Garbage took the stage for a concert at Sydney Opera House just hours after a terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach killed at least 12 people and injured nearly 30 others.
Singer Shirley Manson addressed the tragedy during the show, telling the gathered crowd: “This has become an astoundingly frightening, violent, hateful, intolerant world, and I think the only thing we can do really, as people who do not believe in all this separation and all this intolerance, all we can really do is really try and profess our love for one another.”
“We have been a band that have always believed that we are one people under one sun,” Manson added. “It doesn’t matter what God your worship, what color of your skin, what your gender is, what your sexual orientation is, what food you like to eat, what clothes you like to wear, how you like to hang your junk, whether you like to wear a bra or not wear a bra. You get my point, it’s all so fucking stupid, we have people in power telling us to really hate one another, to destroy one another.”
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Manson also shared a statement to Garbage’s Instagram page, where she revealed that six close family members were at Bondi Beach hours prior to the terror attack. “Our hearts go out to the victims and their surviving families who are now dealing with unfathomable loss and heartbreak,” Manson wrote. “Fuck all this vile antisemitism. Fuck Islamophobia. The killing has to stop.”
To further meet the moment of the night, Garbage made a last-minute change to their setlist, opting to play the song “Fix Me Now” from their 1995 eponymous album for the first and only time during the Australian leg of their tour. “Things don’t have to be this way/ Catch me on a better day/ Bury me above the clouds/ All the way from here/ Take away the things I need/ Take away my fear,” Manson sings on the track.
