Placebo’s love of a good time has got them in trouble before now. At one stage, the London trio were in danger of becoming a caricature of themselves. After the success of their eponymous debut album - which sold 300, 000 copies in the UK alone - and its gender-trashing 1997 single, “Nancy Boy”, which debuted at No. 4, Placebo embarked on a whirlwind of excess: rock & roll, drinking jags and recreational drugs, leaving (in Molko’s words) “trails of blood and spunk across the UK”. Maybe one shouldn’t entirely blame the band, though: just a week after “Nancy Boy”’s chart entry, Placebo played support at hero David Bowie’s 50th birthday party, alongside Lou Reed, Billy Corgan and the The Cure. No wonder their heads started to swell a little.
Endearingly, the band remain fans of music - to the point of almost sounding like groupies. Placebo played in front of Michael Stipe on the set of Velvet Goldmine, and Molko is still excited by the memory, boasting in fannish awe, how Bowie’s got a Placebo sticker on his fridge. Indeed, Molko name-drops bands with a candour not heard since Courtney Love at the start of the ‘90s.
”We were backstage at a festival in France watching Debbie Harry and Marilyn Manson,” he glows. “They were so wary of each other - Marilyn, scared of blowing his cool talking to Debbie Harry, and Debbie obviously thinking, ‘fuck, who is this lunatic, fucking Satan spawn species thing?’ Our eyes were playing ping-pong.”
”I had a barney with (Blur’s) Damon Albarn in Italy,” the singer says later, drunk. “He was slagging off Marilyn, and I was saying I thought he was OK. So he put his arm around me and patronisingly said ‘you’ll learn’, which started a 15 minute fuck-you session.”
Molko’s early naivete helped to fuel various tales of depravity in the press, resulting in what could easily have become a breakdown shortly before the release of Without You I’m Nothing last year. If the debut album had been the sound of hedonism - ambitious, unstoppable, dexterous - and pure, undiluted lust, then the second was the post-coital comedown, wide empty songs echoing with the sound of Molko wailing his heart out. The album was a surprise to many. The title track resonated with a near unbearable sense of loss, while the first single “Pure Morning” indicated the direction Placebo was planning to go. A stately song built around a monster of a riff, it was far more studio and dance-orientated than their previous, American rock-influenced material.
Placebo are hardly your average Brit-pop band, though. Both Molko (born in Belgium) and the impeccably mannered Olsdal (Swedish) are European citizens, originally meeting at private school in Luxembourg.
”I was the misfit, the total loser,” Molko related. While Olsdal hung out with the jocks and played basketball, Hewitt, meanwhile, attended English school where he learnt about life the hard way. “At my school, kids would smash each other’s teeth out on porcelain sinks, “ he says. “It wasn’t exactly inspiring.”
