“We’d grown up feeling like outsiders. We were attracting the same people.” Thirty years on, Brian Molko reflects on Placebo’s debut album.
“We were quite fearless with our image, with the cross-dressing and this exploration of androgyny,” Placebo’s Brian Molko tells Apple Music, recalling the band’s mid-’90s origins. “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. We were attracting the same people. 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.”
Released in 1996, Placebo’s self-titled debut was fast, angsty, unapologetic. “We wanted to be a punk band,” Molko says. The album was mostly recorded live, and emulated how the band performed on stage at the time. Their success took off from there, and over the years, 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.”
Ahead of the album’s 30th anniversary, Molko 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. The energy was really youthful and exuberant, and the songs were remarkably good for the first batch a band can come up with. It’s very true to who we were at that point—three guys between 20 and 22 years old who were just starting, who were still learning.”
Regardless of his own thoughts on the album, Molko is fully aware of how much it meant—and still means—to fans. In fact, that perspective helped mend his own relationship with it. “For a lot of people, the first album is their favorite, the classic,” he says. “You can lose sight of that if you spend too much time in your own head, which I have a tendency to do. But I got to a place where I really understand it.”
Below, Molko talks through four key tracks from Placebo.
“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. I remember when Stefan [Olsdal, co-founder and bassist] and I were in a taxi, driving through Soho in London, and all of a sudden, ‘36 Degrees’ came on the radio. It’s an experience that only happens once to any musician, so it obviously has a very important and special place in our hearts. It was the beginning of everything.”
“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. So I created an exaggerated version—not a fantasy, an exaggeration—of a night out that Stef and I would have in Soho in the mid-’90s. It celebrates non-heteronormative lifestyle and identity, and it’s very cheeky and extremely mischievous.”
“Bruise Pristine”
“It was our very first single. We recorded a version that came out on 7-inch, and it was so ridiculously fast that a DJ from the BBC actually played it at 33 instead of 45. We weren’t thinking about BPM, we were just trying to play as fast as we possibly could. I hear myself trying to emulate Sonic Youth, which is my favorite band ever, the greatest rock ’n’ roll band ever, and my biggest influence. If you go and listen to ‘Kool Thing’ from Goo, you’ll hear a definite connection. It’s funny, because sometimes Stefan and I would look at each other and he’d say to me, ‘I’m really surprised we haven’t been sued yet,’ because we really absorbed so much from Sonic Youth. We regurgitated it in our own way, but you can hear the connection.”
“Lady of the Flowers”
“It’s an intriguing track and one that’s become a really important song for Placebo’s fanbase. It has a standalone quality 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: It’s the link between the first two albums and was the beginning of us becoming more complex songwriters.”
