David Bowie: We're ready to start. [reads] David, please get an opening statement from the band. [done reading] Well, before I go to the opening statement I am of course David Bowie, and I'm going to be the host of this chat. This chat is presented by SonicNet in association with Virgin Records. We're being hosted by Yahoo! We're doing a video broadcast of this chat, it's going to be produced by Globix Streaming Media Group, and it's being streamed by Broadcast.com. I'd like to introduce everyone from Placebo. First on my immediate right is:

Brian Molko: My name is Brian, Brian Molko. I sing, play guitar, sometimes bass. And I'm just the general prima donna of the band.

Bowie: And to his right is the extremely virile...

Stefan: Stefan. I play a lot of bass, bit of guitar and keyboards. And I am the Viking from Vulcan [laughter from all].

Bowie: And to his far right, a coochie-looking guy, whose birthday it just was, and who's received a wonderful guitar from the rest of the band I'm green with envy

Steve: I play drums, percussion, and just generally keep everybody else in line.

Bowie: I'm going to take a lot of questions from out-there-world. Opening question is going to be: Hi Brian, I would like to know about the music that influenced you as a teenager.

BM: As a teenager I remember around the age of 13 becoming quite obsessed with Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys. They were a perfect avenue for me to stream all of my teenage Angst into. So there was a bit of American post-punk in there. Around the age of 16 I kind of discovered Sonic Youth, which changed a lot. Mr. Bowie of course, and the Stooges, Iggy. Also a very big discovery for me, and an important one, was the first PJ Harvey album. The emotional depth and the confessional quality of the songwriting had a very strong impression on me.

Bowie: Did you find, any of you, that when you moved from your teenage years to your twenties, that the actual need and reason for music in your life changed? Or has it always maintained the same value for you?

Stefan: Well, I moved from a serious rock and heavy metal stage in my teenage years guess that's the power of loud guitars and sort of heavy beats, it's a way for your teenage frustrations to come out.

Bowie: Is it because one feels very impotent as a teenager?

Stefan: Yeah, yeah. I think you feel it on the outside, you feel the extreme guys in sort of leather, and sweaty, with the long hair, just sort of turning everything up to 10...

Bowie: Did you like bands that bled for their music?

Stefan: No, it was a bit more contained than that, more melodic, I guess.

Brian: I think as a teenager you feel a great deal of alienation, because you're this kind of ball of hormones and you feel like you're a young adult trapped in a kids body, and everybody's still treating you like a kid. Music sort of becomes a means of escape, really, and I guess the difference between that is that music has become a means of expression.

Bowie: Does it also seem that, when you're a teenager, that the rest of the world has all the answers and that all that oneself has is all questions? And that sort of drives us at the outside, because you feel kind of insecure that you don't know all the answers so you start making up your own answers?

Steve: Yeah, I think so. I mean, from your teenages into your twenties you start looking for more identification within yourself. You start looking at music and looking for music that makes you feel you know

Bowie: I think that before the second World War well, maybe earlier, maybe up to the first World War, there was no such thing as being a teenager, you'd go from being a boy to being a man. I wonder what happened to those years that we call 13 to, like, 21? I wonder what people felt like at that time, when they had no recognizable categories to pop into?

Brian: They used to get married a lot earlier, go off to sea a great deal earlier

Bowie: Damn right!

Brian: conceiving a great deal earlier. People put it down to James Dean a lot, don't they? They say that he was the first teenager, the first rebel. Which is an interesting concept.

Bowie: People like Baudelaire also, in another era. They were the first kind of dreamy teens, in a way. Poetic and romantic.

Brian: The ones who refused to grow up.

Bowie: The ones who refused, point blank, anything.

Stefan: I think a lot of the kids started working a lot earlier, in the family businesses for example. Like my grandparents were farmers, and in that situation when you were 13 you were put to work, you were an extra hand supporting the family, basically. With the pressure of that, I think you were expected to work at manual labor a lot earlier.

Bowie: Here's an odd question do you feel that you missed out on something by not having experienced a war, not having gone through a war as serving military? But you probably were in the military, weren't you, Stephan?

Stefan: No, I wasn't. I escaped.

Bowie: But just the experience itself, do you think maybe it's an element of a male human's life that's not fully explored unless it's taken part in? There's one thing that we're very good at, which is hostility.

Steve: Yeah. As a teenager, when I was growing up, you feel that from past generations. You know, "we were in the war, and you should feel yourself very lucky that you didn't have to go through it." Which is a good thing it's not something that anybody should have to go through, war. I think the generation gaps now getting wider, because there are less and less wars now. But there's definitely a pressure from past generations, and it's hard to realize and embrace your heritage if you've never been anywhere near that.

Bowie: Do you think the need to shock is a kind of a mutation of that aggression, that sort of is channeled in another way?

Brian: Well, perhaps it's the enemy within instead, it's the enemy inside, you know?

Bowie: Ooooh!

Brian: It's the enemy within your own society as opposed to the one that's overseas. Perhaps that's where a provocative desire and a confrontational desire comes from.

Bowie: Here someone asks, "with your initial image, were you attempting to shock people and make them sit up and take notice, or were you just being yourselves?"

Brian: Well, we've gotten more extreme as the time goes on, as the years go on. I think it happens with most bands the more you tour, the more you feel like a freak, and the more it comes out in the way you look.

Bowie: Anyone that stands out in front of 5000 people is a freak. [laughter] I think it shows bucket-loads of dysfunctionalism.

Brian: The image kind of grew, it evolved. I think it was always inside of us, it wasn't a calculated sort of marketing move. We were lucky that we were able to express this identity, this side of ourselves, in our job and in our art. We're very lucky to be able to marry work with the love of our art anyway, and very lucky that we don't work in banks and that we can wear makeup whenever we please. And lucky that we can be adored and reviled for it.

Steve: And be completely in control of touring as well, and have this space and situation where there's a complete amount of freedom why, we could do anything that we wanted to do. I think because of that there's a raise in the creativity, in any situation, and it manifests it becomes, it could become, uncontrollable.

Stefan: And I think that in the music scene you don't want to just see a show, with guys who walk in off the street in jeans and t-shirt, you want to be taken to another dimension, this other world with someone that stands ten feet taller than you as an audience.

Brian: an alternative reality, yeah. It's kind of like being placed on a pedestal, you know? I guess there is a kind of tradition that we do come from, you know, or that we're following through to, its the Velvets and Lou Reed, Iggy, and yourself. That ambiguity, but also that power. That ambiguity married with rock and roll.

Bowie: One tends to think it counters the Catholic church, but I think that rock has a lot to do with Shamanism, with the idea of ritual and slightly neater clothing, and congregation in an audience, and performers being the priest element. It's very tribal, and I think it goes back to the earliest dawn of man's need to bond together and find a mutual spirit.

Brian: It's your preparation for the presentation of your identity, of your collective identity, to strangers. It's a very powerful position to be in, to be on stage, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're in constant control of it, you know, which can be very exciting.

Bowie: We have another question "do you write all your songs from an autobiographical standpoint?" I think there's always been the question in rock music of if a song is autobiographical for an artists by virtue of being his song. You write from, maybe, autobiographical bases, but it has fanciful connotations, does that mean you lose your integrity by not writing from your own personal point of view? Aren't you really just making things up?

Brian: No! Otherwise what you would be doing is essentially putting your diary on to tape, its kinda like believe lyrics are meant to be heard and not read, you know? It's about context, and I think all art is autobiographical in one way or another, but lyrics you have to compress, you have to slow, you have to compress things into a smaller space so that it has meaning and isn't waffling.

Bowie: Why is it that certain groups of people, including the artist, find it important that more than 10 people know what they think? It's not enough for them to say "that car has been parked outside number forty-six all week long," they need to stand up in front of 20,000 people and sing "that car has been parked in front of number forty-six all week long!" [laughter]

Brian: It's a pathological desire to lay yourself naked.

Bowie: It's very pathological, isn't it? What drives the artist to do this very asocial thing?

Brian: It's the only thing that the artist can do to be happy, to not be miserable, to not be depressed.

Bowie: Do you think he'd be better off locked up?

Brian: Umm... No. [laughter] Every society that has tried to be historically fascistic in any way, like Stalinism or Nazism, has tried to squash their art first thing.

Bowie: Democracy has had a pretty fair whack at it itself.

Brian: Art's one of the most important forces in the world, and its quite shameful that still, in England in particular and in America, people still lack an education, that the first thing that gets axed is the art. Creating a nation of bankers.

Bowie: Outside of the writing, do you guys involve yourselves in art?

Stefan: There hasn't been much time for it we've been very busy. We've worked on films

Brian: A film which you particularly dislike. [laughter]

Bowie: What's that, "Shakespeare in Love"? [laughter] "The David Bowie Story", isn't it?

Brian: Yes, "The Velvet Goldmine". And we've done a bit of modeling, here and there. Modeling for Gucci.

Bowie: You know, it wasn't that I disliked the film, it's just that I thought it wasn't terribly successful. The only bits that I liked in "Velvet Goldmine" were the gay bits. I thought they were really very well done and you really felt the heart of the director. But I thought the rest of the film wasn't very good. It felt very early-80's to me.

Stefan: The thing for us as well, we didn't' grow up during that time, so we weren't part of it. As young people, we didn't experience that era, and we don't really know what to compare it to.

Bowie: I think that anybody who has lived through one era, and then looks at somebody from another period altogether, is going to be substantially touching the wrong keys, is bound to be just sort of out-of-sync. I think it produces this surreal idea of what it might have been like. It's a bit like the Jane Austen England books that you see on television, you get this incredibly parochial, pastoral world which was in fact probably a lot dirtier, smellier, more evil okay, SaintMarkHall asks, "do you feel like you're part of the England invasion into the US?"

Brian: No.

Steve: Absolutely not.

Brian: No. The important thing to realize about this band is that it is comprised of three nationalities American, Swedish, and British. We've never felt particularly British we're based in London, but its because we kind of fell there. There's always been a kind of cosmopolitan world view to what we do. I think bands that have comprised of several nationalities take Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, for example, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience it brings so much to the melting pot, culturally, it makes you culturally un-xenophobic as an artist. It's not the same as a group of four or five kids who grew up together in the same suburb in the North of England it's a very different point of view. So we don't feel like we're part of any English or British invasion we're far too international for that.

Bowie: Agreed. SpacegirlBianca asks, "how did you become involved as the opening band for David at his birthday concert?"

Brian: Aha!

Bowie: Well, SpacegirlBianca, we actually go back a lot longer than that, don't we, guys!

Stefan: We do!

Brian: Would you like to explain how?

Bowie: No, you tell the story. But I'll say that I spotted them, I thought they were a really terrific band. And Virgin let me have their very earliest things, including the song "Nancy Boy". I thought, That's a terrific song for a bunch of jacks to sing, I think they'll probably be huge!' [laughter] And we got together, and we were working together what year?

[chorus]: '96.

Bowie: '96.

Stefan: The "Outside" tour.

Brian: We went from playing to 300 people, maximum, in England, to thousands of people with you in Europe.

Bowie: Yeah. From 300 to well over four or five hundred some nights.

Brian: Well over 8000, I think. [laughter] And you got hold of some of our demos, I think we had started touring with you before we had even started recording the first album.

Bowie: And I kept on at them like a dog with a bone, excuse the pun, to put out "Nancy Boy", which of course became a very good song. All of their songs, of course, are very good. I think their songs are much better now.

Brian: Well thank you.

Bowie: But it's very consistent, isn't it, it's been a consistent relationship. I mean, it's not been steps and starts, I think we've brought together quite a lot

Brian: We toured "Outside" with you and most of "Earthling".

Bowie: Yeah, it's been great, it's been a very good relationship, I've enjoyed it a lot. Watching them grow hopefully I shall watch them grow into old age as well. Because I'm never going to die. [laughter] Anyway, we have another question, from PunkInPink, "what do you think of Marilyn Manson? You seem to have little things in common, but you also seem to deserve a bit more respect."