𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗘𝗕𝗢 - 𝗠𝗘𝗗𝗦 – 𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗔𝗥𝗬

Today we celebrate the ♦️𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗔𝗥𝗬♦️ of Placebo's fifth studio album “𝙈𝙚𝙙𝙨”. It was released 15 years ago on the 13th of March 2006. Below you can find an interview with statements on all songs from the record.

Photo credit: Covers of the album and the singles, edit by Silke

📀 𝗠𝗘𝗗𝗦 – 𝗙𝗨𝗟𝗟 𝗔𝗟𝗕𝗨𝗠
🎵 http://bit.ly/2SdQqfO 🎵

“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.

♠️♦️ 𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗘𝗕𝗢 𝗧𝗔𝗟𝗞 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗢𝗡𝗚𝗦 𝗢𝗡 “𝗠𝗘𝗗𝗦” ♦️♠️

🔹𝗠𝗘𝗗𝗦🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

𝘝𝘝 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘴 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘤𝘦. 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵?
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗜𝗡𝗙𝗥𝗔-𝗥𝗘𝗗🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗗𝗥𝗔𝗚🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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’.”

🔹𝗦𝗣𝗔𝗖𝗘 𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗞𝗘𝗬🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “Steve? I know how you feel about this one…”

𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙫𝙚: “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.”

𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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!”

𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙫𝙚: “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.”

𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

Photo credit: Nadav Kander

🔹𝗙𝗢𝗟𝗟𝗢𝗪 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗣𝗦 𝗕𝗔𝗖𝗞 𝗛𝗢𝗠𝗘🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗣𝗢𝗦𝗧 𝗕𝗟𝗨𝗘🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗕𝗘𝗖𝗔𝗨𝗦𝗘 𝗜 𝗪𝗔𝗡𝗧 𝗬𝗢𝗨🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗕𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗗🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “It’s a song for the chicks.”

𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙛𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗣𝗜𝗘𝗥𝗥𝗢𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗟𝗢𝗪𝗡🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣:: “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…”

𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙛𝙖𝙣: [Teasingly] “It’s what you do already!”

𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: [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?”

Photo credit: Nadav Kander

🔹𝗕𝗥𝗢𝗞𝗘𝗡 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗠𝗜𝗦𝗘🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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!”

🔹𝗢𝗡𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗔 𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗗🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗜𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗗 𝗟𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗢𝗙 𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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.”

🔹𝗦𝗢𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢 𝗦𝗔𝗬 𝗚𝗢𝗢𝗗𝗕𝗬𝗘🔹
𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣: “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 cliché and that the world didn’t need another dead rockstar. It was written as a letter to myself.“
(Rock Mag, March 2006)

Photo credit: Nadav Kander

Post by Silke