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 passรฉ.
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.
A special Thank You with a big hug to Luss Forbidden Snowflake l Desing SusanneCk
Credits Photos: Placeborussia., tmblr & Pinterest