Shirley Manson found photo shoots “repulsive” because they damaged her self-esteem.
The Garbage star has admitted she hated the “visual accompaniment” to her music career — admitting she didn’t like seeing pictures of herself looking “gorgeous and fantastical” because she didn’t look like herself and they made her feel like she wasn’t “good enough”.
She told the Guardian newspaper: “The problem with a lot of success is it comes with a lot of visual accompaniment. Your self is reflected back at you on every magazine. Some versions are gorgeous and fantastical and you look nothing like yourself — maybe there’s a small semblance of you in the eyes.
“And then there are incredibly unflattering ones… I wasn’t the right personality to deal with that. I found it repulsive.
“I didn’t get an iota of pleasure out of it. I felt that, if I was good enough, I would look like that image. But I don’t, so they have to augment it with lights and make-up and hair and stylists and nail manicurists. It really did a number on my self-esteem.”
Shirley also admitted it was tough being a woman in the public eye back in the 1990s but she didn’t notice much of the “micro-sexism” at first because she was so “dazzled” by her showbiz career.
She explained: “I was so young and I was hungry and distracted. I didn’t notice a lot of the micro-misogyny and the micro-sexism at first.
“I was blinded by the dazzle of my career. I wasn’t paying attention.”
She added of the criticism levelled at female artists back in the 1990s: “Back then, I read my own press, like a fool, and I was reading these horrible descriptions of me, really degrading or sexual in nature, or just nasty s***.
“It wasn’t just the male writers, although primarily the 90s music journalists were male. It really stung, and I found that hard.”
Shirley has previously admitted she had dealt with “issues” about her appearance since she was a child growing up with red hair.
She told Wonderland magazine: “I dealt with a lot of insecurity about my appearance when I was young: I was red-haired, so I was different right from the start. But one day, I was getting ready for a school play of the Wizard of Oz — I was playing the wicked witch of the west — and I painted my face green, with lots of black eye make-up. I remember looking in the mirror thinking, ‘I’ve never looked this good’.
“Then I saw Siouxie and the Banshees on Top of the Pops, completely transformed by make-up, and I fell in love. Makeup has been a huge part of my life: I used it for escape, for transformation, for joy, as a tranquiliser, because when I’m getting ready, it calms me. And I always had a fascination with it… “
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