When David Bowie guided Placebo to greatness
Up until the day he died, David Bowie was still championing new artists, making it clear that he was interested in what the latest trends were, and looking towards what future generations could possibly do for music.
It’s well known that his final album, Blackstar, took inspiration from the work of rapper Kendrick Lamar, specifically his culture-shifting 2015 masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly, and he had also proclaimed that Lorde would become the future of pop music after the release of her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine. With his prophecy of her reaching immense heights coming true, and Lamar’s magnum opus has only gone on to become acclaimed as one of the greatest albums of the 21st century, it’s clear that not only was his finger on the pulse, but he also embraced these changes more than most artists of his generation might.
But it wasn’t just in the 2010s that he was flexing his knowledge of great artists, and even in previous decades, he played his part in helping elevate the status of acts that he believed had the ability to rise to the top. During the 1990s, while there was a resurgence of alternative rock artists on the verge of breaking through, Bowie was showing an interest in one band in particular, which he thought was presenting an amalgamation of sound and aesthetics that were somewhat reflective of some of his own prior incarnations.
Around this time, the London-based trio Placebo were turning heads with their brand of glammed up rock, and while the style that frontman Brian Molko had adopted for himself was not entirely different from the androgynous image that Bowie had cultivated for himself in the early 1970s, the group were offering something rawer on a sonic level, which Bowie was intrigued by upon first listen.
He would invite the band to tour alongside him on multiple occasions during their early years as a group, and once they’d risen to greater heights after the release of their 1996 self-titled debut and its 1998 follow-up, Without You I’m Nothing, the two parties would find themselves being interviewed together backstage at a Placebo show in New York, where he revealed just how he’d become so obsessed with the band.
Revealing that a close associate had sent him a copy of their single, ‘Nancy Boy’ prior to its release, Bowie claimed that his initial reaction was one of astonishment. “I thought, ‘That’s a terrific song for a bunch of chaps to sing’,” he recounted. “I think they’ll probably be huge.”
It would also be a result of Bowie’s encouragement that saw the group release the track as a single, which eventually led to their commercial breakthrough. “I kept on at them like a dog with a bone,” he claimed.
While Molko was incredibly grateful for the support of one of his idols, Bowie piled on the flattery by continuing to talk about how they’d become close friends and collaborators in such a short space of time. “It’s been great, it’s been a very good relationship. I’ve enjoyed it a lot, watching you grow,” he added. “Hopefully I shall watch them grow into old age as well, because I am never going to die.”
While Bowie’s passing shocked the world in 2016, his spirit lives on in plenty of modern music, and will still remain one of the driving forces that brought Placebo to a wider audience.
