“We were quite fearless with our image.” Brian Molko reflects on the band’s 30-year legacy by revamping their debut. “We were quite fearless with our image, with the cross-dressing and this exploration of androgyny,” Placebo’s Brian Molko tells Apple Music, reflecting on the band’s 30-year legacy. “When we started playing concerts, we realized the people coming were the misfits, the people who didn’t fit into the rigid, binary categories we had in the ’90s. We’d grown up feeling like outsiders. In the mid-’90s, a gay person was meant to be listening to high-energy pop or whatever. And there were a lot of people from the LGBT community who didn’t feel they had a place to go because they liked guitar music.” Placebo’s 1996 self-titled debut was fast, angsty, unapologetic. “We wanted to be a punk band,” Molko says. (Their first single, a pre-album version of “Bruise Pristine” released on a 7-inch, was “so ridiculously fast that when a DJ from the BBC got hold of it, he actually played it at 33 instead of 45. I was trying to emulate Sonic Youth—my favorite band ever, the greatest rock ’n’ roll band ever, and my biggest influence.”) The years went on, the band’s success and experience bloomed, and Molko developed a “complicated” relationship with Placebo. “With the benefit of hindsight, I thought if I’d had more experience, I could’ve completed it differently, or better. But I realized this dysfunctional relationship was a creation of my own mind: I’d had a feeling once, decided it was the truth, and it haunted me for 25 years.” When the time came to decide how to celebrate the album’s (and the band’s) 30th anniversary, he went back and played it for the first time in a decade. “I realized it was well-recorded,” he says. “There’s a vitality to it. I understood then that I wanted to mend my relationship with these songs.” From there, the concept for Placebo RE:CREATED was born. Molko, Placebo co-founder and bassist Stefan Olsdal, and members of their touring band and production team revisited the original masters and made some tweaks—synths here, extra guitars there, that sort of thing. “It sounds more rich, more textured, more like what you would experience if you came to see Placebo live today,” Molko says. “I wanted to pay respect to this album after being slightly disrespectful towards it in my own mind for two decades.” Molko doesn’t see RE:CREATED as a replacement, or better than the original. “The two versions will exist in tandem, and it’s very much up to the listener to decide which one they prefer to listen to,” he says. “I wanted to preserve the integrity and identity of the album, and at the same time, try and sonically drag it into the 21st century.” Below, Molko sheds light on the origins of three key tracks on the album, and how Placebo tweaked them for Placebo RE:CREATED. “36 Degrees” “It was the first demo I made, the first Placebo song I ever heard played on the radio, and our first release from our first album. And the lead guitar melody really helped me understand what my style was in terms of writing guitar parts. It’s kind of the beginning of it all. I spoke to Robert Schultzberg, our original drummer. We felt that the original drums were a little busy, that there was perhaps too much going on. So we tried to get the drums to a place where they were on equal footing with the other instruments, just getting the relationships between them to make more sense.” “Nancy Boy” “I didn’t really expect that it would have such an impact on so many people’s personal lives. It was only our third single. It’s a celebration of licentiousness and debauchery—about having more fun than the people who were calling me ‘nancy boy.’ I wanted to reclaim the insults, to take the power away from people that were hurling homophobic abuse at myself and Stefan almost every time we went out. When we came back to ‘Nancy Boy’ in the studio, there wasn’t an enormous amount to be done, we weren’t going to change its identity. We beefed up the drums. We beefed up the bass guitar. On the original recording, there’s only one guitar.” “Lady of the Flowers” “It’s a big fan favorite, and an intriguing track. It has a standalone quality, a very strong individual identity on the album in a completely different way to ‘Nancy Boy.’ It’s the song that pointed most to where we were going after this recording. I really wanted to complete this song in a respectful way. So we added some synthesizers and guitars. If we imagine that the original recording is in black and white, it’s like this one has been colorised, and I hope we chose the right colors.”