0.14.1 - The medicines, the medicines, the esculent macabre for the mouth
Despite all my practice, my eyeliner game still required me to be stood relatively still, with a mirror, and complete silence to get it even close to right. This night, none of these things were true, because I'd come straight from my office to queue up to see Placebo play at the Sheffield Octogon. I'd taken a change of clothes, and my shirt, tie, shoes and trousers were all folded into a plastic bag under my desk - my black silk shirt, black combats, black Doc Martens and black spiked collar were the outfit for the evening, which I had snuck out wearing through a little known back staircase to get out lest my colleagues see me. The joy of combats was the plentiful pockets into which to put my various makeup items, but as the queue shuffled forward in the cold October night, I took several attempts to put on my eyeliner in the reflection of the glass panels along the side of the venue with little success. I was here on my own for this gig - tickets had gone fast, a small venue hosting a popular alternative band, but I had an inside track with the University entertainments committee who had tipped me off when they were going on sale. In front of me, three young women glanced back at my ineptitude.
"Do you want me to do that for you?" one of them asks; she's in a plaid skirt and artfully torn fishnets, and a Levellers Tshirt under a purple shirt, her blonde hair artfully spiked and dishevelled, her own eyeliner razor sharp. I offer my thanks, and she has me kneel down in the queue while her friends giggle over her shoulder, and she swipes the pencil under and across my eyelashes with pinpoint accuracy. I offer my thanks, she tells me she likes my shirt, we talk about The Levellers and how I'd seen them at a music festival earlier that year; she'd been at the same festival. We file into the venue together, ready to see Placebo. For me, this will already be the 3rd or 4th time I have seen them live. I'm still excited.
In a lot of ways, I feel like I've grown up alongside this band. The arc of ambiguously horny teenage narcissism into uncertainty and depression into personal acceptance and reinvention that I hear across these albums in sequence (though, of course, art is interpretation and that could just be me projecting) could be the soundtrack to the jukebox musical of my lifetime**. While I'm sure my lived experience and that of Brian Molko and Stephan Olsdal couldn't be more different, when I they sing "I'm unclean, a libertine" I'm back to being 22 again; When the choruses to The Bitter End and Meds drive through the song like a bullet, I'm sitting through my feelings about an ugly breakup, I'm confronting my own depression. And when I hear Loud Like Love or Too Many Friends or Beautiful James I hear the words of someone who's moved past those things and is facing into new challenges of being Gen X residents of a post-millennial world.
Are Placebo my favourite band? No; are they one of my favourite bands? absolutely. They're also the band I've seen live the most number of times (currently sitting at 8 different occasions, 4 on tour by themselves, 4 at music festivals) including last year in Halifax as part of their Never Let Me Go tour, and they always put on an excellent performance. Brian Molko's vocal delivery can be polarising but I think it's a perfect complement to a lyrical catalogue dripping with poetry and angst in equal measure, and his flawlessly androgyne presentation, like my relationship with Mike Patton, made me have some serious conversations with myself about where my preferences lay.
I've already covered some of these albums in previous posts, and I don't want to dwell too much on each album musically because I don't think there is a bad one amongst them - if you enjoyed Without You I'm Nothing, you'll enjoy Loud Like Love (I have personal evidence of this - we listened to Loud Like Love driving to Manchester for a gig and Catherine, who likes Placebo but has really only heard a couple of the earlier albums, said to me "This album is really good, isn't it?"). Instead, I'll tr and touch on something personal related to each album if I can.
So I already covered Placebo here in my post about self-titled albums; I also covered Black Market Music in my writings back in 2017 and Covers when I covered cover albums***. We can call them ticked off.
I was listening to Without You I'm Nothing a lot in 1998; I'd been to the T in the Park music festival, and while we were there, myself and my two friends who came with me ended up camping near a group of young women; by the end of the weekend, my two friends and two of said young women had become more personally acquainted, and because of this, one of the young women had invited us all up to her parents farm for the weekend while they were away, and because I was the one with the car, I did my best third wheel impression as my friends and their summer flings became reacquainted. On the Saturday night, the girls invited a friend around, and I remember distinctly the music video for Pure Morning being on the TV when the new friend made what I think will always be the most direct proposition for a one night stand I will ever experience in my lifetime.****
Sleeping With Ghosts was the soundtrack to my breakup with my longest long-term relationship until I met Catherine. It was unexpected and depressing, and I won't go too far into the specifics because it seems that even though it was two decades ago now, those scars are still sensitive if I pick at them too much. When we finally parted ways, six months after the breakup, I spent the weekend before the removal van came to whisk my stuff away looking through our shared CD collection, picking out what I knew for sure was mine, listening to this album. Meds soundtracked what came after, constantly moving to cheaper and worse apartments as my cash ran out and my mental health spiralled away..
It took me a long time to come back to Battle For The Sun and Loud Like Love; I think there was something like a six or seven year period where I didn't listen to Placebo songs much at all, and was only dimly aware of the new albums. The associations with a dark period of my life had me avoid them all together, though it turns out with 20 years of perspective, many of the albums I thought would be tainted forever with the association with that breakup have managed to move past that stigma, or maybe I've just grown healthier as a person, who can say? So I listened to this album as a pair, and to this day I can't tell you which song is on which album without looking - its an unintentional Placebo double album, released around 2015 in my head. And finally, Never Let Me Go came out around the end of the pandemic, after I'd leaned heavily on listening to music old and new to get me through it, and it was an unexpected gift from a band I had assumed were on hiatus, a part of my life which had passed into memory. It speaks to 40something year old me the same way that Without You I'm Nothing speaks to 22 year old me.
So what else is there to say? Placebo are a band intimately connected to my lived experience for the near 30 years they've been a going concern, I've seen them perform live in three different decades, and they've accomplished the difficult feat of growing and evolving their music without ever losing the thing that hooked me into it when I heard Nancy Boy for the first time in a dingy nightclub in a small town.
I missed my train back to Chesterfield the night of that chill October evening. And the following morning, I was grateful for the plastic bag of clothes I had left under my desk. Using the same back stairs, I stole up to my office, changed back into my working clothes, and strode out onto the corridor to get a coffee. In the work room, a colleague saw me walk in, did a double take, and then quietly asked "Are you...wearing eyeliner?".
*At some point I am going to unveil the Record Reconstructor Viral Mystery and see if anyone can come up with answers, but that's not for this article.
**God, can you imagine "Here's a musical about a fairly normal white dude where not much of note happens, accompanied by the songs of Placebo!". Spare me.
*** I enjoyed being about to write the word cover three times in a sentence and it be grammatically correct there.
**** There's a weird coda to this story. The car that I drove up that weekend in broke down and would not start on the Sunday we were due to leave. It was a Sunday, so we couldn't get a mechanic to come out to this small farm village in North Yorkshire, so I called in sick to work in the hopes that the mechanic could get it going on Monday, while my friends got two busses back home. The following morning, the mechanic pronounced the car in need of major repairs beyond my ability to fund, so I left my car on the driveway of this farmhouse for five months, exchanging occasional email conversations with the girl who's parents house it was about it, until eventually it was scrapped by her parents. We never saw those girls again after that.
