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| Photo credit: Covers of the album and the singles, edit by Silke |
๐ ๐ ๐๐๐ฆ – ๐๐จ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐จ๐
๐ต http://bit.ly/2SdQqfO ๐ต
“Meds” was produced by Dimitri Tikovoi, a personal friend of Brian, who was also responsible for some of Placebo's earlier singles, b-sides and remixes.
The album was recorded at RAK Studios and Livingstone Studios, both located in London.
Most of the songs were mixed by Flood (real name: Mark Ellis), a British post-punk and alternative rock record producer and audio engineer.
There are two guest vocalists on the album: R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe on “Broken promise” and Alison Mosshart of The Kills on “Meds”.
The album was leaked to the internet on 17th of January 2006, two months before the official release date. The leak caused a serious loss of profit. Nevertheless in most countries “Meds” charted well, for example it peaked no. 7 in the UK Albums Chart. It reached no. 1 in Austria, Belgium, France and Switzerland.
♠️♦️ ๐ฃ๐๐๐๐๐๐ข ๐ง๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐ง๐๐ ๐ฆ๐ข๐ก๐๐ฆ ๐ข๐ก “๐ ๐๐๐ฆ” ♦️♠️
๐น๐ ๐๐๐ฆ๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “The original version of Meds was very different to the one that was recorded. I wrote it during my time in India, like with Song to say goodbye. Meds talks about a loss of self, not recognising yourself. You feel lost, desperate and you don’t know what you’re thinking anymore, what you’re really feeling. It’s a very perturbing sensation, for me or anyone else, and I wanted to express that. I’m glad it’s the opening track of the album. It’s the first time that a Placebo record opens with an acoustic intro.”
๐๐ ๐ง๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฎ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ช๐ญ๐ญ๐ด ๐ง๐ฆ๐ข๐ต๐ถ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ด ๐ฐ๐ฏ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ช๐ด ๐ฑ๐ช๐ฆ๐ค๐ฆ. ๐๐ฐ๐ธ ๐ฅ๐ช๐ฅ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ข๐ต ๐ค๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ ๐ข๐ฃ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ต?
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “I’ve known Jamie [Hotel] for 16 years. When we wrote Meds, we thought that a feminine voice would be a good idea. It was then that Dimitri suggested Alison. Her voice is a real turn-on, like Viagra. She’s from another world. When we sat down in the studio to hear her do the vocals, all the guys got hard-ons. The Kills are an incredible group. We’ve seen Jamie in a lot of bands, and we even played with some of them… but The Kills!… They’re a musical triumph. One of the best modern rock bands.”
๐น๐๐ก๐๐ฅ๐-๐ฅ๐๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “It’s a song about revenge. Many tracks on the album talk about alcohol and where it takes you when you drink it in excess. When you drink, you often feel very angry towards those who manipulated you in your life. Then you develop this desire of revenge that Infra-Red talks about. On this track I was very inspired by the early Bob Dylan. I imitate him in places. [Sings] "Theeeere’s gonna beeee an aaaaccideeeent!" [Laughs] It might be our second single.”
๐น๐๐ฅ๐๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “At one moment in my life I stopped writing on the guitar to try to improve my piano skills. I was always rather bad at it, but Drag was born that way. I had just fallen in love and wanted to write a song about feeling inferior to someone. When you fall in love, you see the other person above you. "I’ll always be in your shadow, you’re wonderful…" You think that the person you love is perfect and you just feel like a piece of shit on their shoe. It’s also the only Placebo track that mentions the Seine! The working title was ‘Across the Seine’.”
๐น๐ฆ๐ฃ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐ข๐ก๐๐๐ฌ๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “Steve? I know how you feel about this one…”
๐๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐: “It’s a modern classic. [Laughs] Space Monkey was one of the things we wrote at the start of Sleeping With Ghosts. We decided to drop the guitars and become Kraftwerk. We had an electric drumkit and keyboards.”
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “On Sleeping with ghosts we wanted to leave the guitars. For this album, it’s the opposite – fuck Kraftwerk, we’re going back to rock!”
๐๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐: “And so, we’d been working for about three days, and on the fourth, the management turns up and says, "so, what have you got?" We explained that we’d just started, we were still at the stage where we were just messing around and that they’d come too early. They asked us to play something anyway. So we did 'Space Monkey' for them. At that point, they asked us what the hell we were doing. We answered that they shouldn’t have got here so fucking early.”
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “In London, Dimitri [Tikovoi] was doing these bike sessions. One time, we took the bike from him, put it in the studio with a bin, the foot of a keyboard and some bits of metal. Steve played on it for three hours. At the end of it, we had our Space Monkey. The guy isn’t a drummer, he’s a cyclist! Afterwards, we added a real orchestra on it. They came to the studio, they played and we filmed them.”
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| Photo credit: Nadav Kander |
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “This track was inspired by Iceland. The first time we went there, it was summer, during the 24 hours of sunshine. We calculated that 3% of the population came to our gig, despite it being a very small concert. Nobody lives out there. While we were driving through the countryside to see the volcanoes and the geysers, we didn’t see a single cop. It was so weird! You wonder what people do over there. And two weeks ago I met Sigur Ros. Those guys are 25 and already have got 7-year-old kids. Seeing that, I said, "are you crazy? Is there really so little to do in Iceland?" They replied "yeah, that’s why we get drunk and fuck." This trip to Iceland inspired us, made us think about what you do when you live in a place like Luxembourg or Iceland where there’s nothing to do. Most of the time, you just go looking for trouble. In the end, this track, like many others on the album, talks about alcohol. You get completely wasted in a bar, you fall on another guy who’s equally pissed, you decide he’s your new best friend and straight away, you go and do stupid things. This particular stupid thing is to follow the cops back home and rob their houses. After having listened to this, if some guy thinks it’s a good idea, then he deserves to get caught. It’s the stupidest thing you could do.”
๐น๐ฃ๐ข๐ฆ๐ง ๐๐๐จ๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “It’s about alcohol. [Laughs] No, seriously, it’s a song about dependence, loss of self, how one person can be your sole reason for existence. They become your escape, the answer to all your questions. We’ve always written love songs, but our lyrics are more twisted. We talk about impossible love, complicated love, destructive love. A love as destructive as drugs.”
๐น๐๐๐๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ ๐ ๐ช๐๐ก๐ง ๐ฌ๐ข๐จ๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “It’s our first single in the UK. I’d rather not say anything about it. You just need to listen to the lyrics – everything’s explained in them.”
๐น๐๐๐๐ก๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “It’s a song for the chicks.”
๐๐ฉ๐๐๐๐ฃ: “I wrote it four years ago, like Post Blue, when we were recording our covers. The guitars are tuned in the same way on both tracks. At the time, we didn’t want to turn them into B-sides. We kept the original recording for this album, but with the vocals re-worked and extra over-dub.”
๐น๐ฃ๐๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ข๐ง ๐ง๐๐ ๐๐๐ข๐ช๐ก๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ:: “It’s a song about destructive relationships, violent relationships. After having written it, I realised that it could well have been about family relations as well as between lovers. A lot of songs – mainly Country – talk about women being hit by their husbands. In Pierrot the Clown, the target of the violence is a man. A vulnerable man, trapped in a violent and destructive relationship. The tile of the track stems from my obsession with clowns and a passion for the circus. At college, I’d thought about signing up to a school for clowns and becoming one…”
๐๐ฉ๐๐๐๐ฃ: [Teasingly] “It’s what you do already!”
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: [Laughs] “But fortunately for everyone, I was accepted at university. When I was a kid, I’d go to the circus. It was a party, but one person, Pierrot, would always be sad. I always felt compassion for him. It’s also the role that Bowie plays in his video for Ashes to Ashes. It’s a very strong image for me, and I wanted to communicate how you can feel alone in a relationship, to the point where you can let yourself be beaten physically and morally by someone. Joyful, isn’t it?”
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| Photo credit: Nadav Kander |
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “We thought the idea of getting two guys to sing this song about adultery – me and Michael Stipe – was a good one. The result is something halfway between Erik Satie and Metallica. [Laughs] It’s fucking bizarre! It starts with the Satie piano, played by Stefan, then the loud guitars, then Satie, then the guitars… it’s crazy!”
๐น๐ข๐ก๐ ๐ข๐ ๐ ๐๐๐ก๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “Because I want you was our most recent track. At the end of the recording, the label called us up at the studio and said to us, "write us more singles." We said "fuck you! Let’s get into the studio and write something with distortion at 100%". From that we got One of a Kind, and we don’t even know if it’ll come out as a single. It’s odd to sit in the studio to try and hatch a single. We didn’t want the track to be poppy, and in a way, we achieved that, it’s got this twisted vibration like The Pixies. It’s a song about having the impression that you don’t fit in the world. You know you have a place, but you feel like it’s not right for you. At the same time, you realise that you’re unique, and that there’s only one you.”
๐น๐๐ก ๐ง๐๐ ๐๐ข๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ง ๐ข๐ ๐ ๐ข๐ฅ๐ก๐๐ก๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “It’s a musical homage to Leonard Cohen. It’s about drugs, being completely fucked, a bit like Pure Morning. It’s 7 AM, everyone’s off to work and you’re just wandering the streets. You get home, look at yourself in the mirror and you think, "why am I like this? I promised myself never to do this again, yet here I am." You feel completely separated from the planet. The rest of the world is living, doing their work and you, you’ve been decadent and weak towards yourself. You’re not happy about it. And you look in the mirror and say to yourself, "I hate you, I can’t stand you anymore.”
๐น๐ฆ๐ข๐ก๐ ๐ง๐ข ๐ฆ๐๐ฌ ๐๐ข๐ข๐๐๐ฌ๐๐น
๐ฝ๐ง๐๐๐ฃ: “The theme of Song to say goodbye is keeping only the best aspects of your life. It’s the first track I wrote in India. I went over there for a lot of reasons, one of them being to try and change my style of life. I wanted to make myself understand that I couldn’t become a rock’n’roll clichรฉ and that the world didn’t need another dead rockstar. It was written as a letter to myself.“
(Rock Mag, March 2006)
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| Photo credit: Nadav Kander |
Post by Silke
