Brian Molko’s dark, doomed lyrics gave 15-year-old me worldly wisdom while he gave me hope for being small and awkward
It was perhaps inevitable that I would fall for Placebo. Looking back, they were at the precise intersection of my main teenage interests: arty pretension, goth-glam aesthetics, and beautiful wounded men wearing black eyeliner. God knows what, at 15, I understood of their tales of sadomasochism and ketamine, of doomed romances and seedy underworlds. But their songs – filled with theatrical histrionics, angry guitars and quasi-profound religious imagery – seemed perfect to me.
My teenage years were defined by a succession of intense musical obsessions, during which I would focus on one artist for months at a time. Each era was distinct and all-consuming, characterised by meticulously parsing lyrics and every interview I could find for information that might be helpful in the event of meeting them. For example, after reading that Placebo singer Brian Molko’s favourite drinks were bloody marys, I tried and tried to make myself like them, to no avail. (They only made sense years later, when I got my first real hangover.)
