Brian Molko

Brian Molko was born in Brussels in 1972, the son of an American banker who dragged the family from country to country in pursuit of his career: Lebanon, Liberia, Scotland, Luxembourg.

He was always the foreign kid. The new boy, the odd one, the one who turned up at a school where everyone already knew each other and got picked on for being different. He grew up without roots and without a tribe, passing through everywhere and belonging wholly nowhere.

And instead of spending his life trying to fit in, he did the opposite: he made not fitting in into who he was, and into a home for everyone else who did not fit in either.

What he was up against

To understand the gesture you have to see the landscape.

In the mid-nineties British rock was dominated by Britpop at its most laddish and pugnacious: the Gallagher brothers, the lager, the football, the macho swagger. And into the middle of all that stepped Molko. Painted lips, eyeliner, black nails, an androgynous face of unusual beauty, a high, nasal voice impossible to mistake, and a bisexuality he declared without any fuss.

There was his body, too: slim, slight, fine-featured, a long way from the burly rocker that scene celebrated. Everything about him went against the grain of what a rock man "ought" to be, and instead of disguising it, he underlined it.

His band, Placebo, released "Nancy Boy" in 1997 — a slur for effeminate men turned into a title — and the song reached number four in the UK. It was out of tune with everything playing around it. Being out of tune was the point.

Provoking with a purpose

It was not scandal for scandal's sake. Molko spelt it out: he presented himself that way to confront the industry's homophobia, to force the public to question what it took for granted.

He was not after a cheap shock. He was trying to open a door.

That is why he is a cult figure, in the deepest sense of the word. For a generation of boys and girls picked on at school for being too soft or too other, Molko was proof that you could be exactly the thing they pointed their fingers at you for, and be a rock star, beautiful and ferocious.

And that is what saves it from being a pose: under the eyeliner, the music was brutal, furious, clenched-teeth. Molko blew apart the idea that an "effeminate" man was weak. He was delicate and dangerous at once.

The tenderness that hurts

It would be unfair, all the same, to reduce Placebo to fury.

They have an unmistakable signature — that voice, those guitars in strange tunings — but they move with enormous versatility: they can raise a wall of distortion and, in the next song, drop to a whisper and leave you in pieces.

"Special Needs" is one of those. A slow song, sadly beautiful, about the love that is over but gets relived again and again in memory, the one you know was bad for you and that comes back anyway.

Molko writes deliberately ambiguous lyrics, so that everyone can put their own story into them. In the slow songs, that ambiguity becomes a mirror in which you recognise the loves that were never meant to be and happened anyway. The ferocity was one face; that was the other.

The torch

None of this came from nowhere. His lodestar was David Bowie, the original androgyne, the man who taught rock that the oddball could be the god.

And Bowie recognised him as one of his own. He invited Placebo to open his fiftieth birthday concert at Madison Square Garden, in January 1997, the same night that Robert Smith, another man who made a home for those who did not fit in, also took the stage. Afterwards he took them on tour around Europe and recorded a duet version of "Without You I'm Nothing" with Molko.

The torch passed from the man who invented the beautiful alien to the boy who carried it to the end of the century.

The price

Being so visible came at a cost, and it has to be told with care.

The same openness that made him an icon made him a target. The tabloids hounded him, speculated about his private life and boxed him into labels he had never asked for. Over the years Molko himself said he regretted how much of himself he had exposed.

And there was a more intimate cost: years of drugs and alcohol, with songs written from inside that whirlwind. After recording "Meds", in 2006, he went through rehab. He said he had realised he was not immortal, that he had to stop before it was too late. He stopped. And afterwards he took to speaking publicly about depression and mental health.

A loud place

Brian Molko is alive, still making music and still refusing to be one neat, classifiable thing.

He is less famous than the giants around him in this collection, and that is precisely the point: he always belonged to the margins, not the centre. If you were ever the one who did not fit in — too odd, too soft, too other — it is very likely that Placebo was a door that opened for you, and Molko the one holding it.

He took the worst names they called him and wore them as a crown, with eyeliner and a snarl. Put on "Nancy Boy", or "Every You Every Me", or "Special Needs", or "Without You I'm Nothing", and you will hear it: a beautiful, furious outsider telling the other outsiders that there was a place for them, and that the place was loud.

He never fitted in. And out of that he made a home.

Sources

Brian Molko (Brussels, Belgium, 10 December 1972), singer, guitarist and lyricist of Placebo, a band formed in London in 1994. The son of an American father, a banker, and a Scottish mother; because of his father's work he lived in several countries as a child, among them Lebanon, Liberia, Scotland and Luxembourg, and he has said he was bullied at school. He studied drama at Goldsmiths College in London. With Placebo he released the album "Placebo" (1996); the single "Nancy Boy" (1997) reached number four in the UK. He came out as bisexual in the mid-nineties and described his androgynous image as a deliberate way of confronting homophobia in the music industry; years later he expressed regret at the media exposure of his private life. David Bowie invited Placebo to open his 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden (9 January 1997), which also featured Robert Smith, Lou Reed, Dave Grohl and Billy Corgan, among others; he then took them as support on the European leg of his 1997 tour and recorded a duet version of "Without You I'm Nothing" (1999) with Molko. Molko spoke publicly about his drug and alcohol use; he went through rehab after recording "Meds" (2006) and toured sober with the band from then on; he has also spoken about depression. "Special Needs" is from the album "Sleeping with Ghosts" (2003) and "Every You Every Me" from "Without You I'm Nothing" (1998). Placebo released "Never Let Me Go" in 2022. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, AllMusic, Louder, The Scotsman, Drowned in Sound and other press coverage.