With “Never let me go”, Placebo present a new record and you really do feel like you’ve been transported back to the good old Placebo days, when the music was even more powerful and you could scream along live. Synthesizer, electric guitar, drum machine, as no drummer was found (?) and the voice of Brian Molko, who has been shaping the Placebo sound for over 25 years.
Somehow Placebo had lost their way recently and have reinvented themselves here by reversing the songwriting process. They started with the album cover, then the song title, then the music and then they looked for lyrics. Brian Molko says: “I have a big problem with boredom. If we repeated the same process, I could get bored quickly. So I decided to do everything upside down to keep the process of making the album interesting for me – to approach everything from the opposite angle, to prevent myself from getting bored or repeating myself. I thought, ‘What’s the last thing we think of artistically when we make a record? That’s the album cover. Okay, let’s start with the album cover!”. The album certainly didn’t turn out boring.
Happy Birthday in the Sky is about a birthday greeting to a loved one who is already in the afterlife, and that’s why people are asking for medicine. One of the most beautiful songs on a very successful Placebo album.
The following “arte” documentary gives a few more insights…
