Day 15: "Black Market Music" - Placebo (2000)
There are bands of whom I own more albums that this band. There are bands I like more than this band (if that's a quantifiable scale). There isn't a band in the world I've seen live more times than this band though - currently standing at seven separate live appearances.
listen to me here
Placebo were always going to be on-brand for me when they first hit the scene back in 1996. A rock band who played minor key emo songs with a goth aesthetic and an androgynously beautiful frontman ticked a lot of my 19 year old self's boxes. I remember hearing "Nancy Boy" and "36 Degrees" back in the basement dwelling days of Monty's in Chesterfield. Ninety-eight saw me watching the video for "Pure Morning" in a Yorkshire farmhouse near Goole with random women I'd met at a festival that year, with my broken down car stranded in their driveway. And when this album came out in 2000, we were firmly in the era of Kate in my own personal timeline.
It probably says a lot that each of the first three Placebo albums (and one later one, Meds from 2006) are associated with women I had some form of relationship with. I talked about how I met Kate a few days ago, and if that album made me think about the time that we first met, this album feels like the warning siren for all the drama which was about to unfold as our relationship spiralled out of control.
Kate and I had listened to this album constantly when we were together. She was smitten by Brian Molko, and was excessively jealous of the fact that I'd already seen Placebo live four times at that point (At the Leadmill for the '98 Without You I'm Nothing Tour, at Leeds Festival in 1999, at Sheffield Foundry for the Black Market Music tour in 2000 and at Glastonbury 2000), and was extremely annoyed that she'd missed the UK tour for the album. By happy coincidence, Kate's birthday was the middle of September, and Placebo were playing at Reading and Leeds on the August Bank Holiday that year. With our group of friends all ready to commit to going to a festival after mine & Alex's mostly-triumphant trip to Glastonbury that year, I bought Kate a ticket for her birthday so we could go see Placebo together.
What I didn't know at the time was that Kate by then was carrying on a long distance affair with someone at the University of Middlesborough, because her friend Laura at the time had a crush on this guy, and Kate & Laura had a weird dynamic where they would compete for everything. As a result, Laura also had a weird crush on me and resented Kate for fooling around behind my back and not telling me. My friend Alex also had a crush on Laura and resented me for the fact that she liked me rather than him. Did I mention that all of these people would be going to the same festival, and that in 2000 we were basically the goth/alternative version of Dawson's Creek?
Kate was weirdly cold to the whole idea for reasons which I didn't understand at the time, but put down to her not wanting to go camping. However, we all rocked up, pitched our tents, and wandered off to the arena to watch the bands. Every band we wanted to see on the first day were playing the main stage, so en masse we trooped over there to get a good spot in the crowd before Blink 182 came on.
Yes, we were there in the crowd when Daphne & Celeste were bottled off the stage. It was even more brutal in person.
By the time Placebo were preparing for their set, nearly everyone had wandered off apart from me and Kate, as I think Kate might have been the only person who hadn't already seen them live. The weather that day had been dry but ominous all day, and as the band came on stage, the black clouds which had hovered over us for the last hour and a half chose then as the perfect time to deluge the entire audience, non stop, for the 75 minutes of Placebo's set. We, like the band, stuck it out through the rain, as for the second time that year I became soaked through to the skin at a festival. To say that the weather literally dampened the mood is an understatement. By the time "Pure Morning" brought their set to a close, we were both sodden, freezing and unhappy; trudging as fast as we could through the now-muddy fields back to our campsite.
We got back to our tent, changed out of our soaking clothes, and went to sleep. I don't think we exchanged more than a dozen words after the gig had finished until the next day.
That's what I had a hunch that something was wrong. I know, I know, I'm a dumbass.
Listening to the album dredged all that up again, but with 17 years distance from it. I like the album well enough, but it's slightly telling that what it really made me want to do is go back and listen to their self-titled debut and "Without You I'm Nothing" again instead (which I did while I was hanging out my washing this morning - still great). I can't tell whether it's something musically in the album which makes me want to revisit the earlier stuff instead, or if its the emotional connection I have to the songs on here colouring for all time my perception of the value of this. Perhaps its just a reflection of my normal inclination to disengage from confrontational situations in all their forms. Or maybe it's just not as good as the first two albums.
