ReviewsRE:VIEWED: Placebo / RE:CREATED
Marc Burrows on the ‘tweaked’ classic
Thirty years ago Placebo’s debut album became an instant go-to for a certain kind of wilfully misunderstood teenage outsider; a darkly glamorous, provocative and, under the surface, atmospheric and desolate slice of spiky 90s alt rock, perfect for losing yourself in while having a little sulk and dreaming of the day you could go out and live Brian Molko’s decadent, glitter-flecked-despair fantasies for yourself. Handily arriving just as the Manics discovered the M&S menswear section and the rugby lads discovered the Manics, the multi-national, multi-sexual rock trio immediately filled the gap: intimate and decadent, sexy and miserable, literate and animalistic all at once. For a certain type of teenager they were catnip, and that debut album was the homework soundtrack for the rest of the year; the lyrics to ‘Nancy Boy’ scrawled on pencil cases, pictures of singer/guitarist Molko Blu Tack-ed to mirrors. They had David Bowie’s personal benediction and a song literally called ‘Teenage Angst’. They were, in their own way, in that moment, a certain kind of perfect.
Three decades on, Placebo have gone back to the master tapes of their debut album and rebuilt it. RE:CREATED isn’t a remaster and it isn’t quite a remake; the band call it a director’s cut, the 1996 recordings reopened and reworked with three decades of experience folded back in, handled by Brian Molko and occasion collaborator Rob Kirwan and mixed by Adam Noble (Biffy Clyro, Liam Gallagher). Molko is careful about the claim he’s making for it. “It’s not about improving it,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s about completing it.” Which is a curious word to reach for, and a curious thing for him of all people to say, because Molko has spent years being ruder about this album than any critic at the time. In 2009, he looked back on it for Kerrang! and saw “naivety, missed opportunities and mistakes”; he likened ‘Nancy Boy’, the song that made him famous, to the way Radiohead must feel about ‘Creep’, and said he wished the thing that propelled him into the limelight had been better written. So there’s an itch here, whatever the framing says. “Completing” a record is what you call it when part of you has always wanted to fix it.
It’s not about improving it. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s about completing it.
Brian Molko
It’s a risky move. Placebo may have gone on to bigger things with their platinum-selling follow up, Without You I’m Nothing, but their self-titled debut is genuinely beloved. The kind of record fans cradle obsessively and shed tears for. Not everyone is going to want it tinkered with. And the tinkering itself is a flaky business. These exercises can often feel pointless. When they work though, they can turn a familiar record a few degrees so the light catches differently and you hear it anew. Steve Albini’s 2013 remix of Nirvana’s In Utero is the prime example — it’s barely a different album on paper, but it throws the curtains open and makes something you’d worn smooth feel startling again. That’s the test for RE:CREATED. Not whether this is a good album or not, because A) it already is and B) if you disagree then you’re unlikely to have your mind changed by all but the most radical of do-overs, but whether it earns its existence by changing how you hear these songs, and whether what it adds is worth what it costs.
To judge that, you have to remember how strange Placebo were when they landed. ‘Bruise Pristine’ crept out on Fierce Panda in October 1995, the same month as (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, while Loaded and FHM set the weather and “lad” did the heavy lifting in every column. Into that came a band fronted by a pixie witch boy in eyeliner and girl’s clothes — born in Brussels to an American father and a Scottish mother, raised in Luxembourg, flanked by two Swedes, produced by an American better known for Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville — singing about bisexuality and drugs in a high, sneering voice that sat nowhere near the ladrock range. “There was never a chance of us being Britpop,” Molko told NME at the time, and meant it. They occasionally got the tag anyway, because in 1996 every British-ish guitar band that wasn’t audibly heavy metal got called “Britpop” by someone. It never fit, though. Their real kinship was with the American altrock weirdos — Pixies, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction — who knew you could be heavy and pretty and damaged at once with no reference to the Union Jack. Bowie heard it instantly and championed them before the debut was even out. The most discerning weirdo in rock knew his own. They’d go on to cover T.Rex’s ‘20th Century Boy’ with him onstage at the Brits.
Nancy Boy is one of the filthiest songs to ever make it to Top of the Pops
The lightning rod was ‘Nancy Boy’, a gnawingly catchy ode to chemsex and one of the filthiest songs to ever make it to Top of the Pops. And the rod within it was Molko himself. The song was partly a retort to Brett Anderson’s much-quoted line about being “a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience”; where Anderson wrapped his provocations in ambiguity, Molko said the quiet part plainly, in lip gloss. It made him a star and a target in equal measure, and he has never hidden that he relished the second part as much as the first. But the eyeliner-and-outrage memory of Placebo flattens the record into novelty, and it was never a novelty.
It’s one of the great teenage outsider albums. Decadent and sleazy on the surface, certainly, and a fair share of the pleasure is the swagger, but there’s a melancholy, a lonely desperation under the strut that has sometimes gone under-noticed. Producer Brad Wood made an accomplished and evocative record, punchy where it wants to be and atmospheric where it counts, and Robert Schultzberg’s drumming drives it with a busy, controlled, all-feel touch that is the engine of the whole thing. It’s a shame they sacked him almost as soon as the album was out. Listen to ‘Bionic’, one of the very best songs here — bloodthirsty and wistful in the same breath, keening and chiming and dreaming and sad all at once. It’s the balance of the evocative and the alt-rock that the album pulls off better than almost anyone managed in the second half of that decade. We also get ‘I Know’, which might be the peak: Molko at his most despairing and lovelorn, a song of romantic desolation to lose oneself within. Nothing on the record is braver than that nakedness. The album came out in July, but the strata of atmospheric misery it hides beneath its bravado always sounded perfect on a chilly autumn evening, walking alone with a walkman as the sunset, or lying on your bed in your student halls as the clouds scudded past the window. What the album evokes, in the end, is something separate from the brasher reputation it was saddled with by its singles: being alone and dejected in your bedroom on a school night, ignoring your homework, which is exactly where a pocket of outsiders went to commune with it. It didn’t sound like a bedroom, but it sounded like company when you were stuck in one. They baited you with sleaze, and then hooked you with loneliness.
Fire up the standard version of Placebo on Spotify and you’re already getting a rewritten history
That Molko and bandmate Stefan Olsdal are returning to these songs is a surprise on the one hand — they barely play any of them live any more, have long been allergic to their hits and keen to avoid the 90s nostalgia train. On the other hand, though, they’ve set their own precedent. Placebo have been tinkering from the start. ‘Bruise Pristine’ and ‘Come Home’ had both appeared as singles before being re-cut for the album. ‘Nancy Boy’ was re-recorded again for its single release, and that version — the ‘Sex Mix’ — ended up displacing the original track on later pressings. Fire up the standard version of Placebo on Spotify and you’re already getting a rewritten history. ‘I Know’ was re-recorded yet again, in 2008, for a ‘Best Of’ compilation. The band have form for revisiting and second-guessing almost everything on their debut. Reworking isn’t a betrayal of this album’s legacy. Reworking is this album’s legacy. RE:CREATED is simply the biggest swing yet.
Still. Is it worth it?
And the answer is sort of. Just about. What it does, mostly, is make everything bigger. Wider, more muscular, more heavily panned, with more air around the parts and detail surfacing in the corners. There’s more things that go whizz in your ear. More guitar layers that you’d never picked out before. Schultzberg’s drumming, already the secret weapon, sounds superb, every fill and shift of feel brought right to the front. Molko’s voice is pushed forward too, more assertive, more sure of itself. Some of it genuinely lands. ‘Bruise Pristine’ sounds enormous, and it was built to carry the muscle. There’s real new work here, as well, rather than mere polish: ‘Lady of the Flowers’ arrives with what sounds like a freshly sung vocal and an organ rising under the final chorus. Here and there the desired effect kicks in, a guitar line or a texture steps forward, and you do, briefly, hear the song anew.
But the bigger it gets, the less it feels like the album people fell for. The loss is hard to point at and easy to feel: less intimate, less atmospheric, less seedy, less lonely. The confidence is the problem, because the record was never about confidence. A more assertive Molko is a less desolate one, and desolation was one of the attractions. ‘I Know’ survives as the most devastating thing here, but it’s been bulked into something closer to Siamese Dream — more Pumpkins, more weight, a beefier solo ported in from the 2008 version, less of the despair that made it ache (The didgeridoo’s gone, presumably on grounds of cultural sensitivity, replaced or augmented by added guitar. I get that, but I miss the texture). ‘Bionic’ loses some of its dreaming to all the new detail. And ‘Nancy Boy’, the song everyone reaches for first, changes least of all: this edition descends from the Sex Mix, so the hazier feel of the true album take was sanded off decades ago, and it sits so close to the version people have streamed for years that it’s hampered by familiarity. It’s a rework of a rework, and less seedy than either. The band’s canon-classic is the clearest case of motion without distance.
So: completed? No. You can’t complete a record that was already whole, and this one was. The mistakes Molko has winced at for thirty years, the naivety, the under-written ‘Nancy Boy’ lyrics he still can’t quite forgive, are not bugs to be patched. They’re the substance. An album about being a lonely outsider is made by lonely songwriting, and ‘Nancy Boy’ became an anthem precisely because of its slightly ridiculous abandon; a better-written version would have been a worse one. What Molko has built instead is a loving and occasionally gorgeous-sounding expansion of an album that didn’t particularly need expanding. RE:CREATED clears the lower bar with ease, because the songs are great and the loud bits sound punchy and the drums are a joy, but only now and then does it clear the higher one, of presenting these songs in a new light. Most of the time it simply makes the familiar louder, and the thing it spends to get there is the exact thing the debut was treasured for: the intimacy, the atmosphere, the sense of a late-night communion with someone as out of place as you. Molko has finally made the record he had the craft to make in 1996. In doing so he’s slightly un-made the one he actually made. This is the bigger album. It isn’t the better one.
Reviewed for SDE by Marc Burrows. Placebo’s Re:Created is out now.
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Tracklisting
RE:CREATED Placebo /
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LP1 – RE:CREATED
Side One
- Come Home
- Teenage Angst
- Bionic
- 36 Degrees
- Hang On To Your IQ
Side Two
- Nancy Boy
- I Know
- Bruise Pristine
- Lady of the Flowers
- Swallow
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LP2 – Remixes
Side One
- Bionic (Sirens 12” Club Mix)
- Bruise Pristine (Sirens legato Remix)
Side Two
- Swallow (Sirens World of Shadows Remix)
- I Know (Sirens Triceps Are Better Remix)
- Lady of the Flowers (Electric Friends Remix)
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7″
Side One
- Drowning By Numbers
Side Two
- H.K. Farewell
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LP1 – RE:CREATED
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