By Robert Oliver

Copyright metro

A famous chart-topping band can no longer tour like they used to (Picture: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images)

An 90s American band who once topped the UK charts have blamed the ‘record industry’ after saying they can no longer afford to go out on tour.

Garbage, who formed in 1993, are best known in the UK for their songs Stupid Girl and Push It, as well as for their James Bond theme The World Is Not Enough.

They went to number one on the UK albums chart in 1998 when their second album, titled Version 2.0, reached the summit and eventually sold over 500,000 copies.

Despite being best known as a 90s band, their success continued into the 2000s with top 10 single Why Do You Love Me and top 10 albums Bleed Like Me and Not Your Kind of People.

However, with the costs of touring and concert tickets at an all-time high, the four-piece band have confessed that playing live shows around the world may no longer be feasible.

Shirley Manson, 59, who fronts the band, has said that the band’s current US tour may be their very last as their profits from live concerts continue to take big hits.

‘Touring is very, very difficult.’ (Picture: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

During a live show in Washington DC last week, Manson said on stage: ‘We have, as a band, decided that, due to basically the economics of the music industry, that we have to curtail our headline touring business.

‘It has, thanks to the thievery of the record industry, made touring very, very difficult. We’re not complaining, we’ve had a great run,’ adding that she worries mostly for younger bands just starting out.

‘Young musicians who go out there and tour – they’re holding down jobs, they take two weeks off their work and they go around the country.’

Garbage were one of the biggest alternative bands of the 1990s (Picture: Gie Knaeps/Getty)

”Sometimes they’re sleeping in vans [or] staying in dodgy motels – it’s unacceptable and it has to stop’ (Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

Manson, who grew up in Scotland before joining Garbage, continued: ‘Sometimes they’re sleeping in vans [or] staying in dodgy motels – it’s unacceptable and it has to stop. Whatever’s going on… It’s unsafe.’

She then reiterated that this tour would be the band’s last but thanked the crowd for continuing to see them, almost 30 years after their commercial peak.

‘At times in the music industry, they’ve told us we’re old, we’re over, nobody’s interested. Nobody wants to play us on radio… And then you lot came along. You were like: “Get behind us, Satan’. And we won’t forget it.”‘

Garbage landed a UK number one album in 1998 (Picture: Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images)

Manson then doubted that she would see many of the people in the audience ever again, saying: ‘We don’t know if we’ll ever see you again – maybe we will, maybe we won’t.’

The tour began back in April in Monterrey, Mexico before heading around the United States and Canada for the last five months, and will finish in Mexico City in November after 41 dates.

Garbage’s current tour, which was announced in March 2025, was given the name Happy Endings, indicating that the band were intending to have this be their final run of shows.

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