tough, and they also have a good sense of humour. So, grit with humour. I should say “gritted with humour”, in the same way we grit roads.’

At the age of 57 she has learned to look for the joy in life – like, perhaps, officiating the marriage of a friend – instead of focusing on the negative.

‘At this point, I feel like if it’s not fun, then I’m uninterested entirely, she said. ‘If somebody’s treating me poorly, I have to walk away.

‘Life is so fricking short and I’m three-quarters of the way through mine already; I just want to have a good life, full of joy.’ Not a bad sermon from the newly officiated Minister Manson.