Music Sounds Better With You #6

'Stupid Girl' - Garbage

For a short while in the mid 90s, Garbage were A Good Band. It's worth stressing, though, that everything is relative. Their stature was partly due to the proliferation at that time of fuckawful bands like Menswear, Cast and the below-mentioned Sleeper, all beloved of the Shine! compilations. Liking Garbage was not so much sorting the wheat from the chaff as picking the sweetcorn out of the turd. But at least they had a fiery magnetic frontwoman in Shirley Manson, and drummer Butch Vig was already a legend for his production duties for Nirvana and Sonic Youth (amongst others). Of course, their status as A Good Band didn't last - second album Version 2.0 was on the whole pretty weak (as the title suggests, a poor facsimile copy of their self-titled debut) and the less said about the "long-awaited" third LP Beautifulgarbage the better.

BUT (and, yes, that is a deliberately big but) 'Stupid Girl' was a deliriously good single. And perhaps even still is, as I was prompted to think while watching them with indifference at last year's Glastonbury. It's everything a pop song should be - instant, sexy, stylish, a little dark around the edges. I can hear its influence in much of the best pop of today, including the likes of the fabulous Richard X / Sugababes collaboration 'Freak Like Me' and Girls Aloud's debut single 'Sound Of The Underground'.

In the context of music tastes, I'm grateful to 'Stupid Girl' for two reasons: it awakened me to the invigorating potential of electronic beats and it alerted me to the possibility of mainstream pop being innovative and positively exciting rather than merely sterile and platitudinous - before this I'd been very much cloistered in my snobbish plaid-shirted-American-white-boys-with-guitars-only universe.

Inspired a love of: Beck, Primal Scream, Death In Vegas, Chemical Brothers, Le Tigre, Beastie Boys, Portishead, Prodigy, Sugababes...