“I didn’t think that Oasis were very good songwriters. This obsession with Britishness just didn’t really compute with us”: Placebo on drugs, Bowie and standing out from Britpop ‘like a sore thumb’

Placebo – the late '90s alt-rockers fronted by Brian Molko – have a career-spanning documentary, This Search For Meaning, coming out and Molko has been talking to the i about their early days when they were emerged as a dramatic, provocative counterpoint to Britpop.

The band released their self-titled debut album in 1996 and Molko’s androgynous look – he wore makeup and had a penchant for dresses – and their heavier, serrated sound, couldn’t help but get them noticed in a musically conservative era when Oasis were at their peak.

“Probably yes, because we stood out like a sore thumb,” Molko told the paper. “We certainly didn’t set out to be the antithesis to Britpop. The media kind of engendered that to give the whole thing context. But we were phenomenally disinterested in what was happening at the time. I didn’t think that Oasis were very good songwriters. This obsession with Britishness just didn’t really compute with us.”

Around this time, Placebo fell into David Bowie’s orbit and they performed T Rex’s 20^th Century Boy together at the 1997 Brit Awards. “The thing about David is that he was such a raconteur that sometimes you had to tell him to shut the f*** up – listen David, it’s my turn to talk,” Molko remembers. “But my memories are just conversations going on for hours and hours and hours, a very relaxed person who is genuinely interested in the people that he was talking to, very open. It was really, really lovely and very un-rock starry.”

Whilst Bowie undoubtedly saw something of his younger self in Molko, a more unlikely friendship was that which blossomed between the Placebo singer and Robbie Williams, of all people. “When we met we were very much going through a lot of the same issues, and found a real connection,” the singer says. “Robbie’s a bit of a big brother to me. He’s an extremely kind individual.”

Molko liked his drugs and the documentary, This Search For Meaning, doesn’t shy away from depicting the excesses of this period. Apparently, the singer walked out on last year’s London premiere of the film – the ‘addiction section’ was just too difficult to watch.

“It was too close to home, really, to see it on such a big screen,” Molko says. “It’s a very uncomfortable moment in the film. So I had to step out. Stefan (Olsdal, bassist) too.” “Between the 90s and 2000s there were quite a few moments like that”. But he explains, the idea was to show the “brutal honesty about what happened to us and what our lifestyles were like at a certain point”.

Both core Placebo members are sober now and incredibly, the band have endured. “I don’t question it. I don’t necessarily understand it, either. I like the mystery, and I like the romance of it,” says Molko. “I think what we’ve achieved is something very, very precious.”