Shirley Manson thinks Garbage look "f**king bizarre".
The 45-year-old singer admits the band – made up of herself, Butch Vig, 54, Steve Marker, 53, and Duke Erikson, 59 – are a "queer" band, but has embraced their unusual image as she has grown older.
She said: "There was a lot of queerness about my band. Are you kidding? We are the oldest, weirdest-looking cats out there, we look so f***ing bizarre. I always used to be a little ashamed that we were older; that we weren’t beautiful and young and cool and wearing super-cool clothes.
"There was a feeling of, ‘Oh I wished we looked like The Clash’. This time around, I love how much my band look. I think we look like the cast from a French movie. It’s about self acceptance."
Shirley – famed for her bright red hair- claims she "punished" herself as a youngster for not fitting in with accepted standards of beauty.
She told Attitude magazine: "I was very uncomfortable. I didn’t feel beautiful. Looking back now, I was a beautiful kid but I didn’t feel that. To be viewed as someone sexy and beautiful is an irrelevance to me, funnily enough, even though I clearly spent a lot of time punishing myself for not being what I should be. So it’s a contradiction in terms."