Placebo was my liberation: I could do anything and be adored

Placebo was my liberation: I could do anything and be adored
Kathryn Bromwich
© Provided by The Guardian
Photograph: Pat Pope/Rex/Shutterstock
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.)

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