Placebo feel the love
by Bob Gordon
Thursday, 24 August 2017
There’s something inherently Placebo about the documentary the band have released while in the midst of their 20th anniversary.
Placebo: Alt.Russia follows vocalist/guitarist Brian Molko and bassist/co-founder Stefan Olsdal along the Trans Siberian Express, with the latter stopping along the way to interview local artists.
The doco has won five international awards and is as far from a self-congratulatory summary of two decades of achievements and tribulations as you could get.
“We’ve always followed our own gut instincts and always tried to forge our own singular path artistically,” Molko says.
“We’ve never made careerist decisions. It’s just not part of our DNA.
“So when we got to Russia we were like ‘How many documentaries are there out there already about a band going to a different country and what a band experiences?’ Like, hundreds. So let’s not do that let’s do something else.
“I think it’s that particular angle which has brought originality to the film which has sparked great interest and led it to winning many awards.”
The anniversary commemorations are, however, playing out on the road. The 20 Years of Placebo World Tour sees the band revisit their back catalogue like never before.
“It took a great deal of crying and pain for me to get to the point where I could actually do this retrospective show,” Molko laughs.
“At the start I wasn’t sure if it was going to be possible for me to do it on an emotional level. But as we started to do it the response from the crowd was just so euphoric that that’s what we started to feed from — the euphoria we were creating in the audience.
“That’s what’s giving us the energy to do it and making it a lot of fun.”
While 1998’s Every You Every Me is the most played Placebo song in the band’s concert history, other hits such as Pure Morning and Nancy Boy were long buried and, in Molko’s words, have been “exhumed from the graveyard for this tour”.
The love from crowds has made the frontman take a second look at older songs, albeit with a critical eye.
“I think now I’m a little less harsh in terms of my opinions towards them,” he says.
“I recognise their essence, whereas before I just thought that they weren’t well written songs and they were naive and that I’d written much, much better lyrics since.
“We’ve reappraised the value of their naivety, their innocence and their spontaneity, I suppose. Seeing how much they mean to people can be quite a joyful experience.”
