Placebo
3Arena, Co Dublin
★★★★☆
“You may not know this but I have some French blood in me, so I have a tendency to strike at the drop of a hat.”
A few minutes later Placebo frontman Brian Molko is as good as his word and stops the show mid-song at Dublin’s 3Arena.
His preshow message urging people to keep their phones in their pockets has predictably been largely ignored but people are taking him seriously now. He says the show will continue in this staccato nature unless the filming stops, as people want to “watch the show not the back of your phone”. His stance is met with some grumbling and a lot of cheers in the arena. It appeared to have the desired effect with phones a mercifully rare sight for the rest of the evening.
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Once the phones have been dealt with the British alt rockers get back to business and they take us “way back” with Bionic and recall recording their first eponymous album in Dublin in 1995. Molko notes that Dublin’s Pride celebrations have just passed and says: “We just want to congratulate you. You’ve really come a long way. When I first came here you couldn’t even buy a condom.” The 50-year-old, who is bisexual and spent much of the 1990s striking an androgynous aesthetic, also offers “big respect and courage to our trans and non-binary friends”.
That’s about as nostalgic as they get with Bionic the only song from their debut record to make the set list. The duo have long had a complicated relationship with much of their back catalogue with Molko previously swearing to never again play two of their biggest hits, Pure Morning and Nancy Boy (although the latter got a rare airing at Download in the UK a few weeks ago).
The focus is very much on Never Let Me Go, the album they released in 2022 after a nine-year gap, of which the uplifting and slightly mysterious Beautiful James is the highlight. However, the gig, which was rescheduled from last December while Molko recovered from an illness, truly comes alive when they belt out Meds, a quintessential Placebo hit with its wailing guitars and talk of “the sex, the drugs and the complications”. The crowd are in full voice for The Bitter End, while the encore brings a cover of Tears for Fears’ Shout before they close with their slow, haunting version of Kate Bush’s Running Up that Hill, recorded 20 years before its Stranger Things renaissance.
Molko remains a compelling and distinctive performer, guitarist Stefan Olsdal is as flamboyant as ever and they deliver a stylish set, ably supported by warm up act Friedberg, an all-female percussion-heavy four-piece who will doubtless have picked up some new Irish fans.
When discussing Placebo’s reluctance to play older material in 2017, Molko told NME: “We need to have an emotional connection to the material that we’re playing and we really need to believe in it in order for us to be able to play it. That’s more important for us, than making the audience happy”. Leaving the show on Monday night, it’s hard not to think that maybe they’re missing a trick.
