PICTURES

It's an epiphany that comes to all rock stars eventually - whether z-list or multi-platinum, Kylie or Dannii. It can come from the mouth of Jimi Hendrix during the world's longest acid bender, it can come sternly over a major label's boardroom table or it can come during an immensely expensive session of primal scream therapy, but it's always the same. It says TIME TO UP YOUR GAME.

For wee Brian Molko - ex-girlboy conundrum, ex-'difficult' interviewee, current worldwide rock phenomenon - it came on the side of a stage in Australia, watching a naked man with the beard of Satan bouncing on the spot for an hour.

"A lot of bands are creating new benchmarks in rock, like Queens Of The Stone Age," Brian enthuses, "At the time that we were touring 'Black Market Music' a band that really made us eat humble pie was At The Drive-In and this last year it's the Queens. We played with both of them at Big Day Out. They're the gods of rock!"

Trouble is, when you're the singer with Placebo - one of the most intriguing, compulsive and widely successful rock bands in Europe - upping your game is a bit like Rik Waller squeezing on a few extra pounds. Their third album 'Black Market Music' had sold a cool million copies worldwide by the end of 2002 and given Placebo their first Number One in France and Top Five hit in Germany. Their trip to Moscow to play on the same stage in Gorky Park from which Lenin and Stalin addressed the bloody-toothed proletariat was "like being in A Hard Days Night, being chased around Moscow by crazy people". 'Black Market Music' saw Placebo's music break free of England's petty Culture Of Cool and go global. Up their game? Really, you may as well ask Everest to get a bit higher.

But this wasn't about sales figures or bank balances or quivering, spread-eagled markets begging to be broken. This was about making the most savage and spectacular rock music that can possibly be made by anyone of woman born. Which, contrary to popular myth, includes Brian Molko.

"I thought 'Black Market Music' sounded like expensive demos in places," Brian admits, "and I wanted to do something that was very confident and hi-fi. I thought it would be fun to inhabit that place for a while."

If Placebo have a maxim it is Challenge Everything. Ever since the afternoon in 1994 in South Kensington tube station when a 21-year-old Brian accidentally bumped into Stefan Olsdal, an acquaintance from his Luxembourg schooldays and (it quickly transpired) the tallest bassist in history and Placebo was conceived ( Steve Hewitt, whom Brian was writing songs with at the time, ummed and ahhed about his other band Breed before wriggling onto the Placebo drum-stool full time in 1996) they've been brilliantly at odds with any fleeting media scenes while, at the same time, throwing ignorance and prejudice back in the faces of anyone who channel surfed anywhere near them.

Observe. In 1996, with the UK stuffed to the gills with stodgy leftovers from britpop, Placebo were a psycho-sexual freakshow of ambiguous sexuality (and, to the casual observer, gender). They were such only two years on from their debut gig (the Rock Garden, January 1995, trivia obsessives!) and 12 months after their first single ('Bruise Pristine' on Fierce Panda, late 1995!) they squelched into the charts at Number Four with 'Nancy Boy' and went gold with their superbly atmospheric eponymous debut album. In 1998, when the nod from Wellah or Noel was the golden ticket to stodge-rock superstardom, Placebo were a lone beacon of narcotic glamour - hanging out with Marilyn Manson and Bowie and making cameos in the glam rock movie 'Velvet Goldmine' Placebo's: darkly seductive second album 'Without You I'm Nothing' sold over a million copies and a Top 5 single with with 'Pure Morning'). By 2000 and the triumphant, Blondie-flecked electro-punk-pop of 'Black Market Music', the devout Placebo faithful were legion on all continents.

Come the end of the tour in October 2001, having spent six years challenging everything from homophobia to medical thinking about drugs being dangerous and winning, Placebo had nothing else to challenge but themselves. Within a month of getting home the threesome had bought identical mini-studios and begun toying with ideas for the fourth album, circulating musical sketches on CD. Six months later they had 25 songs demo'd, and hit a string of UK studios starting with Townhouse in July 2002, recording for a total of four months with - bizarrely - UNKLE and DJ Shadow producer Jim Abbiss. One imagines the Blur/Fatboy Slim collaboration but with the ability to rock skyscrapers to the ground.

"We wanted to do it much quicker," says Brian, "and we wanted to work with somebody who would give us a kick up the ass and make us do things backwards or sideways. I thought it'd be more electronic by the time it was finished, I didn't expect it to sound as rocky as it does. But I kinda saw that as the natural progression, to have one foot in the rock camp and one foot in a more beats-orientated place. I felt we'd reached a point where we should refine ourselves, pull forwards the elements we're naturally good at, and we thought that Jim could put a twist on it that we ourselves would never have thought of. Jim had really strong ideas, he'd change the time signatures of tracks and things like that and we'd really freak out, being the control freaks that we are. It was really difficult, being forced to do something backwards. But the benefit of the situation was that two people with very strong ideas end up somewhere where neither of you would've gone on your own. And that's kind of what we were hoping we'd achieve."

And 'Sleeping With Ghosts' is an almighty achievement. The most emotionally reflective yet explosive Placebo album to date, it weaves furious scatterbeat electronics into soul-baring elegies that manage to be dark, maudlin and riveting at the same time, a trick only previously performed by the likes of PJ Harvey and Bjork. And when Placebo wrench open the Big Guitar cupboard and pile into a driving chordstorm like 'This Picture' or first single 'The Bitter End', they sound as though they've had a rock transfusion from QOTSA themselves. It's a fundamentally experimental and stunningly fresh shove of the envelope that - unlike some other recent electro/rock crossover projects we shan't mention - doesn't get its head jammed so far up its arse it can lick clean its own colon. 'Sleeping With Ghosts' retains the feral power that's made Placebo the world-demolishing band they are while both rewiring their hard drive and letting you in a bit more.

"The album title's about carrying the ghosts of your relationships with you," Brian explains, "to the point where sometimes a smell or a situation or an item of clothing they bought brings a person back. For me it's about the relationship that you have with your memories. They inhabit your dreams sometimes and sometimes these ghosts can even pop up when you're on the job. There can be a lot in the future that's gonna remind you of the ghost of relationships past. So I see the album as a collection of short stories about a handful of relationships. Most of them mine. In a way writing the songs helps me to get a lot of the nasty feelings off my chest and put them in a box, and therefore have a bit more of an objective discourse with those emotions because you've done something positive with them, you've rid yourself of them."

Though this dozen tracks were written over the space of three years, it's the wounded mood of 'I'll Be Yours' and 'Protect Me From What I Want' - both penned at the end of the 'Black Market Music' sessions when Brian was undergoing "a very very messy break-up" - that dominates. Relationships are asphyxiating all over the shop: in 'The Bitter End', bleak piano ballad 'Centrefolds' and the title track, which is based on an idea Brian picked up from an American psychologist that people can be 'soulmates' who have relationships repeatedly over many different lives (Brian, with typically warped gusto, imagines them reincarnated as brother and sister). Elsewhere 'This Picture' details the trials and tribulations of being 'mummy' in a doomed S&M relationship and creepy keystone track 'Something Rotten' tackles the prickly subject of child abuse.

"Its one of those tracks that you decide it's about something after the fact," Brian says. "I didn't actually write it about anything but when I listen back to it, for me it conjures up a lot of images of just a nasty
childhood - not necessarily child abuse as in sexual abuse, maybe that's too specific a term - its just about running away from home or having to get away from your family situation. In my mind; if it was gonna be a soundtrack to an imaginary movie then this would be the subject that'd fit."

Between recording sessions for what Brian rightly describes as "our most successful album yet", he's poked fingers into all manner of collaborative pies, contributing guest vocals to a recent Alpinestars single and a concept album called 'Trash Palace' by French producer Dimitri Tikoboi ("Trash Palace is a secret club, a member's only club that moves around a lot, with seven rooms of sin. It's like me popping into the party for an hour and going again, as opposed to being the first one there and the last one to leave"). And in taking a more casual, enjoyable and experimental approach to his music, Brian has even developed a startlingly bright new worldview.

"I haven't felt this comfortable in my skin ever," he smiles. "In the early days I was all over the shop, extreme in my lifestyle. A lot of it's to do with masking insecurity and with bravado. I feel much more settled now. I think we have to prove ourselves again to a certain degree, coming back this time, because to come back and to be sloppy and lazy and all rock star about it would get us an immediate finger in the face. I think the attitude we're coming back with this time is not taking past success for granted, and we've got to work for whatever success we can get. I'm really looking forward to the hard work aspect of convincing people that you're still relevant and convince people that you're not old. We're coming out fighting."

And Placebo at the top of their game are gonna mash all-comers. Seconds out, round four...
 

	Sleeping with ghosts-2003      1.     Bulletproof      2.     Cupid      3.     English Summer Rain      4.     This Picture      5.     Sleeping With Ghosts      6.     The Bitter End      7.     Something Rotten      8.     Plasticine      9.     Special Needs      10.   I'll Be Yours Second Sight      11.   Protect Me from What I Want      12.   Centrefolds
	Black Market Music -2000 Taste In Men Days Before You Came Special K Spite and Malice Passive Aggressive Black-Eyed Blue American Slave To The Wage Commercial For Levi Haemoglobin Narcoleptic Peeping Tom
	Without You Im Nothing-1998 Pure Morning Brick Shithouse You Don't Care About Us Ask For Answers Without You I'm Nothing Allergic (To Thoughts Of Mother Earth) The Crawl Every You Every Me My Sweet Prince Summer's Gone Scared Of Girls Burger Queen
	Placebo -1997 Come Home Teenage Angst Bionic 36 Degrees Hang On To Your IQ Nancy Boy I Know Bruise Pristine Lady Of The Flowers Swallow