Song 144 - Stupid girl by Garbage

Now I don't know whether you would really class Garbage as a Britpop band, but their music was playing out on the dance floor along with Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene at the same time. Also, I feel we had a run of male dominated bands so I wanted to add the brilliant vocals of Shirley Manson into the jukebox, and Garbage's 4th international single release in 1996.

With a beautifully repetitive baseline taken from The Clash's Train in vain hit, Stupid Girl's lyrics are about female empowerment. The origins of the track started in 1994, where Garbage minus Shirley Manson started sampling the tune using an ADAT eight Track and samplers. This was brought together with the drums and baseline by using the Clash's song. Manson would join the group after two auditions and the lyrics for the song would be some of the first lyrics she had ever written. When writing the song,  her take on Stupid girl was to create a girl who wouldn't settle for anything less than what she wants.  People still question Garbage to who was the Stupid girl.

Stupid Girl was released in the UK in March and debuted at number 4 in the UK Singles Chart. It spent 7 weeks in the Top 75 and sold approximately 120,000 copies. Taken from their self-named album, which debut at number 12 in the chart, it was picked up and remixed by the dance scene which turned the single platinum.

If Britpop was a move away from the Grunge scene, then Garbage bridged the two. Butch Vig, one of the founder members of band had produced Nevermind by Nirvana, who were the essence of Grunge, a fact played down when Garbage were looking for a record deal as they wanted to avoid a bidding war over Vig's producer experience. I think it is little facts like this that makes the music world really interesting as everything has a connection and different styles of music always end up merging somewhere down the line.

Anyway have a listen to Garbage
Stupid Girl by Garbage

Written by Garbage/ The Clash
Released: March 1996
Album: Garbage