James R. Blandford talks to the Glam Rock Crusaders about art, America, music and make-up
“I think ‘Black Market Music’ reconciles a great deal of the themes and, sonically, a great deal of what we attempted to do on the first two albums but failed,” breathes the immaculately made-up Brian Molko as he slips further back into the sofa.
“Failure is probably a bit too harsh, but it fell short. The first album, I think naiveté. The second, we didn’t have a very harmonious producer/band relationship, so it suffered. This one takes the best elements of the first two, but improves on them, and also includes new directions and experiments which are there to keep us interested.”
Placebo – androgynous frontman Brian Molko, bassist Stefan Olsdal and drummer Steve Hewitt – are gathered in Holland Park’s Halcyon Hotel at the end of a gruelling spate of interviews to promote their forthcoming album, ‘Black Market Music’. The last five years have seen the band metamorphose from an overnight indie-punk sensation, chuffed to get a Fierce Panda single, to a major rock entity whose ‘Pure Morning’ single generated 2500 plays a week on American radio. Two albums and a high-profile collaboration with David Bowie down the line, the band have every right to be both pleased and tired, especially as they’ve just finished their third magnum opus and released the single ‘Taste In Men’ to glowing reviews.
The Placebo story proper begins in Luxembourg, where Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal attended the same private school. The two rarely spoke – American born Molko was a misfit even then, while Olsdal was more popular and hung around with the basketball crowd. Already involved in music at that stage, Stefan made his live debut with a school band playing the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Eight years later, Olsdal had moved to London to study guitar when he bumped into Molko – who had also relocated – at South Kensington tube station, and the duo exchanged numbers.
Brian’s first band, Ashtray Heart, named after a Captain Beefheart’s 1980 ‘Doc At The Radio Station’ album – was the “first incarnation” of Placebo: “Before Steve joined the band properly, we did one gig together in a pub called Round The Bend in Deptfort. I needed somebody to help me out, ‘cause I had these really dodgy songs which I wanted to play, so Steve came in and pulled it together. He was in a band called Breed, then Stefan came down to that show and said, “Do you want a bass player?”, and that’s where everything started. Steve went back to his band, and we continued to do stuff in the front room in Deptfort – keyboards, guitars and basses, no drums or anything like that – but never anything that memorable. It was the beginning of our desire to search for a regular drummer and start a punk rock band.”
Steve Hewitt made his drumming debut at a school assembly when he performed ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac. Hewitt left school in 1987, aged 16, dreaming of stardom with his band Mystic Deckchairs. His father set him up with a job as an apprentice joiner – he walked out after seven months – after which he spent two years as a signwriter before working as a mechanic on Formula 1 cars. Playing with Liverpool band Breed at this stage, Steve packed in his job to tour with the Boo Radleys. Eventually, the Boos recruited a full-time drummer and Hewitt went on a European tour with Breed supporting Nick Cave.
ORIGINAL DEMOS
What should have been a potential breakthrough, however, ended in tears when Hewitt returned to England to find his record company bankrupt and his girlfriend pregnant. Then Breed split up. It was around this time that Hewitt first met Brian Molko, in a Burger King in Lewisham. The pair clicked immediately and so it was that when Stefan Olsdal went down to the Ashtray Heart gig in Deptford’s Round The Bend, he witnessed the bizarre spectacle of Brian Molko handling vocals while Hewitt played bongos. According to Stefan, what caught his attention that night was “Brian’s voice, first of all, and the energy. I was like, yeah, this is what I’ve been looking for.”
Steve recorded a demo with Brian and Stef, but his new band, Jaguar, got a deal with Warners, so he left the duo to concentrate on their own material. Olsdal called in old friend Robert Schultzberg to take over drum duties, and the trio recorded a demo tape, including ‘Nancy Boy’. ‘Teenage Angst’, ’36 Degrees’ and ‘Bruise Pristine’ – all of which are available on a fanclub CD titled ’The Original Demos’ – the tape also included two unfamiliar cuts, ‘Flesh Mechanic’, later available as a B-side of ‘Teenage Angst’ and ‘Paycheck’, which remains unreleased.
The same demo resulted in the band’s debut single, ‘Bruise Pristine’, issued on Fierce Panda. Placebo the played In The City music business bash, where they came joint first with Kula Shaker. Shortly afterwards came a single on Deceptive, ‘Come Home’, after which the band signed to Virgin subsidiary Hut.
Tensions between the diminutive frontman and glowering drummer Schultzberg, however, were reaching a critical level. As Brian explains, “I don’t think that we would have been friends if we hadn’t been in a band together. So we were fucked from day one. There was a great deal of tension and a great deal of paranoia, and what often happened was that Stef ended up being piggy-in-the-middle.” Stefan points out that, “one had to go”, and the one that went was, unsurprisingly, Schultzberg. “He doesn’t speak to us to this day,” admits Brian.
Fortunately for Steve Hewitt, he was to bump into Placebo at the ’96 Phoenix Festival, where he spoke to a dejected Brian Molko about the band’s success. Molko and Olsdal found the immediate answer to their problems in Hewitt – two months later he was back on board, just in time to see ‘Teenage Angst’ crack the top 40. ‘Nancy Boy’ was issued as a single in January ’97 and it climbed straight to No.4.
lead singer with his Louise Brooks bob and make-up. Unsurprisingly the media were quick to latch onto the effeminate Inevitably, there were those quick to assume that the gender-bending frontman was using his lipstick as a conniving marketing ploy: “Oh, ye of little faith!” answers Brian. “I think people are just trying to punch holes into whatever they can. They can’t fuck with the music and they can’t fuck with Steve and Stef, so everything has a tendency to veer towards character assassination on my part.
“I never saw this whole transvestitism thing as particularly shocking or subversive in the first place. It seemed quite natural. People say ‘it’s not controversial and it’s not shocking’. Well, I never actually said it was. When it comes to cross-dressing, I think people like myself and Eddy Izzard are starting a new form of cross-dressing, where you can wear make-up and a beard at the same time.”
Although some have levelled accusations that Molko has encouraged the focus on himself rather than on the group, he has a rational reply: “At the very beginning, Stef felt incredibly uncomfortable about doing interviews, and myself and Robert couldn’t be in the same room with each other without having an argument. So what happened at first was that I was burdened with the entire promo schedule. If these guys would wear as much make-up as I wanted them to, things would have been different!”
JEALOUSY
The second album, ‘Without You I’m Nothing’, came in October ’98, heralded by another No.4 smash, ‘Pure Morning’. The next few months were taken up with what many perceived to be an attempt to break America. “There seems to be an unhealthy interest is Britain about bands breaking America” reckons Brian. “We’d be stupid if we didn’t go to America and tour, but we’ve spent just as much time touring the rest of the world. We’re interested in breaking the world, not just America, and this emphasis which continually gets placed on breaking America seems to highlight a certain amount of jealousy that exists over here in England about the fact that America doesn’t want British bands.”
Nevertheless, Placebo have a healthy Stateside following: “We’ve sold over 150,000 copies of each album in America, which places us on a par with bands like Tortoise, Stellac and Grandaddy,” beams Brian, “bands who aren’t Limp Bizkits or Korns, but have a cult following and are also able to make a living just by touring. So in America we’re still very much the underdog and I feel that’s a perfect fine position for this band to be in. We still have a lot of work to do, but if we can go to America and play in front of 700 people a night, that’s fine, that’s really OK.”
Brian’s stage presence is a work of art in it’s own right, but the band have plans to embroider their concerts with yet more visual stimuli: “We’re trying to move away from the psychedelic aspect of gig visuals,” pipes Brian, “we’re trying to make video-art pieces that would accompany the songs. I have a very short attention span so I think it’s interesting to go to a gig and have several senses stimulated at once. You’re sense of smell is immediately stimulated by smoke and beer, then there’s the visual and sonic aspect of the band playing, and the relationship between the band itself a performers and the image that exists behind them. Hopefully they’ll all the abstract enough for people to make a personal connection between the three.”
This won’t be Placebo’s first foray into film outside of their promo clips. September ’98 saw the band’s celluloid debut in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine – are there other artistic aspirations harboured by the band members? According to Brian, “Not really. As a band we’ve turned down a movie where we were asked to play Judas Priest! After Velvet Goldmine it just started to feel like we were ‘rent-a-band’ for Hollywood. I’d like to get more involved in the creation of our videos, because the ones that have been most successful have been the ones where we’ve come up with the ideas ourselves. ‘Pure Morning’ (in which Brian looks set to plummet from a tall building) was one where the whole concept came from us. I’ve started to write scripts for the upcoming singles, which I still have to present to everyone. I would like to do more acting but it’s got to be something that’s challenging. And I would also like to get involved in film-making itself in the future in one way or another, but that’s way down the line.”
Sex and drugs are a staple ingredient for any true rock’n’roll story and the third is religion. Recent reports have suggested that Brian will exorcise his born-again Christian childhood on ‘Black Market Music’, completing rock’s unholy trinity. “I think it’s because I pushed it back for a long time,” muses Brian. “When we started – a long time before Steve joined and even before Robert joined – it seemed that I had a lot to get off my chest as far as my religious upbringing was concerned. The first songs that we wrote were very anti-Jesus, and I guess it’s just something coming full circle. It’s also a songwriting tool, in a way that, on her third album, PJ Harvey really discovered the blues and ‘sweet Jesus’ seemed to crop up a great deal. I think when you’ve come face to face with yourself and the world, then you come face to face with God, the last person the fight with.”
FRENCH ORAL
Despite Brian’s religious childhood, none of the band acknowledge any real religious convictions, although Master Molko has a strengthening belief in reincarnation: ‘I’ve always felt this strange affiliation with the French language and I remember as a kid – I don’t know if it’s a fantasy or something I’ve created within my own head – around the time that I was learning to speak English, I could understand French already, which led me to decide that in a previous life I was a high-class French prostitute. That’s probably more wish-fulfilment than anything else, but without sounding stupidly over-the-top, sometimes in life things seem to be not confusing enough. Whether or not you’re born with inherited knowledge I’m not sure, but I definitely believe in the concept of karma.
“Coincidence surrounded the inception of the band. It was a series of happy incidents – or was it destiny? I think the hand of fate had something to do with the beginning of the band. The same night we clicked – I think it was the 15th January 1994 – Steve met the woman who was to become the mother of his child, so our lives changed forever, individually and collectively.”
As with any artist of stature, Placebo have already found themselves the subject of many bootleg. Considering the anarchic nature of bootlegging, I wonder if the band approve. “It scares me,” says Steve. MP3 and the internet, fascinating but scary. But the sort of blatantness with the way things are done, I can’t come to terms with that yet. It does bug me. It upsets me.” “I don’t think there’s that much we can do,” says Brian. “I don’t think the technology is in place yet for it to be a huge threat to musicians, because the quality of bootleg material – whether it be MP3 or a CD that you buy on Camden Market – isn’t very high.”
INTERNET ANARCHY
“I think it’s quite interesting because what we did between the time that Steve joined the band and we recorded ‘Without You I’m Nothing’, was to use the gig situation as an open rehearsal for songwriting. So a great deal of the bootlegs that are out there comprise songs like ‘Allergic (To Thoughts Of Mom)’, half-written because we were just trying them out with me singing garbage over the top, cos I hadn’t written the lyrics yet! So, if nothing else, that development of songwriting has been documented, which could be quite interesting in 15 years when we go back and listen to it. But it’s something that you have to resign yourself to, when you have this Bill Gates dream of one system being everything, your TV, video and stereo, a wall-size screen with everything digital CD quality – that’s when I think the record companies will get very wary.”
Fans clearly want to hear work-in-progress, a fact evidenced by bootlegs’ very existence, so do the band understand this mentality? When Picasso’s sketches are exhibited, art lover will surely appreciate the insight of seeing them, just as a Placebo fan will value hearing the original demos. “Sure,” says Brian, “But did Picasso allow those sketches to be exhibited while he was still alive? Do people expect us, because we’re artists, to work for free?” Steve remains similarly unimpressed by the bootleggers: “I don’t want people to hear our work-in-progress. Isn’t anything sacred anymore? You get so exposed, down to the bone, that there’s nothing left for the imagination.” But would the band condemn the fan for buying them? “Absolutely not,” states Brian, “Because I would probably do exactly the same thing in their position. But whenever we encounter bootlegs we take them. What are you going to do? Call the cops? Go ahead (laughs)!”
Placebo have expressed a sense of inspiration gleaned from London’s recent May Day riots, but surely such herd mentality should be anathema to a band who thrive on individuality? “Those riots were facilitated by the communication on the internet,” agrees Stefan, “so there is that to it. Communication is so quick these days.” Brian comments, “Paul Corkett, who worked with us on this album, believes that the internet signals the coming of the Apocalypse (laughs)! He really thinks that, because of the availability of everything, there’s no way of controlling anything any more, so what starts as a good thing will always be taken and used against you in the long run. When they decided to split the atom, I think that they were trying to find a more practical form of energy, but it actually cost, a few years later, several Japanese people their lives.
“I think that what scares Corky, and what scares me, is that you have no more freedom anymore, because we are turning into a society where everything is found. A long time ago, in order for your words to have some kind of credence, you had to get them published in some form or another, but you had to go through several hurdles in order to get that in the first place. Now anybody can open up a home-page and say whatever they want, and it’s the act of putting it up that makes it seem like the truth. So truth is changing essentially at the moment and it begs the question: what is truth now? And what is freedom when anybody can say anything and anybody can take them seriously?”
As my time with Placebo draws to a close, I ask how they feel about the direction their career is taking. Steve says he feels “comfortable, not pushed into being something that we don’t want to be”. Brian as usual has the last word: “I feel in a strange state of limbo, because the album hasn’t come out yet. So everything’s building up to this album and it’s going to be, hopefully, a very important thing to us. I think we’ll be able to breathe a big sigh of relief when it comes out, because to a certain degree we’re talking in a vacuum, because nothing has been proved.” As Dusty Springfield once sang? “Need I say more? Very well put.”
(Record Collector, oct. 2000)