Garbage’s Manson calls Universal countersuit ‘madness & fun’

Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson has responded to a countersuit filed against her and her bandmates by Universal Music’s Radioactive Records earlier this month, calling her legal hassles “madness and fun,” and joking that the “lackeys” who delivered the suit to her “resembled the baddies out of The Matrix.”

Posting the note on her group’s official website (garbage.com), Manson further commented, “So talking about madness and fun…how about the sinister appearance of two goons in suits at the front door of our studio with the full intention we suspect of serving me a lawsuit courtesy of my very own record company!!!! Meanwhile, I was having my hair dyed pillarbox red at a salon on the other side of town, so I was nowhere to be found by the time the aforementioned lackeys (arrived), who according to eyewitnesses at the scene resembled the baddies out of The Matrix.”

Radioactive Records countersued Manson in Federal District Court earlier this month, claiming breach of contract and seeking declaratory relief. The label aims to force Manson to honor a contract agreement made when she was with her pre-Garbage group, Angelfish. The suit was in retaliation for Manson’s earlier legal blow, claiming in her own lawsuit in January that the contract was void due to a California statute limiting personal service contracts to seven years. But Radioactive has countered that the contract was signed in New York, thus rendering the California law inapplicable.

Manson’s comments regarding the countersuit were extensive and without restraint. “This is all getting so ridiculous,” she wrote. “I feel like James Cagney. Shouldn’t I be making some kind of an ugly scene? Shouldn’t I step onto the top of the studio roof dressed in blood-soaked rags and yell dramatically, ‘Come and get me f–kers?!?!’”