this interview was sent to me by my friend tess

“It’s getting on a bit and I’m ploughing through the tinnies so my voice is packing up. How are you anyway?” enquires Placebo drummer Steve Howitt from his North London home by way of introduction. And introductions are just what’s needed, given the band’s relatively new-found success/ attention in this country with the single Pure Morning (helpfully nicknamed the ‘weed song’ by the trio’s US fans).
Of course anyone sussed enough to have checked out their mighty self-titled debut of two years ago is now grinning smugly at having made such an enlightened decision. Think back to Bruise Pristine or Nancy Boy, (Placebo’s Animal Nitrate, if you will), moments that at the time seemed unsurpassable, and ponder for a nanosecond how new LP Without You I’m Nothing has proved otherwise while still co-existing with Placebo as two equally compulsory albums.
“I’ve been in bands for years and this is the best band I’ve been in, it’s wicked,” Steve enthuses. “When this album came out in England I was dreading it because I knew the press were just waiting to tear it to pieces but at the same time once we’d finished it I just thought, ‘that’s it, you can’t touch us, you CANNOT touch us’, and they couldn’t.
“Because of the musicianship and the songwriting, it’s like, ‘well we can’t touch you but we’ll get on your personal case’,” he continues. “In a clever way I think that’s Brian’s [Molko, singer/guitarist] whole plan. Now they want to get on his personal case about things, he’s calming down and shutting up more and he’s been giving them the runaround for the last two years and they don’t actually know what’s true and what isn’t and it doesn’t bother us now. There’s nowhere else for the press to go and it’s good, it’s got them on the run.
“Brian’s never changed ever since I’ve known him,” Steve recalls. “When I first met him nine years ago we used to go out partying in South London and we used to get completely slaughtered and when he’s slaughtered he’s a mouthy little whatever, an asshole. Still is [laughs], nothing’s changed. People think ‘oh, the little rock star thing’ and it’s like ‘no, he’s always been like that, you don’t understand’.
“Different upbringings, different styles, different people, completely,” Steve concludes, summing up the three band members’ backgrounds. “I’m obviously the definitive dodgy Manc: [adopts broad Mancunian accent] ‘oh I don’t care, let’s go for it, it’ll be great, blah blah blah’. And Stefan’s like [in poncy but hysterically accurate Swedish accent] ‘no, I like pop music but it’s so cold’, and Brian’s like, ‘I’m in Luxembourg so I must get drunk all the time’. We all met up and said, ‘let’s rawk!’ Beautiful.”
Placebo’s last British tour sold out nine weeks before kick-off, with Steve pointing out that they were the only band to fully sell out a UK tour last year.
“People are already saying, ‘when’s the next British tour?’ and the way things are actually working out now, it’s like, well, we might not do the UK again until probably 2001 because we don’t need to,” he explains. “There’s bigger fish to fry. We, as a band, want to concentrate on bigger areas. America’s taken off so we’ve got to jump on and capitalise on that.
“Who’s that New York DJ?” Steve asks when recalling the squillion radioplays Pure Morning, originally slated to be a b-side, (“We put the vocal on and Bang! There was Pure Morning”) has garnered in the States. “Howard Stern. He rarely plays new bands and he picked it up one morning, obviously one pure morning – hur hur – and he put it on and said, ‘these guys rock man! Cool!’, and that program goes out to 30 million people.
“Check this out, Pure Morning went Number One in Indonesia,” Steve laughs. “We were like, ‘yeah let’s go on tour’ and they were like, ‘no, you can’t tour there because there’s a war on’.”
And your December US tour?
“We did 15 gigs in 20 days and we were crawling, we were dying to leave America by the end, we just couldn’t wait to get out. I think it’s going to be better on this next tour because we can get a proper routine, it’s going to be proper touring, soundchecks and less promo. There’s two buses so the crew can have a bus and the band can have a bus and I just put on loads of great techno, [Paul] Oakenfold and lots of old skool stuff, so we’re gonna rave our way around America and then rock at night. That’s the only way to do it.”