The Alternative Number Ones: Garbage’s “#1 Crush”

8:59 AM EDT on May 4, 2026

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard  Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to  The Number Ones . The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.

Garbage shouldn't have worked. The band's entire story is deeply unlikely on every level. Here we've got three middle-aged Midwestern underground rock dudes. These guys worked together in a couple of bands for many years, and they had a couple of shots at success, though they never quite broke through. But then one of those guys — the drummer, at that — happened to produce some of the biggest, most important rock records ever made. That doesn't mean that anyone was checking for the drummer's new band. You don't become a star by producing rock records, or by playing drums. You need to find a star. The drummer and his friends did exactly that.

Specifically, these guys recruited their star directly from 120 Minutes , finding themselves a charisma-bomb singer from all the way out in Scotland. Her own band wasn't really going anywhere, and the guys knew that she had a spark even though the early audition process didn't go well. That singer moved to Wisconsin, and the newly formed band leaned into the avant-garde studio-pop sounds of their moment. Unlike most of the other acts who played around with those styles, Garbage were never really a critics' band. Instead, they became a radio band, and possibly the only radio band of their kind.

Garbage originally intended to work as a studio project that would never play live. Thirty years later, they're a touring institution. In their first few years, they made hit after hit. They looked and sounded sleek and expensive and produced , but they still belonged in the alternative rock universe through connection, pedigree, and general attitude. They thought of themselves as futuristic new wavers, not as straight-up rockers, though you couldn't take the rocker out of them. In the '90s, Garbage looked like a fascinating evolution, a glimpse at what alternative rock might become in the future. But Garbage were a path not taken, and the commercial zeitgeist moved in different directions instead.

Over about a decade, Garbage racked up a greatest-hits album's worth of alternative rock hits — five songs in the top 10, as well as a handful of other seemingly omnipresent jams that must've only been kept out by sheer witchcraft. After their extended spotlight moment, Garbage just kept working. They're still a band today, and they have had zero lineup changes over the years, even though one of the band members is now 75 years old. But thanks to the mysterious way that weekly charts work, Garbage only ever made one chart-topping Modern Rock hit, and it's a remixed B-side that became a hit when it showed up on the soundtrack of one of the most bonkers teen blockbusters of an era that was rich in bonkers teen blockbusters. Also, their only #1 hit is the one that has "#1" in its title. Makes you think.

The Garbage story goes back a long time, longer than you think. You might say that the story began 52 years ago, in 1974. That's when a guy named Duke Erikson started a band called Spooner in Wayne, Nebraska. Spooner made a fuzzy kind of power-pop, and they found a regional audience after they moved to Madison, Wisconsin. They didn't have a drummer at first, but local teenager Butch Vig joined the band in 1978. Gary Klebe, from the cult-favorite Illinois power-pop band Shoes, produced Spooner's debut EP in 1979, and they put out a couple of '80s independent albums before breaking up. Years later, Vig told SPIN that Clive Davis once attempted to sign Spooner and to put them in the studio with Def Leppard producer Mutt Lange. This did not happen. Based on an extremely brief perusal of their discography, I can tell you that Spooner were pretty good !

When he was at the University Of Wisconsin, Butch Vig met a guy named Steve Marker, and the two of them became friends and got into music production together. They built a studio in Marker's basement, and they used it to record Spooner's music, which they released on their own label. Soon afterward, Vig and Marker opened a proper facility that they called Smart Studios. Starting in the mid-'80s, Vig produced a bunch of records for Midwestern underground noise-rock bands like Killdozer, the Laughing Hyenas, and Die Kreuzen at Smart Studios. At the same time, Vig played drums in Duke Erikson's post=Spooner band Fire Town, which sounded like a slightly sleeker take on Spooner. Fire Town released a couple of albums on Atlantic, and they made it onto the Modern Rock chart exactly once. In 1989, their song "The Good Life" peaked at #18. That same year, Fire Town broke up.

Spooner got back together and released one more album in 1990, but it didn't really go anywhere. Butch Vig's career took a sharp turn in 1991, when he produced Nirvana's Nevermind and the Smashing Pumpkins' Gish — a pretty good year. Suddenly, major labels identified Vig as the guy who could take wooly sounds from the suddenly-hot underground and turn them into something resembling pop. He produced the Smashing Pumpkins' blockbuster 1993 follow-up Siamese Dream , as well as albums from Sonic Youth, L7, Helmet, and Soul Asylum. He's been in this column as a producer a few times.

After Butch Vig got industry-famous, labels started hitting him up for remixes. Vig went to work with his friends Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, and their first effort was a very silly 1993 riff-rock take on House Of Pain's "Shamrocks And Shenanigans," which was already a very silly song to begin with. After that, Vig and his friends did remix work for big bands like U2 , Depeche Mode , and Nine Inch Nails . Their remixes always had big, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, but they also played around with gothed-out keyboards and rap-adjacent drum loops. Talking to SPIN , Erikson described their process as "not like a rock band at all," but they decided to start a new band anyway. They called it Garbage after one of their friends complained that that's how they sounded.

Duke Erikson had handled lead vocals in Spooner and Fire Town, but he didn't want to be the frontman for Garbage. Instead, the three guys in the band wanted to find a tough, powerful woman to sing for the band. One night, Steve Marker was watching 120 Minutes on MTV, and he happened to see the exact right woman. Shirley Manson was the leader of Angelfish, a Scottish group who released exactly one album, a self-titled 1994 LP, before breaking up. According to the commendably dependable 120 Minutes Archive , Angelfish's "Suffocate Me" video played exactly once on 120 Minutes , near the end of a September 1993 episode. This was fortuitous. If you watch the "Suffocate Me" video today, you can see that Shirley Manson was already pretty much fully formed.

Shirley Manson — it's her real name, not an edgy affectation — grew up middle-class in Edinburgh, and she studied music and theater in high school before dropping out and turning into a bit of a delinquent. She sang for a couple of local bands before joining the group Goodbye Mr Mackenzie as a teenager. Manson played keyboard and sang backup in that band for 10 solid years, some of which she spent in a relationship with frontman Martin Metcalfe. Goodbye Mr Mackenzie released a couple of major-label albums around the turn of the '90s, and their synth-rock single " The Rattler " scraped the bottom of the UK top 40 in 1989. (Good song!)

Angelfish started off as a Goodbye Mr Mackenzie side project because their manager wanted them to record an album with Manson on lead vocals. Former Talking Heads Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz produced Angelfish's self-titled LP, and they toured the US with Live, a band that's already been in this column a few times. But Angelfish's album didn't sell well in the US — just enough to peak at #196 on the album chart.

When Shirley Manson got the call to try out for Garbage, she didn't know who Butch Vig was; someone had to tell her to go look at the credits on her copy of Nevermind . The gentlemen flew out to London to meet her. The day that she met them was the day that Kurt Cobain's body was discovered. Thanks to that sad and freaky coincidence, Garbage can be framed as a clear example of a thing that came after grunge, one that easily slotted into the chaotic alt-rock radio moment when nobody knew what the next thing was.

Manson and the Garbage guys met again later on, when Angelfish played in Chicago. Manson came to Madison to try recording vocals with them, but they couldn't get on the same page. Manson had never written songs for Goodbye Mr Mackenzie or Angelfish, so that was new to her. The guys asked her to go into the vocal booth and come up with stuff, and she was intimidated. Also, her accent was strong enough that the guys couldn't understand what she was saying at first.

Not long after that first frustrating session, Angelfish broke up, and Manson called the Garbage guys back and told them that she had some ideas of what she wanted to do with their tracks. When they tried again, everything clicked. Manson co-wrote and co-produced Garbage's self-titled 1995 debut with her new bandmates, and she quickly emerged as a real-deal bandleader. She favored lyrics about depression and obsession, familiar topics in '90s alt-rock, but she sang them with a level of sexual intensity that was pretty rare at the time. The other Garbage members say that Manson wasn't just their singer. They had a sound, but she gave them a direction. For the first few months, Garbage were sold as Butch Vig's band. But very quickly thereafter, Garbage became the Shirley Manson show. When you go see the group live, she's the one you watch.

Figuring that they were a studio project who would never play live, the band built a musical style out of layers of processed sound. The guitars could be shoegaze smears or industrial crunch-squeals, and the beats often verged on trip-hop. For a couple of tracks, Garbage brought in Clyde Stubblefield, the former James Brown drummer who might've been the most sampled man in the world. He happened to be living in Madison at time time, so it was really just luck, but I like the circularity of this band of rock dudes playing around with "Funky Drummer" loops but then realizing that they could get session work from the actual Funky Drummer.

Things moved quickly. Garbage found a record deal even though they didn't put Butch Vig's name on their demo, and they released their debut single "Vow" in March 1995. That song introduced everything about their sound — warped electro-guitars giving way to sudden processed roars, keyboard sounds piled on top of keyboard sounds, Shirley Manson's snarled new wave melodies. Garbage enjoyed filming the song's video with " Smells Like Teen Spirit " director Samuel Bayer enough that they decided maybe they could try playing live after all. Before long, they were touring arenas with Smashing Pumpkins. "Vow" got serious MTV burn, and it peaked at #26 on the Modern Rock chart and #97 on the Hot 100. The original version of "#1 Crush" first came out as a "Vow" B-side.

When you get used to hearing the "#1 Crush" remix that became a hit, the OG version sounds surprisingly sparse. It's got programmed shakers and digital distortion all over it, but it sounds like a rock song , more or less. The grimy riffs get a lot of room to operate. Shirley Manson sings about romantic obsession with feverish severity. She starts off purring that she would die for you, an expression of affection that we've heard many times through pop history. As the song progresses, she takes things further and further, really showing how fucked up that cliché actually is.

Shirley Manson's narrator won't just die for you. She'll wash away your pain with all her tears and drown your fear. Sh

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2496981/the-alternative-number-ones-garbages-1-crush/columns/the-alternative-number-ones/)._