The Cover Uncovered: Placebo’s ‘Without You I’m Nothing’
The cover of Placebo‘s sophomore album, 1998’s Without You I’m Nothing, features a photograph of two women with similar ponytails, one blonde and the other brunette, dressed in black, eyes downcast at a table, as the window and curtains behind them reflect a yellow hue, with shadows milling over them.
This louder-than-words photograph was taken by none other than English photographer Corrine Day, best known for her work in the 1990s with Kate Moss. They began working together when the model was just 15 years old, and it was through her lens that Moss became the face of imperfectly-perfect beauty. The photographer’s preferred aesthetic rested in capturing the raw, everyday people, which was the antithesis to the high glamour modelling world, wherein Day, herself, began as a model in the 1980s. She captured the photograph that adorns Without You I’m Nothing by wielding her signature use of natural lighting with a balance of simplicity and grit.
“We have always thought that music videos and album covers are something that is necessary. But if it’s necessary, if it must be done, it must be art, and it must communicate emotion,” vocalist/guitarist Brian Molko explained on Radio 21 in 1999 (translated from French), “It must say something about the human being… It was important to us to have an image which represents a relationship between two people, but not a sexual one, something greater than that. I think we can’t understand the relationship between two twin brothers or sisters, unless we are. It was something mysterious.”
The two women on the cover are, in fact, British twin sisters Sarah J and Sally A Edwards, who by then had carved niches for themselves within the music and modelling industries alike, and would go on to venture into DJing, photography, writing, film, and more. Now, they are the heads of their independent brand BLAG.
“There are some serendipitous moments, with regards to our work in the music industry and also, with ‘Nancy Boy’,” Sarah revealed, in an interview with Sally and Placebo’s bassist/guitarist Stefan Olsdal. Indeed, in the video for ‘Nancy Boy,’ Sarah’s image is present on Molko’s T-shirt in the form of the record sleeve for Depth Charge’s 1995 EP The Legend of the Golden Snake. Sally, conversely, worked on television promotion for ‘Nancy Boy’.
From their teenage years, the Edwards sisters worked within the music industry, where Sarah was a publicist, and Sally became one of music’s youngest female television pluggers and therefore had a hand in getting Placebo early exposure. Thus, in a way, both sisters were immortalised in Placebo’s legacy before Without You I’m Nothing catapulted them into instant recognition.
The sisters and Placebo ran in the same circles, recognising each other from when both they and Olsdal arrived in London as teenagers and immersed themselves in the same scene. Then, Sarah received a call at the publicity company she worked for, at the time, asking if she and Sally would be interested in doing a photoshoot for Placebo’s record sleeve with Corrine Day.
“So we went to the casting in Soho,” Sally recalled, “and I think there were about three other sets of twins. It was kind of weird being around those twins”. Sarah agreed, explaining, “At that age, we were kind of like, not wanting to be twins. ‘Cause you go through stages, and I think we were in a stage, because I’ve got super blonde hair there, and [Sally’s] got natural hair. We were kind of like, ‘Let’s do what we can to kind of look different’.”
The photograph was shot in just one day, beginning at the crack of dawn when the sisters were picked up before sunrise and driven for hours outside of London. They arrived at “this huge, empty… spooky disused school,” as Sally described, “Lots of wooden, clouded walls and big stairways”. In the room, only the table and curtains shown in the album’s cover stood; the wallpaper was otherwise peeling off the walls.
The sisters were given no cues as to the vibe of the shoot, or Without You I’m Nothing’s sound, for that matter, nor did they know that they would eventually become the album’s cover. Rather, they followed Day’s lead, which Sarah described with the term “specificity”, enacted with slight movements of their heads, mouths and eyes.
“You could tell there were just a million thoughts going through her mind, and then she’d say minimal words,” Sally explained about working with Day. She also revealed that she and her sister were not even sitting at the table but were “half kneeling” beside it. Still, “that was probably the most comfortable we were on the day,” she said of the process.
“I think we were kind of into the idea of the beauty of things decaying, like dead flowers,” Olsdal explained, “Also, having spent a lot of time in council flats in south London writing the first album, and parts of this album, as well, so that really appealed to us then. And that’s why we went for Corrine Day, as well, because there was that, not ‘hyper-realism’, but there was something that wasn’t very ‘fashion’. It wasn’t very flashy, her style.”
This energy of being on the same page translated not just into the photograph that ultimately found place as the cover, but the portraits used on the inner vinyl sleeve, too. Both sisters were posed in a shed, “jet black with one window,” as Sally recalled, their faces standing out in the glare of the camera, almost shockingly so. Sarah added, “When this first came out, I was really kind of upset about how raw and honest it was, because you can see all those blemishes, beauty spots, loose bits of hair and things like that, which sounds super vain. But now, like the way the world is, it’s totally cool to be like this, which is brilliant.”
“I think it was something for us, this time, as well. We wanted to be honest through our lyrics and who we were as people, in interviews and generally as a band. We didn’t want to hide behind anything,” Olsdal outlined, “So, I think for us, it was just amazing to have such stark, almost naked, ‘to the bone’ and very personal images.”
Without You I’m Nothing would become an icon of its time, both in terms of the photograph of the Edwards sisters and in the elevation of Placebo’s sound, defining their balance of introspection with a darker, emotionally-driven sonic laid bare, one that could easily soundtrack one of Day’s photographs, and vice versa.
