PLACEBO – I DON’T HAVE THOUSAND FRIENDS - Interview with Brian Molko -

Magazine: Rock & Pop Czech Republic

Issue: November 2013

Text: Thomas Clausen, Translation into Czech: Michal Bystrov, Translation into English: Luss (Forbidden Snowflake)

The group around striking front man Brian Molko wasn’t originally planning on making the new record, but here it is. It’s called Loud Like Love and it’s said to be so honest that it almost hurts. Relatively suitable characteristic – listening to Placebo has always been a little bit painful. But beautifully painful... Our German colleague was talking to Molko in Soho Houser Hotel in Berlin.

You released the previous album Battle for the Sun four years ago, after that you had been touring for two years. Had you been looking forward to the end of the tour, so that you wouldn’t see each other for a while?

After such a long time you need to have a rest from one another, it’s a necessity. Moreover, when a person is on a road with a band for two years, he starts to get sick of his own music. The ears need to take a break from it. Basically, you need to keep your distance so that you can shake off all those previous years and clear up your mind for the new impulses and sounds.

Painfully honest novelty

Is it any hard to come up with a new music? After all, you have been on the scene for almost twenty years now.

It’s getting harder with every record. With each record you need to come up with something what will also surprise yourself. You also cannot turn your back to what is making you who you are. I think that we needed the time to get ourselves back to normal. Again, we wanted to experience something new and look around on what other bands are playing now. We needed to get out of the bubble. The good thing about recording is that every night you get back home and you also have free weekends. It almost looks like a normal life...

You need to wash up after yourself, no-one’s making the bed for you...

Exactly! It’s an amazing therapy. On the tour, they take care of you completely. It sounds strangely, but one may get insane from that. You start to feel like you want to cook for yourself or do the laundry by yourself. It’s really needed to get your feet back on the ground otherwise you stop to be creative!

Judging by your latest album Loud Like Love, it doesn’t seem like you have nothing to write about.

No, definitely not. I admit that this record came to existence a little bit strangely. There were times when we had been saying that we were not going to ever finish it. The road to it was very rough. Firstly, we wanted to put together few novelties for our „best-of“ album. But later on we stopped to care about it. Then the tour came and we were thinking about recording EP but it turned into the whole new album. It all happened by a chance. Originally we went to the studio just to record a single, but after a while we realised that it’s probably going to be an album. This all was back in 2012. We started with writing and composing, and we were recording it and until the end of the year we finished half of the album. According to the fact that we hadn’t planned it in advance and hadn’t made any time reservations, we had to let it go at a time we had left for the tour. We got back to the recording earlier this year. We had written other pieces and we had gone to the studio and then we mixed it. All that time we lived in doubts how it would turn out to be. But it was worth it.

It seems to me that the second half of the album – especially A Million Little Pieces, Exit Wounds or Begin the End – is visibly much darker than the first one. Is the way how the album was recorded responsible for this?

Definitely. Songs on the first half of the album are shorter and more energetic. Then the songs are getting longer, the darker emotions and the sadness are added. Songs are arranged in an exact order in which they were written and recorded. It’s like you had been there while we were creating them.

How would you, yourself, describe this record?

It seems to me that it’s painfully honest. We took a risk with that as well as with the main theme [note: love] of the album, which is actually the emptiest theme in the world’s pop music history or in the whole pop culture. But for Placebo it is very unconventional theme. We loved the idea that we would again confuse those who have had some expectations from us. As a band we like to play with our identity. It came to us very funny to do the exact opposite of what is expected from us - to do something what would confuse people. With every song we are walking on more and more slanted floor.

What is driving you to do this?

Personally, I feel less tied to what we mean for some people. With this record I – in a way – freed myself. Now we can write about anything and we can try any music genre until it will sound like Placebo in the end. Thinking in this creative way is a huge relief. One has to cross the lines of the secure zone to find new ideas. If I was relying on the old trick, it all would have had lost its point. We wouldn’t progress, we would only be passé.

Just try it

Is it possible to say that Placebo is more up-to-date with Loud Like Love?

For one hundred percents. Especially me, I see the reason in my enthusiasm for Eastern culture. For Buddhism, for meditations, or for the written work of German philosopher and spiritual person Eckhart Tolle, who wrote an amazing book called The Power of Now. Also, nowadays I live an incomparably healthier life than I did in my times. We were talking about it last night on our way from the restaurant. And we said that in last 10 years we had partied more than some people will ever do in their entire lives.

When you start recording, are you considering all the pros and cons?

I think that it’s clever to do that. Otherwise you may start to repeat yourself. You realise, that as soon as the record is done you are supposed to star touring the world and night by night you’re playing it live. You need to have some kind of relationship with the songs so that you can pass the emotions to the audience. It requires a lot of self-confidence and when you don’t consider every aspect before you do that, then it’s like you’re trying to find a right way into a tunnel. Whatever you do may destroy you artistically when you don’t ask yourself about the meaning. You’re telling yourself for example „We are good at this, but we’re not going to do that.“ But why? We can at least try that? There may not be any point in doing that, but isn’t this the real meaning? Finding out where these roads are going to take us? I think that this is the way to do it.

You are using a lot of electronic technology, but also traditional indie instruments. You have built up your specific genre on the alternative rock scene.

We refuse to admit that we are playing „guitar music with bass and drums, and that from time to time we add a piano for the fun“. This is not the way we do our music anymore. Maybe before those twenty years ago we did... But from those times we’re always trying to find new musical instruments that we can use. Obviously, this record appealed to us from time when we arrived into the studio from the 70’s where they had the original mixing panel. And then there were us with our iPads. It completely suits our position – we must surprise each other in order not to get bored.

Happily sad song-writing

While talking about iPads and modern technologies in general; the single Too Many Friends is making fun of all that.

We’re not taking ourselves too seriously as one may imagine. That song contains humour but it also is very sad and desperate. Kind of bittersweet. I’ve found out that melancholic music was appealing to me since I was a kid. That kind of music, that can drive you to tears but at the same time you’re happy that you’re alive and that you can feel all those things. I happened to become a bittersweet song-writer. That is my realm.

Under what circumstances had the song Too Many Friends been made?

I don’t remember what I was googling but one day my computer started to attack me with links as I was some kind of a very active member of a community of gays, fetishists or what else. „Wow, my computer thinks I’m gay!“ I was thinking. And immediately I thought that it could be an awesome slogan for Placebo. Our relationships with technology have come to a very personal level... That exact week, few of my friends – to sort it out, not I, for me the social networks are still an unknown – were trying to refuse the ‚friend requests‘ of people who were trying to be the friends with them on the Internet. Simply they have had too many of them already. And I asked „How can you have that many friends?“ And I had started to count how many friends do I have. I mean the real friends, and I can say that there wasn’t any number close to 500 or 1000. It had driven me to the thoughts of what a friendship really means these days and how much the perception of the interpersonal relationships has changed. This song is about alienation, false promises that are carried through the social networks. It is responsible for solidarity but also for the new form of loneliness.