Garbage played a huge show at Edinburgh Castle over the weekend – check out a full setlist and what went down below.
- READ MORE: Garbage’s Shirley Manson: “I don’t have to be young, I don’t have to be sexy – if you cancel me, you cancel me”
The Scottish-American band were the final headliners of the iconic venue’s summer concert series, and took to the stage on Saturday (July 11) to storm through hits like ‘Vow’, ‘Stupid Girl’, ‘Special’ and ‘Push It’, as well as a cover of The Cure’s ‘Lovesong’, suited and booted for the occasion in their kilts.
When the gig was announced last year, frontwoman and former NME Icon award winner Shirley Manson said she’d be bringing the band home, “for what most likely will be our last headline show in Scotland”, saying it felt “both poignant and triumphant”.
Last night, she said the evening felt like “the culmination of 40 years in music”. She also took time throughout the set to pay tribute to her family, and told the crowd that her late father’s eyes “lit up” when she told him they’d booked the castle.
A photo of him sat propped against Butch Vig’s drumkit, and Manson later led the crowd through a huge singalong of ‘Happy Birthday’ for her big sister, Lindy-Jane, who was watching along from the stands.
Garbage played:
‘There’s No Future in Optimism’
‘Hold’
‘Empty’
‘I Think I’m Paranoid’
‘Stupid Girl’
‘Right Between the Eyes’
‘Vow’
‘Happy Birthday to You’ (dedicated to Shirley’s big sister)
‘No Horses’
‘It’s All Over but the Crying’
‘Have We Met (The Void)’
‘Control’
‘Chinese Fire Horse’
‘Lovesong’ (The Cure cover)
‘Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)
‘When I Grow Up’
‘Push It’
‘The Day That I Met God’
Encore:
‘Special’
‘Only Happy When It Rains’
After the gig, Nicola Sturgeon took to Instagram to reflect on its significance to her, calling the evening “very special”.
She looked back to 1999, when she watched the band play Princes Street Gardens as a “brand new” MSP, and said to seem them 27 years later, having now stepped down as an MSP, was “a real full circle moment.
“What made it extra special was that in the intervening years, the amazing Shirley Manson has become a friend. She is an absolute powerhouse and personifies strong, resilient, fearless womanhood. Watching her perform last night at the peak of her powers was a privilege.”
Garbage have a run of European dates coming up this week, and are scheduled to make further stops in London, Belfast, and Dublin on July 14, 17 and 18, respectively. Find any remaining tickets here.
Back in 2025, the band wrapped their last-ever US tour, having indicated that they were “unlikely to play many of the cities” on the run “ever again”.
Speaking to NME at the time, Manson opened up about the crushing and “abusive” financial strains of the music industry.
“Now what you have are musicians who are independently wealthy – maybe they come from a wealthy family – and they can start to carve out a career for themselves in the music industry,” she told us. “You have the old guard who made records before 1995; they themselves can survive. Then the artists who enjoy phenomenal success also survive.”
We later caught up with her again to talk being invited by The Cure‘s Robert Smith to play his curated Teenage Cancer Trust gigs alongside Placebo, as well as the fallout of ‘beach ball gate’ and their future as a touring band.
“We have never said that we are stopping playing entirely – despite how some of the media has chosen to report on this,” she clarified. “We have made the decision that our touring will be a different model from here on out.”
“We did the maths. I think this is a fascinating statistic: we played about 40 shows in North America, and Billy [Bush, 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. 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!”
