These days we've been posting many new Placebo interviews, but in this one I found a couple of very significant statements: the first is about how collaborations with very important artists at the beginning of his artistic career had a profound effect both on Brian's constant sense of insecurity and on his self-confidence...and the second is about Michael Bublรฉ...
maybe this name reminds us something about the head-to-head battle for the N.1 in the UK chart in recent days?
Enjoy the reading!
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| Photo Credit: Roger Sargent/REX/Shutterstock, Mads Perch / Edit by Emanuela |
๐ข What's my state of mind right now? Anticipation, mild frustration, impatience. This has been a long time coming and it's kind of the album has been delayed for a considerable amount of time. Our musical lives have been delayed, you know, for a considerable amount of time.
So we're kind of hesitated on this record for two years longer than we should have been. We have to kind of restart and go back into this kind of rock-and-roll machine, and now we're thinking about it, because we had enough time to have a break for it to become not automatic. So, inverably, because I'm a catastrophizer, and I have a tendency to project into the worst case, you know, kind of thing I just think everything is gonna go wrong, I get really worried. Because I don't have that kind of bravado that I had before, just from kind of doing it all the time without thinking. Now I think too much about everything, I overanalyze every aspect of what we're doing because I have the space and time to do it!
What have been the greatest goals you have achieved?
๐ข For me the greatest achievements, they shift. When we started I had been to Goldsmiths College in New Cross, and so the nearest kind of important place to see gigs was Brixton Academy for me. And I saw Fugazi, I saw Polly Harvey (PJ Harvey), I saw Sonic Youth, I saw Pavement, I saw these amazing bands in the 90s which were so inspirational at Brixton Academy. So that was my dream. And we got there in '98, in 1998 we played at Brixton for the first time and then so you kind of have to find new dreams, you know, new heights to scale.
What were the other goals achieved?
๐ข I guess for me it started to become about my insecurity, my own personal insecurity, you know, being somewhat diminished by the support of people that I admired, people that I grown up listening to. Were kind of knocking on the door and saying "Shall we do something together?", whether it's David Bowie or Michael Stipe, actually recording some through his. Or, you know, sharing a stage with Robert Smith and Frank Black, you know. These were ridiculous things to do, playing their songs! These are absurdly magnificent things to happen to a musician to get that kind of support from such legendary figures that he grew up listening to, and to find an affinity with them.
And that little voice in the back of your head that just keeps telling you "you're never good enough", you know you're slightly by the support of your heroes and people who definitely influenced you.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from live DVD Soulmates Never Die, Paris 2003. |
๐ข Every time we come around to starting a new record, I kind of have a major existential crisis. And so this time the methodology I used, to pull myself out of kind of artistic panic, was just to reverse the entire process. So I thought myself what's the last thing we do? And the last thing we do is we usually enter choosing a picture for the album cover. So let's start with the album cover and work backwards. And then the second thing is probably...oh well, you know, the lyrics, and song titles after the lyrics. So I've been writing a list, a list of song titles.
So I had this enormous list of titles I had been writing for about seven or eight years. And I was just kind of pick a title that we'd like, in a way that would kind of serve us as an inspiration for the song. It's extremely unusual, I really enjoyed it because it just forced me to break with all of my comfortable methods. And so it increased the danger, I guess, for me. You know anything could go wrong, but also anything could go right and could go anywhere. And to change the process completely and I just did it backwards 'cause it was the first thing that came to my mind.
(At this point the journalist, while translating into Italian the answer Brian had just given, says something more that Brian would have said but which is not present in the released audio of the interview: she says that another mental process that helped Brian to get out of the 'blank page' block was thinking that this was going to be their last record, the last Placebo record).
What are the themes of this record?
๐ข What are the general themes of the record? A climate disaster's on there, things that are very very much I suppose in the news, one of the most major one's being climate disaster. There's also themes of surveillance capitalism, privacy, and how much privacy do we still have.
Some classic Placebo themes like not feeling comfortable in this world, not feeling represented in this world, feeling manipulated by others, feeling disconnected, and the powers of being, you have to be a different human and our (...) pressure.
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| Photo credit unknown |
๐ข Am I optimistic about the future of humanity in where we are today as a species? Forgive me for saying so but, because I don't want to depress about your people, but I'm not particularly optimistic, no.
But I suffer from depression so it's very difficult to have that to be a part of your life, to have a tendency to worst depression and then to not have climate depression for example, to not be completely aghast at the treatment of refugees in this country, to not be completely aghast at the lies and the manipulation that we're subject to by the powers in this country.
It's very difficult I think to take a cold hard look of what's going on, and to empathize with it, and to find optimism within that.
But I ask myself...every kind of 50 years we have kind of doomsday culps, every 50 years people gather and decide that the end of the world is going to happen, and it never does.
I wonder whether and how my lack of optimism has to do with the fact that I'm within it right now.
There is no distance, there is no historical distance, we're living it, maybe it feels more intense because we're living it right now.
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| Photo credit: Getty Images |
๐ข I think that we're extremely fortunate, because after 27/28 years we still have fans, we still have an audience.
And for me that was one of the things that I got so insicure about during lockdown, because for the first time in my life the possibility that not being an audience there, the possibility of us not playing concerts again seemed real!
And that was something that I always depended on. The matter... how fucked up your life gets? How messy everything is? Or how many disasters happen in a row? There'll always be an audience for you to go and do a show.
That was taken away during lockdown, and then all of a sudden I started asking myself questions that I had never asked myself before in the career, like "do I have a future?". For me it was evident before lockdown but, of course we'll always have a future. Look, we're still around! So many bands has started the same time as us, they aren't still around, you know. They quit, or the audience flown away, so we're in an extremely privileged position, I think.
But I'm not about pretending, because we reached some kind of longevity, that we are superior, artistically.
Michael Bublรฉ has achieved longevity, so as Barry Manilow.
So I never know if what I do is artistically valuable, because I'm questioning continuously.
Original audio interview:
https://bit.ly/3LWqIoq
Transcript and translation by Emanuela
Post by Emanuela
