When Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson got word that her band’s summer co-headlining tour with New York’s influential Lower East Side rock band Blondie had been given the green light, she was ecstatic.

During a phone interview ahead of the outing, dubbed the Rage & Rapture Tour, which stops by the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Sunday, July 9, Manson said she had been lucky enough to have had several run-ins with Blondie vocalist Debbie Harry throughout the years.

Back in the early ‘80s, Manson’s Scottish rock band, Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie, opened for Harry on her solo tour and in the early ‘90s, Harry came out to see Manson in her band Angelfish when she was opening up for the Ramones at The Academy in New York City.

“I was weird on Blondie,” Manson said with a laugh. “I was. Debbie has been one of my touchstones throughout my life.”

Rock band Blondie will join Garbage for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Alexander Thompson)

Singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira will serve as the support act for Blondie and Garbage’s co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Rich Fury, Associated Press)

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Rock band Garbage will join Blondie for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Katie Darby, Associated Press)

Rock band Blondie will join Garbage for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo courtesy of Blondie)

Rock band Garbage will join Blondie for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Joseph Cultice)



Singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira will serve as the support act for Blondie and Garbage’s co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Rich Fury, Associated Press)

Rock band Garbage will join Blondie for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Owen Sweeney, Associated Press)

Rock band Blondie will join Garbage for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by courtesy of Blondie)

Rock band Garbage will join Blondie for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Joseph Cultice)

Blondie will join Garbage for the co-headlining Rage and Rapture Tour, which comes to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, July 9. (Photo by Robert Altman, Associated Press)



Manson recalls looking out into the audience at The Academy gig and seeing Harry bobbing around in the moshpit with the rest of the fans.

“I just thought to myself, there is someone who will have my loyalty ‘til the day I die,” she said. “She’s very special and unlike a lot of very successful, beautiful women, she’s incredibly generous to all of the other women around her. That’s not always the case. A lot of very famous, beautiful women are very threatened by anyone else coming into the room and taking up space, but Debbie is very generous and has never just played upon her looks. She’s always just been focused on being a great singer and entertainer and she’s a really spirited and inspiring person. Make no mistake, you don’t get to be 71-years-old and still be able to make records if you’re a pussy cat, we’re looking at a true maestro.”

Blondie formed in 1974 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. The band just dropped its 11th studio album, “Pollinator,” in May, which was led by the single, “Fun.” Garbage formed in Madison, Wisconsin in 1993 and received critical acclaim for its self-titled debut in 1995. The band celebrated its 20th anniversary with its 20 Years Queer Tour in 2015 and released its sixth studio album, “Strange Little Birds” last year.

Manson said that this tour was not only a “dream come true,” but that the timing of it, with human and women’s rights so heavily in the spotlight, was also perfect as there are so many strong female voices on the bill. Singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira will serve as the support act at the Hollywood Bowl, while Exene Cervenka and John Doe of legendary L.A. punk band X and L.A. rock duo Deap Vally will open on other stops across the country.

“What we’re seeing is just smart women galvanizing and realizing that these are perilous times for women and if those of us who have a voice do not stand up together, then there is very little hope of protecting our futures,” Manson said. “Nobody is messing around at this point. I think everyone understands that we have a president that has willfully disrespected women in public and given the opportunity to be contrite about it, wasn’t even remotely contrite and therefore I think it gives us a good idea about how he feels about women. I’m sure he loves his daughters and he’s a good husband, regardless, I think his attitudes are a little too old fashioned for my taste. The times have become fraught with women who consider themselves feminists and who are not to be messed with and I think we realize that there’s an urgency, and we must stand together.”

Throughout Garbage’s 20-plus year career, the band has played just about every club, theater and arena in Southern California, with the exception of the Hollywood Bowl.

“Like all of us, I feel like I’m being flown into the Hollywood Bowl on the wings of Deborah Harry,” she said. “We’ve never stepped on the Hollywood Bowl stage so this is an extraordinary event for us and we’re a wee bit nervous because it’s coming at the very beginning of the tour. It’s not coming after weeks of getting the set list under our belts, we’re coming in fresh so we’re a little trepidatious and as a result we’re rehearsing a lot longer than we normally would. It’s a great challenge, but we’re definitely up for the task. I think, at this point in our career, we know we can pretty much step on any stage and deliver a good show, but you just want to eradicate as many chances of failing as possible.”

On Tuesday, July 4, Garbage will release an autobiographical coffee table book, “This Is The Noise That Keeps Me Awake.” That title comes from a line from its 1998 hit song, “Push It.”

“How do you pick a title that encapsulates an entire career,” Manson asked rhetorically. “I feel like that line from ‘Push It’ does just that. This has been sort of our life obsession. It’s the thing that has kept us all awake at night.”

The book will feature never-before-seen photos of the band and pieces written by each band member, including Manson, bassist and rhythm guitarist Duke Erikson, drummer Butch Vig and guitarist Steve Marker. The limited-edition pre-order also comes in a collectible box with a 12” vinyl record featuring six never released live recordings of Garbage’s ballads such as “Milk,” “You Look So Fine” and “Cup of Coffee.”

“We thought it would be a nice gesture to include some music and originally we flirted with the idea of doing some new music, but then decided we didn’t want new music to necessarily speak for the whole body of our work,” she said. “We went back and decided to pick a ballad from each of our records as the easiest and most efficient way of picking songs.”

When it came to actually writing portions of the book, Manson said it became a highly amusing process as each member, of course, seemed to have a different account about how certain events took place.

“Overall I think what we felt the most was gratitude that we’re still here making music and what an incredible opportunity we had been given,” she said. “We were sort of shocked at how lucky we’ve been. When you move through the music industry, there’s a lot of hurt that goes on, but that’s a given in anything in life. You get hurt, you lick your wounds and you remember those pains by your scars and it’s easy to sort of forget that along the way with all this pain came outrageous pleasure. I think it got us all back in touch with those real moments where we just rode this crazy wave of adrenaline and of excitement. It was a hard venture to put a book together for so many reasons, but was also an incredibly joyful one.”

Manson admits that there was also a bit of a selfish reason for the band wanting to officially jot down and document their memories.

“This sounds really macabre, but the reason we wanted to make the book is because we’re older … well, we’re old, actually, and we realize that our time is limited,” she said. “We’re starting to watch our heroes die off and we thought that the Grim Reaper is going to come a callin’ for us sooner rather than later and we wanted to leave a little scrapbook, which is the perfect way of putting it, for the children in our lives. Every member of the band has children except for myself, but I have a niece and a nephew and we all have godchildren and so forth, so we wanted to sort of leave behind a token of what their crazy parents or uncles and aunties did with their lives.”

Blondie and Garbage’s “Rage and Rapture Tour”

With: Sky Ferreira

When: 7 p.m. Sunday, July 9

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles

Tickets: $23-$111

Information: 323-850-2000 or HollywoodBowl.com