Napster, Eminem, the American
election, and whether or not I ve fucked Marilyn Manson.

Brian Molko is listing the subjects that we won t be discussing during this afternoon s interview. The first three are indeed too yawnsome to contemplate, but the fourth? Rest assured that I ll be doing everything in my journalistic powers to discover if the Little & Large of Goth have been getting jiggy with it.
I m not having a go at you cause we ve only just met, but it amazes me that some writers think they have the right to ask you really personal questions, Molko resumes. I wouldn t dream of being introduced to you, and five minutes later asking if you take it up the butt. If you volunteer the information, fine, but I m not going to interrogate you like a criminal.
It s fair to say that the Placebo mainman has the reputation of being a difficult interviewee. Christened The Walking Tantrum by one of the less charitable British inkies, he s had almost as much bad press as Gary Glitter.
Only in the UK, where pretty much from the start it s been open season on our ass, the panda-eyed one proffers. They decide what they want you to be, and if you re not prepared to go along with it, you re branded difficult . I don t want this to turn into an anti-journalist rant, but if most of the British ones had their way, I d still have the Molko bob from 97 and be slumped over the table at showbiz parties. They resent the fact that I ve evolved into someone who d rather be famous for his music, than his antics.
It s like certain sections of the media turning on Ash because they re no longer perma-trolleyed teenagers.
Do you wanna know who we scored the most drugs off when we were 20 and 22, and got our first record deal? Thirtysomething English journalists. Y know, throw the seal a fish and watch em perform! The hypocrisy is that if one of us, or one of Ash, had died from the illegal substances they so enjoyed us taking, they d have been the first to go, Oh my God, what a tragedy .
There are a lot of people who want to live self-destructive lives through their rock stars, and for that reason have a vested interest in you being strung out all the time, he asserts. Dave Gahan put it best when he said, From down there this life must look glamorous, but up here it s killing me .
You ve probably got Molko marked down as suffering from a serious Joan of Arc complex, but this is all said without any trace of martyrdom or self-pity. In fact, pressed further on the subject, he admits that Placebo are largely responsible for their own pigeon holing.
The gender-bender thing is really tiresome, but then again we started it by writing a song ( Nancy Boy ) about going out on the town and wearing women s clothing, he laughs. Then there are the supposedly throwaway comments that come back to haunt you. The NME asked Stef and me what the 97 tour was like and we said, We left a trail of blood and spunk around the country . Three years later we re in Japan and the first words that come out of this journalist s mouth are (adopts appalling Oriental accent), So, ablaht the tlail of blard and sparnk? It was the fucking headline and all!
Much to the chagrin of the ambulance chasing brigade, the blood and spunk of yore has been replaced by a penchant for board games.
We ve invented something called Reservoir Scrabble, which is normal Scrabble combined with outbursts of extreme violence, Molko explains.
Shagging and ligging get boring. It s like eating cake. You can only have so many slices, in the same way there are only so many parties you can go to, or so many people on the party scene that you can shag without completely running out. I m getting much more private and being much more reclusive than before and I think to a certain degree I ve started feeling a little less sorry for myself. Maybe that s a sign of growing up. We started the band when we were in our early 20s, now we re almost turning 30 and that s a landmark. For us, anyway. Scared of the big 3-0!
Growing up in public is a tricky business, but Placebo have had a great role model in David Bowie who, lest we forget, drafted them in as support when he played the hotpress Irish Music Hall of Fame.
You see him with a beautiful wife, a gorgeous baby and all that money, and think bastard! He s someone who stared into the void, and somehow managed to pull himself back without ruining his body. Being around Bowie teaches you a great deal about what it means to be a star. The guy s worth hundreds of millions of pounds, yet there s no trace of arrogance. He says please and thank you and knows more about music than you, me and everybody we know put together.
Bearing in mind how well his hero s taken to it, how does Brian Molko think he d cope as a dad?
Impatient, probably. It s so unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future that I haven t given it much thought. Is there room enough in the world for two Molko-sized egos? I doubt it.
While deeming it too boring to go into today, the 27-year-old has admitted in the past to a sanity-threatening crack habit. His act has subsequently been cleaned up to the extent where his idea of a beezer night out is dinner with friends, fine wine and good conversation.
The blackest it got was when we were writing Without You I m Nothing, he confides. I m not being over-dramatic when I say that people very nearly died. I ve had a few wake up calls in my time, but boy, that really got me about-turning.

Having besmirched his character in my opening paragraphs, it s incumbent on me to point out that, on today s evidence, Molko is no way the ogre he s been made out to be.
Most of the people who reckon I m a wanker haven t met me, he observes. At first it upset me, but now I think, Fuck it, it s better than being ignored. That s one of the few things in life I couldn t deal with.
Another is having his photo taken sans a make-up artist present. Despite polite calls to management, hotpress lensman Cathal Dawson has been refused an audience with Molko and his Placebo bandmates.
Okay, I m going to hold my hands up and admit that I m unbearably vain. The thought of appearing on a magazine cover with badly applied eyeliner is too horrible to contemplate.
Would he by any chance be taking the piss out of himself?
No, although on other occasions I d definitely benefit from the invention of a taking the piss out of myself typeface. Stuff you say as a joke doesn t always come across that way in print.
Wet dream fodder that they are, Placebo have been inundated with lucrative film offers, among them the chance to play Judas Priest in the new Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston vehicle, Metal Gods.
It was the worst kind of Hollywood cheese imaginable, he says disdainfully. They wanted us to be the guys in the band who weren t Rob Halford, which meant jumping into swimming-pools and frolicking with bare-breasted bimbos.
The problem being?
That we d already played a glam band in Velvet Goldmine. As proud as I am of that film, it typecast us to such an extent that we only get offered musical roles. I don t want to act what I do every other day of the year.
There s not much that Molko s closet about, but is there a secret heavy metal past he d like to confess to?
To be honest, I always found it too homophobic. It was obvious that Rob Halford was gay, but he couldn t come right out and say it because Judas Priest s macho-men fans would ve stopped buying their records. That said, myself and Tim Wheeler were like kids when we had our photo taken with Ozzy at the Kerrang! Awards. We went to see Black Sabbath do their second-last gig at the Astoria, which was quite amusing. You ve got Ozzy shaking uncontrollably, Tony Iommi with his permatan and Bill Ward waiting to have another heart attack. What I remember about it most, though, is the stench of patchouli oil mixed with sweat. It s such a heavy metal smell.

The Sabbath boys may have lost the fight for eternal youth, but Brian Molko is still as fresh-faced as when Placebo first burst onto the scene in 1995. What s his advice to those of us who are starting to sag?
Play lots of ping pong. We ve got a table in a flight-case that we take on tour with us, and like Reservoir Scrabble, it gets pretty scary. My hangovers are definitely worse now than they were five years ago, so I ve had to moderate my drinking. As you hit 30, you start to become aware of your responsibilities towards the other members of the band, the fans and everybody who s depending on you for a paycheque. There s been a couple of times recently that I ve pulled back from things cause I know that they ll fuck not just me, but everybody else up.
When he looks in the mirror, does he like what he sees?
Bad hair days aside, yeah, pretty much. Returning to what we were talking about earlier, I m vain, but not to the point where I can t go out without make-up on.
Which brings us to the meat and two veg of the matter. Is there anything he d like to tell us about his relationship with Marilyn Manson?
Ah, the Did I fuck him? question, he says almost triumphantly. I ve a stock response to such speculation, which is to neither confirm nor deny it. I certainly have a lot of admiration for the way he goes about his business. He s ruthless, Machiavellian and great fun to be around. Humour isn t something that s normally associated with Marilyn Manson, but he s got an incredibly dry wit.
Whatever about the guy s music, he has to be applauded for putting a fist up the Moral Majority of America s arse. They re the modern day Satan, not him.
Amen to that!