Garbage billed their 2025 “Happy Endings” tour as their “last North American headline tour,” saying it was “unlikely we will play many of the cities on this tour ever again.” Those shows wrapped up in November, and now Shirley Manson has reflected on them and what she describes as the “insane” economics of touring. Speaking to NME, she said, “We have never said that we are stopping playing entirely – despite how some of the media has chosen to report on this. We have made the decision that our touring will be a different model from here on out.”
“We did the maths,” she continued to NME. “I think this is a fascinating statistic: we played about 40 shows in North America, and Billy [Bush, Shirley’s husband] is such a nerd and did a bunch of equations to realise that we could have earned exactly the same amount from the entire tour if we’d only played 10 shows. That would have been approximately five shows on the east coast, and five shows on the West. Instead, we went into the middle of North America and toured all the way through it because we wanted to say farewell to a lot of the places we know we will never go back to because we can’t afford to go there.”
“So we would have earned the same amount of 10 shows as 40,” Manson added. “Let that sink in. I don’t think the world has yet fully grasped how insane the economics are. I’ve said my peace on that and could go on and on!”
Manson also told NME about the 2025 incident where she went viral ranting against beach balls from a festival stage in Australia. “I was astounded by the intensity of criticism,” Manson said to NME. “To be fair, I lost my composure. My dad died on October 3, I’d been touring solidly since and it was now December. Clearly, I should have been at home but I carried on working. It was a bad call, but it something I had agreed upon with my dad. I had just buried him the week before.”
“This is not an excuse,” she added, “I’m just saying that I lost my composure. People are human, they make bad errors of judgement, I made a bad error of judgement and I shouldn’t have gone off like that. But you would have thought I’d have killed a fucking baby! There were calls for me to be deported from Australia. It was ludicrous. In the end they got so hysterical in their desire to punish me that the whole thing turned around.”
“Shit happens,” Manson continued to NME. “I just felt bad for my band as 100 beach balls came sailing over the crowd the following day. Luckily for us, we all have a really good sense of humour. We knew it was coming and already called it. I’m sure there will be hundreds of beach balls for the rest of our career.”
Read the interview in full on NME.