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what the Brian meant...
quotes taken from various interviews and said by Brian Molko unless otherwise noted!
many thanks to Que of http://www.placebo.fan.pl for quotes about Slackerbitch & the first album
jump to:
The Bitter End
Black-Eyed
Blue American
Brick Shithouse
Broken Promise
Centrefolds
Commercial For Levi
Days Before You Come
Follow The Cops Back Home
Haemoglobin
I'll Be Yours
In The Cold Light Of Morning
Meds
Nancy Boy
Narcoleptic
One Of A Kind
Passive Aggressive
Peeping Tom
Pierrot The Clown
Plasticine
Protect Me From What I Want
Pure Morning
Scared Of Girls
Second Sight
Slackerbitch
Slave To The Wage
Sleeping With Ghosts
Something Rotten
Song To Say Goodbye
Space Monkey
Special K
Special Needs
Spite & Malice
Taste In Men
Teenage Angst
This Picture
You Don't Care About Us
The Bitter End: "Two people trying to come out of a relationship with the least scars. Very fuck you."
Black-Eyed: "This song says that it's time to take responsibility for your actions and whatever happened to you in the past, you have to reach a point where you stop moping and you have to keep going forward and you can't blame everything on your parents. But in many ways it's an autobiographical song and it's what could happen if I allowed myself to wallow in self pity."
Blue American: "Pure and utter disgust. American style. It's just someone who's at such a low point in their life that they're hitting out at everything and anything. I think the person who inhabits that song is disgusted by the fact that he's human and feels weighed down by that. It's called Blue American simply because it has references to slavery in America. It's also interesting because Blue American is also drug dealers speak for Viagra and Valium."
Brick Shithouse: "A disembodied soul floats overhead, observing the living. It's a ghost story, about somebody watching their lover make love to the person who killed them."
Broken Promise: "Written completely whilst on the road and is about adultery."
Centrefolds: "Someone telling a washed-up celebrity 'I'm the best you can get now so you'd better be mine.' It's about obsession, questions of status and self-degradation."
Commercial For Levi: "That's a song about grabbing your mate by the scruff of the neck and telling him that he's walking down a rocky road to ruin. It's basically, "You're my mate and I love you, but if you don't watch out you're going to fuck up pretty bad." It's autobiographical in the sense that there have been certain points in my life where the band or other friends have had to do that to me. Which was very beneficial. I love that song because musically it's like a really sweet lullaby and lyrically it's quite a filthy number. It puts a smile on your face."
Days Before You Came: "It isn't written about anyone in particular, it's a song for no one really. It's straightforward lyrically and you can read it as someone falling in love or even someone kicking a really intense drug habit. I think the provisional line in the song is 'I didn't want you anyway'... about something taking over your life without you asking for it. Or if you have to give up something bad in your life, health-wise, it's not necessarily because you want to - it could be something as simple as cigarettes or something far more dangerous."
Follow The Cops Back Home: "We wondered what teenagers get up to in Iceland, which we visit regularly, as there is no police and barely any crime."
Haemoglobin: "That's our version of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit and in that song she's walking around looking at all the strange fruit hanging from the trees, which is the bodies of dead black men. In our song you find yourself at the beginning inside of someone being lynched in the American South. They start off in the beginning in a state of acceptance of his fate then acceptance becomes confusion and his confusion becomes anger - so it's saying that prejudice breeds prejudice and violence breeds violence."
I'll Be Yours: "A disturbing track. Someone who wants to engulf another person completely in the name of love. Something I've been on the receiving end of and it's scary."
In The Cold Light Of Morning: "Very much inspired by Leonard Cohen and being on the streets early in the morning after a night out when everyone else is going to work."
Meds: "Its a statement of fact and what being alive today is all about.About feeling completely dislocated from the world and not feeling like a real person anymore."
Nancy Boy: "It's not your run-of-the-mill, boy-meets-girl song. Sonically, we tried to capture a kind of drug-induced sexual rush; it's got a rising car sound which was meant to kind of reproduce the first rushes of E, and it's obvious that the character in the song is kind of drug-crazed at that moment. There are times in your life where you are so off your head that all you really want to do is fuck. It's a celebration and a slag of that behavior at the same time. It doesn't promote promiscuity but it doesn't judge it either. It pokes fun at very macho, classic phrases - 'I'd fuck her with a paper bag over my head'; 'Don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire,' et cetera. And like with the words queer and fag, when you appropriate it for yourself, it starts to get attached with your own power. So that line about 'Eyeholes in a paper bag, greatest lay I ever had' - it's just saying that the drag queen in the song is probably very ugly, but is attempting to reach some kind of beauty, twisted beauty, perverse beauty. I guess it's stating you can be ugly and be an amazing lay; it doesn't really matter. It criticizes people who think it's fashionable to be gay - guys who think that because 'some of my best friends are gay' that they are going to try it out because they're in a milieu where it's cool, but they haven't actually felt the desire themselves. In the song, I'm questioning people's reasons for sleeping with people of the same sex. In the same way that heroin is very hip today, being bisexual seems to be very chic."
more on Nancy Boy: "It's trying to capture that certain point of an evening, or a certain point of intoxication when all you can do, or want to do, is fuck. It's a celebration, but it also pokes fun at drug-induced promiscuity and that experimentation for experimentation's sake. I've also been called 'Nancy Boy' a thousand times, so it's about me as well."
Narcoleptic: "It's a song about the passing of love ...Drugs and love are one big pillow and they can make you forget about so many things and they can make you forget about living and put you into a somnambulistic state, like sleep walking."
One Of A Kind: "About feeling completely dislocated from the world and not feeling like a real person anymore."
Passive Aggressive: "Again this is a song that can work on two levels. You can see it as someone asking someone to let them in, to be a part of their lives or you can see it as the old saying I was taught at Sunday School 'When Jesus knocks at your door, it's your choice to let him in' so it could be a simple song about love or religion."
Peeping Tom: "It's about voyeurism. It's about being a peeping tom. I try in the song to place you inside the head and make you feel the emotions of this voyeur and try and make you feel sympathetic because the only ray of light in this person's life is spying on this one particular person. The song is full of pathos and extremely sad - it's kind of like "Burger Queen" but taken a couple of steps further."
Pierrot The Clown: "About seeing someone who you once had a relationship with and remembering why you were first attracted to them."
Plasticine: "A classic Placebo song with a classic Placebo theme - individuality."
Protect Me From What I Want: "Written when I was hurting deeply and coming out of a very self-destructive relationship, hence the creepy atmosphere."
Pure Morning: "It's a celebration of friendship with women, kind of immortalizing a couple of my friends. It's also about that time of the day when the sun's coming up and you're coming down; and everybody else is getting ready to go to work and you're feeling incredibly dislocated from the rest of the world; and all you really want is for a friend to be there to put their arms around you and help you ease into sleep."
Scared Of Girls: "It's an investigation into male heterosexual promiscuity. Do male flirts do it because they really love women or actually because they're actually scared with women and themselves. I'd say that they are scared of girls."
Second Sight: "A one-night-stand song saying walk away for your own self-respect."
Slackerbitch: "Quite horrible... An exploration into somebody's misogyny; this man in the song feels very threatened by women, But at the same time, it's very heartfelt. It's angry and nasty and insulting and completely politically incorrect. I'm not afraid to say I've felt some of those things. It walks a very fine line, and it's dangerous. I decided that I have to be responsible as the person who wrote those lyrics. I know that it describes a genuine emotion. Interestingly enough, before it was released I played it to a lot of women, without saying anything, to see if they would construe it as being misogynist. The only people who found it offensive were men. I think the point a lot of people would miss is that you're not supposed to like the guy in the song. He's a fool."
more on Slackerbitch: "It is an abusive song, and we've had problems with it. We debated for a long time whether to put it on the album, because I was worried about it being construed as misogynistic. I play it to girls to find out their reactions and most of them are surprised I thought it was misogynistic. I mean it's a very politically incorrect song to put out, but I'll stand behind it because it contains feeling that some men do feel towards women. Men feel very threatened by women. Sometimes you have to say something negative to make a positive point. I mean if I want to insult a guy I'll call him a prick, and if it's a girl you might call her a bitch, what's the actual difference? This song opens up that and forces that question to be addressed."
Slave To The Wage: "The song tells you to be an individual, believe in yourself and have the courage to chase your dreams. If you do, the rewards at the end are tenfold, versus doing what your parents tell you to do: Get a good job, get married, have 2.4 children, 1.2 goldfish, 3.6 cars... To a lot of people, that's the epitome of personal success. Which is why so many people go through a mid-life crisis. People reach a point in their live and go, 'Is this it?'"
Sleeping With Ghosts: "Inspired by a crazy American psychologist who believes in the cliché of eternal love. He thought two of his patients were soulmates who'd been reincarnated through many previous lives."
Something Rotten: "It's about child abuse, but not necessarily sexual abuse. It could be physical or mental. When I sang the lyric it was just completely off the top of my head, and we never changed it. It just kind of stayed there because it captured a real atmosphere - very sinister and creepy. It came to be about a young person very desperate to get out of a family environment situation for whatever reasons. It's a song that people can interpret in a hundred different ways."
more on Something Rotten: "I suppose it doesn't have to be about a family either, it could be about a marriage, because physical and mental abuse occur within those moral constructs, too."
Song To Say Goodbye: "A way of making clear to myself the path not to take as a human being."
Space Monkey: "This track was a real journey of discovery and felt like it just dropped out of the sky one day."
Special K: "It's comparing the rush with falling head over heels in love or being infatuated with someone and coming upon controlled substances of any kind. The moral of the story is what comes up must come down."
Special Needs: "The tale of a celebrity has-been told from a wheelchair. Someone reminiscing now the shoe is on the other foot and worrying that they'll be written out of their ex's biography."
Spite & Malice:"It started off as a song about homophobia, but then when the May-Day riots happened it started to take more of a political vent. That was just about the time that Justin Warfield (One Inch Punch rapper) arrived from L.A, and we opened up the tabloids and we saw a picture of Churchill's mohican and I started jumping around the studio screaming "dope, guns, fucking in the streets" - the old White Panther saying and that found its way unto it. What I was thinking at the time is, isn't it ironic that there was pre-millennial tension building up to the past New Years, when in fact the real new millennium is this year and it could mean that the shit's really gonna hit the fan."
Taste In Men: "It's just 'You dumped me, come back.' That's all it is. It doesn't matter who you are. It's happened to all of us."
more on Taste In Men: "... lyrically it's very simple-being the classic old story of love lost. The person in the song is suffering from this obsessional pining and feeling of torment that follows you from the moment you wake up to the very moment you go to sleep - it's ever present, it's right in your face and affects your ability to function or do anything properly. It's a kind of Pain that absorbs every aspect of your personality and every molecule in your body and the person is so desperate that they are willing to do anything possible, or change themselves in any way to win this person back, which is obviously a very unhealthy state of mind and being, emotionally."
Teenage Angst: "Me and my friends always used to talk about Billy Pumpkin being a little too full of angst on-stage. Maybe in that way it's self-deprecating, but the subject matter's genuine. It's about the intense emotions you feel as a teenager the way you have a tendency to close yourself a bit, create your own little world. You're an adult trapped in a kid's body - you want to break out but everyone still treats you as a kid."
more on Teenage Angst (specifically the line 'since I was born I started to decay'): "Well, that was something my mother said to me. She was talking about aging, wrinkling, skin drying up and stuff. This was when I was about 14. She said that as soon as you pop out of the womb you start to deteriorate. I actually found her words quite disturbing but, y'know, she's a religious kind of person."
This Picture: "This song is about self-destruction and self-destructive relationships."
more on This Picture: "Someone walking away from a self-destructive relationship. It recalls James Dean's fetish of having cigarettes stubbed out on his chest during sex, only here they're being stubbed out on mine."
You Don't Care About Us: "It's about an ex-lover having a furious rant at me for not caring and being wrapped up in my own head. Unfortunately, that's how I used to conduct my relationships: I was always imagining the end just as it was beginning."
songs i still need explanatins of: 2468, 36 Degrees, Allergic (To Thoughts Of...), Ask For Answers, Because I Want You, Bionic, Black Market Blood, Blind, Bruise Pristine, Bubblegun, Burger Queen, Come Home, The Crawl, Drag, Drink You Pretty, Drowning By Numbers, English Summer Rain, Evalia, Every You Every Me, Evil Dildo, Eyesight To The Blind, Flesh Mechanic, Hang On To Your IQ, I Do, I Know, Infra-red, Kangaroo Died, Kitsch Object, Lady Of The Flowers, Lazarus, Leeloo, Leni, Little Mo, Long Division, Mars Landing Party, Miss Moneypenny, My Sweet Prince, Paycheck, Post Blue, Summer's Gone, Swallow, Teenage Angst, Then The Clouds Will Open..., Twenty Years, UNEEDMEMORETHANINEEDU, Waiting For The Son Of Man, Without You I'm Nothing

please email dreamplacebo@yahoo.com if you have any quotes by Brian explaning his lyrics, especially about any of the songs on the above list

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