⭐𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐀𝐍 𝐌𝐎𝐋𝐊𝐎 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖 𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐁𝐂 𝟔 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂 𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐎 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟗 (𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝟏)⭐

Some time ago, I found an audio recording of a brilliant 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖 that Brian did with 𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒 on BBC 6 Music Radio back in 2009.

I’d really like to note that Brian’s interviews with Steve are always so perfectly effortless, friendly and witty. I’m sure the reason for that is that they know each other for many many years, actually from the very beginning of Placebo’s career!
So today, I’m bringing you the first part of this interview that I transcribed for you.
Started from Brian’s school memories, it goes to the times of recording of Battle For The Sun with lots of precious never-before-heard moments along their conversation…

Placebo at Reading 2009. Photo credit unknown

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Welcome at 6 Music for a Monday evening! David Bowie ‘Let’s Dance’. Well, everyone's favorite hero’s David Bowie. Brian Molko, favourite Bowie album?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: It’s got to be “Ziggy Stardust…’ Yeah, to me that was really the one that I sort of studied, got heavily into. It’s guitars I think…

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: When did you hear it, what sort of age did you hear that record?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, let me see… My basketball coach at school in Luxembourg gave me a cassette with “Ziggy Stardust…’ on it and a couple of tracks of ‘Aladdin Sane’, and I must’ve been about fourteen or something around that time.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: So now, in Molko town… where are you living now?.. What part of the world are you living in?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: I live in London, I live in East London.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Ok, in Molko town, East London, who wins in a fight, I don’t mean a physical fight, but who wins between Bowie and Sonic Youth?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Oooof, well, Sonic Youth I guess ‘cause they’ve got so many more guitars which they just can pummel Bowie with.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Alright then. Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, you know, you’re asking me to choose between my first love and other loves in my life, but Sonic Youth remain my first and ultimate love. So they will kind of always win, really.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: One of the reasons I ask that is because of the opening track of the new album. Kitty Litter is a little bit Sonic Youth-ie in my head.
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: It’s interesting you mentioned this track because me and Stefan, we started writing it about 14-15 years ago…

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: No! Really?!
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: … and we were writing it… we were members of a guitar orchestra this guy called Rhys Chatham had who’s a contemporary of Glenn Branca’s. These are kind of alternative avant-garde composers who came out of no wave scene. The members of Sonic Youth have actually played with Glenn Branca. But his contemporary Rhys Chatham has written his symphony for one hundred and one guitars which required you to sort of restring your instrument and tune it in a certain way. And backstage, Stefan and I, we were just playing around with this tuning and we wrote this summery upbeat kind of tune and we never finished it, never wrote any lyrics. But, in the back of my head, I was like ‘One day it’s gonna make a really good rock song.’ And in 15 years later, when we reconvened, I was like ‘Let’s try this!’ and it was the first thing that we kind of got our teeth in.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Essentially, the longest overdue homework…
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Absolutely!

Placebo at Main Square 2009. Photo credit unknown

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Ever! That’s pretty much so. That’s the first track, we will talk through the record. We should explain the whole process this time around because you made it yourself, you financed it yourself this time around, this record.
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Yes.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Did you do anything differently because of that?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, you have a different attitude towards the purse strings a little bit when it’s your own money.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Had to bring your own tea into the studio?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Actually we did, yeah (𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑠) you know, because you can't get decent tea in Canada, yeah. Even though they're still the Queen's children over there but you still can't get a decent cup of tea, so we had to bring our PG tips over, I’m affirming you that.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: So you rehearsed out the songs - did you? - before you went to the studio or were you still writing it over there?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: No, we rehearsed at all in West London, at the Railway Arch in West London where we work, and David Bottrill came over from Toronto. And so we did a lot of pre-production work with him on the structure and arrangements of the songs. So it was the first time we really worked that way with a producer. We just got the song as far as we could get it, played it to him, and then he would’ve just deconstructed and put it back together in a more sophisticated way. So he's kind of responsible for, you know, that structural complexity of this record.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: You’re learning things about your own musical writing by seeing the process happened then…
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Yeah, I mean it really forces you to not be extremely precious about your material and to have the right attitude about it, it puts you in a place of humility towards the song, you have to serve the song itself. So it's a good process to sort of squash the ego. (𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑠)

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Did you need your ego squashed?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Yeah, every now and again, yeah, you know, I'm not as bad as I used to be but every now and again I get a little carried away of myself. So yeah, a bit of humility it was good.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: So, no diva moments now in the studio?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: No… it was a very disciplined and workman-like kind of experience. And normally we would record about 9 or 10 songs, this time around we recorded 18. I think that was the fact that we were far away from home, so we didn't have everyday life distractions getting in the way. We had 3000 miles away from our managers, so they couldn’t stick their nose in. And we didn't have a record company at the time worried about the commercial aspect of it. So we just felt completely free.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: And you had a new drummer first time, isn’t it?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: That's right.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: You’ve stuck on: when a drummer Steve leaves, you employ a new drummer called… Steve.
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Yeah.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Was his name on the flight cases so you didn’t want to scrub it off and repaint somebody else's name?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, we didn't want to be prejudiced towards all Steves of the world, we didn’t hold it against him and we decided to kind of focus on his musical ability and his positive mental attitude towards being in a band rather than hold to that unfortunate moniker against him. (𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑠)

Placebo at Cirque Royal 2009. Photo credit unknown

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Do you have a final idea of what the record's going to sound like in the shape of the finished product? I think you’ve mentioned before somewhere that this is like a book, with 13 chapters to this book, isn’t is a bit vaguely?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, a bit more like a collection of short stories to me that sort of relate to each other, really. And I hope that there's some kind of thematic unity. It's not really meant to be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s meant… if seen as a whole, it can be appreciated, and also if each individual song this is just seen individually, it can be appreciated as far as meaning is concerned.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: When you listen to this record (we have a lot of Placebo fans listening and we’ve got some questions actually coming from some of the fans which we’ll get to in a second) but when you finally hear this record – it was pretty up in my head - it does sort of start with this feeling of frustration, anger, and disappointment in the first third and then there's kind of this certainly reflective reevaluation period and there’s slightly weird left-turning into a song which we’ll get through later on and then kind of resolutions at the end, in that sort of never-again-style but with no answers. It’s like ‘I know what I want to do but I don't really have the answer, I want to change but I don’t know what I want to change into.’
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, it's about a journey I guess, and it's about the process of change and the struggles that you encounter along the way because it's not always that easy to change your ways. But I guess what it's saying is that the choice is important and the struggle itself is also very important as well because you can learn a great deal from that. I don't think that people who inhabit the songs actually arrive anywhere but what they're doing is that they're recognizing the fact that there is some kind of conflict going on, and it's their efforts which are important and which are kind of documented.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Are the heroes and villains there in the songs?
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Well, yes they are, and most of them are different aspects or versions of myself really.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: Right, okay, so there isn't you. See, because I was thinking, I’d hate to fall out with Brian because it might be a song of somebody like that… not me personally but if you fall out with somebody, they might be in a song. But then again, now reading this back, because in Battle For The Sun, a title track, there is that line ‘You are a cheap and nasty fake.’
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐: Mmm… but - you see, in Battle For The Sun, the person that is being addressed… I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not necessarily a person who's being addressed - it could be a substance, it could be an idea, it could be being stuck in a rut - it doesn't necessarily have to be directed towards a human being.

𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒒: You make it more ambiguous than we’ve already seen it!
𝑩𝒓𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒍𝒌𝒐 𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑠.
(𝐵𝐵𝐶 6 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑐 𝑅𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑜, 𝑀𝑎𝑦 11𝑡ℎ, 2009)

Transcription by Olga
Post by by Olga