BEFORE we begin: you have actually heard Garbage, haven't you? You haven't? Let me try and describe the band's music for you, then: great big, meaty chunks' of pure pop ecstasy wrapped in a grungy, crinkly coating, spiced up with samples, loops, breakbeats and sudden flashes of genius, and served up with a combination of moody sexuality and brooding menace.

OK, well, at least I tried. You see, Garbage is not your common or garden disposable US indie band, as you'll realise when you listen to the brilliantly sculpted songs which soar through its eponymous debut album like satellites of lust. For a band with such a rummagy name, Garbage has an unnerving knack of tossing out sparkling gems of sonic iridescence, and the band's current single, Stupid Girl, is a pearl among pop songs, a driving, unstoppable attack on shallow - vanity and selfish manipulation, a Lycra'd leg thrust into the path of an unwitting, preening prima donna. It's just one song out of the album's dream dozen which amply captures the eclecticism, inventiveness and iconoclasm which fuels the Garbage truck.

"I think it could easily have been Stupid Boy," says singer Shirley Manson, on the phone from Columbus, Ohio, the next stop on the band's current US tour, "but we realised it was much more playful and mischievous by having a girl speaking to another girl. Definitely that was deliberate. We try to have fun with it, but still retaining some, you know, irony.

Garbage was formed in Madison, Wisconsin, but the voice which comes down the transatlantic line is a soft Scottish brogue, the first of many incongruities which set Garbage aside as a hit of a rock oddity. Take the three guys who back Shirley up, for example: they re not your typical US college geeks with guitars, but are in fact a trio of thirtysomething studio hot fins who between them have produced everybody from Nirvana to Nine Inch Nails. And the most famous person in the band is not the feisty 29 year old singer from Edinburgh who is giving this interview, but the drummer, Butch Vig, otherwise worshipped as the man who produced the epochmaking album Nevermind.

The Garbage story goes something like this: Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson, three knob twiddling veterans of US alternorock, and also long time collaborators, began to jam together at their own Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, in between remixing jobs for the likes of U2 and Depeche Mode. Being backroom kinda guys, they needed someone up front, and when they spotted Scotswoman Shirley Manson singing on MTV's 120 Minutes with her band, Angelfish, they knew they'd found their man. Lucky for them, Angelfish were in the throes of a break up, and Shirley was open to offers. What, pray tell, made her accept this one in particular?

"I think it's difficult to intellectualise it," says Manson, "I met them and we just hit it off very early on and we shared a similar taste and outlook on music and a similar outlook on life. And when I went up to Madison and we heard some of the tapes, it was very open ended, there were no particular rules at that time, it was just literally, let's see what happens. And we had no demos, we never did any demos or anything. What's on the record is what came out."

What came out was an album of fierce intelligence and ferocious creativity, a confident, consummate debut which oozes natural magnetism. "I think when we made the record we were quite conscious that we wanted to make it a fully rounded piece - I think that people are complicated and have multi facets about them, and I think that should go the same with music. We had all played in bands before and had worked in that sort of restricted environment, and I think we were all delighted to have a totally blank canvas. We didn't feel that we had any band identity to protect, so we could do anything we wanted, pull from any kind of music we wanted, sample from every genre, hip hop or techno, jazz or blues or whatever. I think there's a lot of artists who are doing that now. I think we've caught a wave of like, Tricky and Portishead are doing similar things, albeit fairly different from us, but they're still stealing in the way we are and amalgamating it into their own sound.

GARBAGE may have the same magpie approach to their music as the Bristol trip hop bunch, but their influences as befits a band the majority of whose members have spent much of their lives in cold, north western American climes are entirely different. Recent hit Queer, for instance, takes a rolling, blues based motif and sends it snowballing down a mountain side; the band's first Top 20 hit, Only Happy When It Rains, is a refreshing splash of post Goth homour, while their current single, Stupid Girl, though anchored to a solid bass driven rhythm, is torn from its moorings by twisted guitar bends and set adrift on an outrageously poppy chorus. Stupid Girl tumbled from the p.a. system at the Brown Thomas Fashion Showcase at the Point last month, making an ironic counterpoint with the Supermodels prowling the catwalk, and it has entered the UK charts at Number Four, giving Garbage a hat trick of heavenly pop hits.

Now the band has come out of the studio and decided to tour, but it emerges with some distinct handicaps: firstly, how do you reproduce the singular sounds of Garbage on stage without a load of samplers and sessioneers, and secondly, how do you come out from under the shadow of Butch Vig's enormous, towering reputation?

"I think at the very, very start when we first came out, we got some press in the UK because of who Butch was," concedes Shirley. "Definitely. But similarly we also had a lot of doors that were closed to us, because people were very cynical about it and didn't treat us like a normal band, and were very reluctant and very slow to come on board, particularly certain magazines and certain radio stations. As time went on, the Botch Vig issue fell into the background and we had to work like every band to try and make people aware of the band and aware of the music, and eventually it was the music that sold the record, not Butch's name."

Another initial problem was the perception of Shirley as Garbage's "token bimbo", when in fact she has the same creative input into the music as the three guys. Was this a difficult prejudice to overcome?

"Absolutely. I think if I was male it wouldn't have been questioned otherwise. But there's rabid sexism rite in the world still, so it's kind of just an attitude I've come to expect. I don't think there's a lot I can do to change people's perceptions, I just think eventually, they'll see we're the real McCoy.

WHEN Garbage made its first tentative steps on to the gig circuit, the band decided to go for a straight four piece live sound and quickly got entangled in its own gaffa tape. In the studio it was genius, but onstage Garbage was stumbling on shaky ground.

"Yeah, we felt like we were being fed to the lions," says Shirley. "First of all we were always sort of catching up with the record. The record took on a momentum of its own that we just did not expect. And we had to put together a tour in two or three weeks. The record company were saying, they have to know that you're a real band, they don't believe in you, you have to go and show that you're willing to be touring and you're gonna make another record."

"So we rushed the touring aspect of it, and we know that when we went out we were totally unprepared - I mean we all knew that, we were ill with worry."

"After that tour, we were as aware as everybody how we failed, and we went back and reassessed, and we've incorporated a bit more technology, but all manually triggered onstage. Both guitarists have midi switches that switch to keyboards, we've got the trigger samples off the guitar pedals and the drumkit, you know, there's a whole lot of stuff going on that didn't go on the last time."

So, would you say that, having heard the album, the fans came with high expectations which you were unable to fulfil?

"Yes, although in the long term I think we've probably done the smart thing. To show your flaws and to show that you can also fail can be endearing, and I think that, yes, we got some bad reviews but I think we'll get better ones this time.

So far, things seem to be going Garbage's way stateside. The band is playing to sold out houses on this tour, and Only Happy When It Rains has just cracked the US Top 100 which satisfies Shirley no end "because it's such a huge country and it takes a long time for people to be aware of who you are".

Longer than Garbage may last, perhaps? Is Shirley worried that Butch, Duke and Steve might go back to producing records for megastars and put her out the back door like last week's trash?

"I think it feels like we're definitely gonna go on for longer than we expected. I don't know if - I'm too long in the tooth to expect bands to last forever. But I hope that it will last for quite some time. I've had a lot of experience in bands, I know that they are difficult things to keep together. I think to be honest that was probably one of the reasons why they were attracted to me in the first place, is that I wasn't desperate to do it, I took some persuading, coz I knew that it could go drastically wrong. And I think that they felt that they could connect with me as a person, as an individual, and as a mature person. Which makes a big difference if you're trying to do something creative."