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Quite fittingly, David Bowie helped them out, and why not? After all, the Thin White Duke could think of no other band to kickstart his birthday bash last year. Marilyn Manson, Michael Stipe, Todd Haynes and a hefty percentage of France, America and Britain were also hugely impressed by Placebo during the course of 1998. A band who offered hope in a plateau of musical sub-standards and mediocrity.

This was doubly pleasing as prior to this the band had been written off as wannabes by the music press. That's bad enough in itself and quite a futile position for most bands. But added to this was the fact that within the band there was trouble and strife.

Before the re-emergence in their lives of Steve Hewitt Placebo had almost torn themselves apart due to increasing bad feelings within the home-camp. But no one counted on how much they wanted to shine and so they have re-emerged, stronger, savvier, more confident, less outrageous purely for the sake of garnering attention and best of all, musically mature and restlessly prowling for new horizons.

All this comes to the punter in the bow-tied gift of the surprisingly fragile and sentimental at times, though balanced with power and narkiness, album that is Without You I'm Nothing.

All three members of Placebo were present for this interview: This being, Brian Molko who raptures on about the merits of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of The Heart, Stefan who first appeared on TV at the age of 8 in a barn-dancing segemnt and Steve Hewitt who finds the very mention of TJ Hooker and The Fall Guy possibly the funniest thing in the entire world.

It's rare these days to meet up with an entire band. Possibly due to this, there's been conjecture that the Placebo three-prong interview set-up was some form of damage control due to Brian - who incidentally isn't looking so 'ladyboyish' as Alan Partridge may put it, but rather, positively glowing from a holiday in Barbados, losing it somewhat in earlier interview scenarios. After all he has shown he can handle himself - very well in fact on the likes of TV such as Jo Whiley and Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

Brian: No, it's not that much of a big deal really and nothing to do with damage control. All it is, is to make sure that people don't just see the band as me with two other guys. The music is written in a totally democratic way - we split everything three ways. We are three songwriters and one band and all have equally as much to say as the other. Previously, though, before Steve joined the band, Stef wasn't very comfortable w ith interviews. And myself and Robert (pre-Steve drummer) weren't getting on very well. We could hardly be in the same room as each other. so we weren't going to be conducting interviews together. So basically I ended up doing all the press and it was a bit of a cross to bear, I suppose. It got a bit heavy after a while, and when it got a bit heavy, I started...

Steve: Calling in reinforcements.

Brian: Yeah. The effect of having too much press to do meant I ended up saying too much sensationalist, overblown statements, because I w as bored and tired, getting blase with it all. I just attempted to shock in interviews. It's far more natural this way and far easier.

Stefan: It's a band.

Steve: (makes to leave) Yeah, so see ya! (the first burst of 'group' laughter rings out).

Brian: One day I won't be here. One day I'll get too big for my boots.

My Bloodied Valentine. The fact that Without You I'm Nothing received a February 15 - i.e.: the day after Valentine's Day Australian release is met with some amusement by the band.

Brian: How appropriate. It's the album for when you haven't got any Valentine's cards.

Stefan: Or you break up on Valentine's Day...

Brian: You slip this on and it all makes sense.

If that's not the campaign they're going with, then they just haven't thought it through.

Steve: I've been told never to trust an Aussie.

Why's that?

Steve: Because they do things like that. (Cue second burst of laughter.)

Glamourama. Released back in November in the UK, Without You I'm Nothing was quite a standout in a rather lacklustre year. Punters and critics were also genuinely surprised that Placebo had progressed to such a degree.

One thing to add to Placebo's place in people's affections is that beyond all this...

Beyond being a powerful live experience, they've injected a bit of glamour into a music world populated by drab track-suited bands.

Brian: We like showbiz and we like flamboyance and we like glamour - we're not huge fans of glam rock, so we make the delineation between them, but that's by the by. We think you should make an effort and I think particularly in this country, they wanted more flamboyant, more verbose rock stars and then they got a few and then they just didn't know what to do with them. It's part of who we are.

Steve: It's not like we go around consciously with the challenge in our heads to rid the world of track-suited bands. We don't even think about it, we just get on with it.

But it is something they realise that they've taken on board as all that they hail true and right about exciting, passionate and powerful music. It pays off to spend a bit of time on all manner of things.

Brian: We wouldn't feel right if we just went on stage in a T-shirt and jeans - the same clothes that we wore the rest of the day - the same clothes that we wore when we went to Tescos. It's not what we're about and it's not what the best rock and roll has been about.

A Hunka Hunka Holographic rock.

From here the conversation veers into dangerous Kiss 3D rock show territory which is only beaten when Brian brings up the fact that there's going to be a holographic Elvis show. One where original Elvis band members support a light-beamed Elvis who even interacts with an audience member at one point. It all makes the genetic cloning debate seem curiously redundant. It is, of course, Brian who seals the subject.

Steve: Forget the Kiss show, the Elvis 3D show is first.

Brian: It's the Elvis one, I really want to see - Holographic Elvis man.

Steve: This is an actual hologram of Elvis with all the original band at the back. It's on at Wembley Arena.

Brian: Yeah, just one night, I think it sold out in one hour. The holographic projection of Elvis is put together from two of his most famous concert films - Vegas and the one before that - '72. The lead-up word to it getting here is how uncanny it is. Apparently, he turns around and has asides to the rest of the band. Then he goes down and touches the audience. Now there's talk of Hendrix ones.

Well that could only lead to the Hendrix, Brian Jones, Lennon band that has at times been mooted.

Steve: The super-super-group.

Brian: I think it would have been more interesting to have a holographic projection of what they were doing back-stage.

Voulez Vouz. Placebo will be heading over to Australia in April which means certain places will be getting their heads hollowed out with the road-drilling sounds the band are capable of. What particular territories they hit - whether it's just Melbourne and Sydney or a more full-throttle tour taking in the likes of Brisbane and Perth is unsure at this stage. At the time of the interview though they were gearing up to play on of their biggest markets, France, for a huge show in Paris.

Brian: We'll be playing our biggest headline show in France - 6000 seater. We're also doing the Brit Awards as well. America's really come along for us now - we're top 20 on the rock charts.

The boy with the thorn in his side. While the music comes from the band, Brian does all the lyrical duties. He at times writes from both a heterosexual and homosexual point of view. Did someone like say, Morrissey's ambivalent stance on sexual matters have some effect on Brian's songwriting development which he then turned on its head for his own personae?

Brian: It's never really been conscious. I definitely listened to the Smiths... (they also covered Bigmouth Strikes Again for The Smiths Is Dead tribute album). I haven't thought about it, but these things manifest themselves in quite subconscious ways. I did listen to the Smiths a great deal when I was a teenager. We said the other day that the Smiths and The Cure were the soundtrack for every teenager's rainy afternoon. Also, New Order, Joy Division, that sort of stuff was what is pent my weepy teenage years listening to. I think these things never really leave you. I think if they manifest themselves in your music in a way that's not obvious, then that means you can digest your influences well. You've chewed them up well, before you swallow them. When I first heard Miserable Lie - it was, like, Whoa! That was the template for self-deprecation that I found in music and loved.

Mutters of agreeement rise up as we discuss a recent BBC story conducted by Marc Almond where anyone who hadn't realised how Johnny Marr conducted himself (hey, like me), found out that Noel Gallagher appears to have based his whole persona on that of A Boy Called Johnny.

Brian: Yeah, definitely. I know that both Morrissey and Marr like our cover. When we got the offer from France, we were surprised that no one had taken Bigmouth Strikes Again, so we decided that people must have been scared. We took the challenge and becasue it's such a hateful and vitriolic song, we just tried to up the ante sonically to match. We wanted to balance the hatefulness lyrically with the hatefulness sonically. I thi nk the Supergrass one is about the only other good one on there. The rest of it's pretty dire. Bis did The Boy With the Thorn In His Side which is just atrocious.

Steve: What did the Boo Radleys do? (Steve drummed for the Boos in an early incarnation of the band).

Brian: They did The Queen Is Dead. BAsically, they based it on a site that was atrocious - some horrible dub-lite terror.

Working down the goldmine. While they quite obviously rate their version of the epochal Smiths song, a cover they've done which they hold in even higher esteem is their head-clearing version of 20th Century Boy used prominently in the film Velvet Goldmine.

Brian: It probably means more to us, because it was the first time we recorded something in a recording studio with Steve and the first time we worked with backing vocalists and stuff like that. The scope was opening up a bit.

It may be a stand-out of the soundtrack, but it's also, actually, a stand-out moment of the flm itself.

Steve: It's a great dramatic entrance.

Brian: It lifts it, it really does. We've reached a point where the story is collapsing inward and that pulls you out of the complicated miasma of storylines. The film, though, is a fantasy and it has to be taken on board as a fantasy, otherwise you're coming at it from the wrong angle. It's not a docu-drama on glam.

Steve: Which is what people were expecting.

Stefan: It's a love-story really.

A new hope. 1998 then proved itself to be a year of highs after almost reaching the point of total implosion close to the start of their career. It all started to go right once Steve and Brian met up at the Phoenix Festival with Robert Schultzberg being ousted to make way for Steve.

Brian: Steve joined when Nancy Boy was released, so we were still touring the first album. So that changed the dynamic, gave us a new band hope. It was uphill from the beginning of 1997 and it feels like a bit of a wave that we're still riding.

Stefan: The pressure was on from day one really, because we got signed so quickly and the album was rushed. So it was a whirlwind time and for us not to get along as three people was not enjoyable. Really, it should be at least somewhat enjoyable so when Steve saw us and thought that we were the most miserable humans he'd ever seen...

Brian: I think his exact words were 'You miserabl cunts. You're in a successful band, selling loads of records and look at you. Look at the fucking state of you'. (Next peal of band laughter rings out.) So , that was when we got to sorting it out, because it was collapsing in on itself and it felt like those things you'd aspired to were slipping through your fingers and we weren't enjoying them at all. (To Steve). I guess it was rather fortuitous bumping into you at that point, I hadn't seen you in ages.

Thin line between love and hate. Placebo are quite clearly a band who attract extreme reactions. Listening to the extreme phone messages in the final, unlisted track being just some examples of this point. Has this type of thing escalated or diminished since the album was recorded?

Brian: I haven't received any death threats or anything like that. So it's still about the same - either really adoring reactions or very hateful reactions from people. I guess we're probably a little bit more protected now, so in that way it doesn't affect us as much - it's harder to get to us, both emotionally and probably physically. I look upon that though, as a sign of art that really works or art that really works - that it inspires extreme reactions in the soul of the viewer or listener. It's either love or hate and indifference is the killer.

Taxi-driver. Naturally, this course of conversation brings us to the music they hate and it ties into a common experience for many.

Brian: Swing-beat is the killer. In the 3am taxi-ride home, when your brain's fried afet a night at a club and the driver's got swing-beat happening at 8 on his volume knob and you feel ready to explode.

Stefan: Or they're always playing Sting's Illegal Alien.

Brian: So yeah, Swingbeat and all those new acts: Steps and all that, plus the new German techno - German cheese techno.

The triumvarate have already worked up a number of songs for album number three. One thing for certain is that Steve Osborne will not be producing.

Steve: Steve Osborne will definitely not be producing.

Brian: (lets off a volley of machine gun laughter.)

Steve: No disrespect to the man or anything, though.

Brian: He did a fantastic job and it was probably what we needed at that point, but it was a...

Steve: It was a grind wasn't it?

Brian: Yeah. Mixing the album was a very insecure time. We weren't communicating very well at all with Steve Osborne and I don't think any of us want to go back there.

Steve: Not unless he has speech therapy or something like that.

Brian: Unless he comes out of his shell. But we write a lot at soundchecks and we went in and did some B-side stuff and saved it, because it was too good. So there is stuff that is there. Pure Morning was the last thing that we did for the album - which also came out of the B-side sessions where we (were) working off loops and stuff. We'd go into the studio with a loop and build it from there - not knowing exactly where it was going to. We enjoyed that spontaneous attitude and it would be nice to do more work like that. We are writing fiery, emotionally-charged music at the moment and maybe it will be rawer in a lot more places than the second album. It's feeling very powerful and we definitely haven't run out of ideas.

Built like a... Not that I thought they ahd. Now, something that has been plaguing this journalist's mind for some time is just where they encountered the term Brick Shithouse? Surely it has to be an Australian one they've adopted?

Steve: (Adopting Oz accent). Nah, mate. You nicked it off us, mate. It's a great term.

Brian: Actually, it was Collins. Collins is the VP at Hut. I used to share a house with him and we used to talk about that. It's just such a wonderful term.

William Shatner's pants. Possibly, a little-known fact (until now) about Brian is that he's a Star trek fan. Which particular flavour, though?

Brian: What is it Mike Myers says in Wayne's World? Even though the kitsch value of the first series cannot be surmounted. Storyline and scientific nature of STNG is far superior. I like the NG, basically, because it's more Stephen Hawking.

I interject that the only thing I like out of any of them is 7 of 9's outfit, which sends Steve especially inot hysterics. We are also about to enter TJ Hooker territory, folks.

Steve: Have you got one?

Brian: (Still actually attempting to keep it serious) I think Deep Space Nine gets a bit into soap opera teritory, so I get bored during that one.

But surely Deep Space Nine is the porn version. (I think you know what happens next). I still also can't get over the fact that they allowed William Shatner to direct a Star Trek film. How could you trust such a bad actor to direct a multi-million dollar film?

Brian: You shouldn't trust a guy who presents Rescue 911. Or stars in TJ Hooker.

Steve: (almost bursting a blood-vessel cackling.) Fucking hell, I remember that. Oh God.

As the interview ends, any chance of seriousness long gone, especially after Stefan's line-dancing admission coming straight after the Star Trek shenanigans and well... time's up, basically. But there's one more jape to come - as we're waiting for the next journalist to take over, somehow, the new Blondie single comes up. Brian takes a bit of a shine to the topic and acts out how he believes Deborah Harry has ballooned out somewhat.

Brian: It looks to me that someone actually started blowing air up her arse into her body.