Placebo are releasing RE:CREATED — ten reworked songs plus two bonus tracks, into which Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal poured three decades of stage experience. The recordings were remixed by Adam Noble. According to Germany's Musikexpress, the friction with which Placebo steamrolled the music scene in the nineties remains palpable: outsiderdom clashes with mass reach, androgynous self-presentation with direct, winking songwriting. Musikexpress ↗
The interview was originally supposed to be about this very album. But hardly had the Zoom connection been made when RE:CREATED receded into the background. Molko preferred to talk about identity in the nineties, about the failure of social media and the decline of crate-digging through record bins, about attending a Leonard Cohen concert with a plastic clarinet — and again and again about balancing pragmatism and idealism, which he describes as his central inner conflict. Musikexpress ↗
Asked whether RE:CREATED marks the beginning of something new or the end of a chapter, he replied: "It feels like a circle is closing. But that's only happening because we invented an arbitrary concept of time so we could capture things." That Molko still prefers to talk about attitude rather than hits is, according to the magazine, only consistent. Musikexpress ↗
Placebo are among the most searched bands on SuperMusic — you'll find more than three hundred of their lyrics, translations, and chords there.
Illustrative photo: Brian Molko at Frequency Festival 2017. Photo: Biha / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Brian Molko: "Only dreamers change the world." Placebo rework ten old songs
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