There’s a problem with Placebo. You know that. The problem is that they offer little to distract you from Brian Molko’s desperate vanity and creepy weasel-esque anti-grace, sending most reasonable people scrambling for the shower, tub of Ajax and scouring pad in hand. Their effectiveness has waned over the years, repetition and lifeless precision increasingly replacing the reactionary abrasiveness and burgeoning sexuality of their classic debut. They always had the capacity to grate, but they give you too much to dislike these days, the ratio’s all wrong.
Watching the tour documentary bundled in with this full live gig will do nada to assist that. “It’s gonna be a punk rock show,” squeaks the plastic goth pixie entering a pokey Seattle club, weighing up his immediate surroundings with all the insight and depth of an apprentice-plumber quoting for a job, “have a chat with the fans afterwards, hang out, have a few drinks, cool”. He’s about as convincing as a Hollyoaks extra. And if that doesn’t get your blood boiling his cliché-sodomising self-aggrandising post-gig reflections surely will.
To its credit, the live Placebo does have the potential to out-do the studio Placebo given the sheer fact that some rough edges do get through. And so this gig – impressively and stylishly filmed as these things go in front of 16,000 at some Paris enourmodome last October – occasionally feels worthy and sometimes powerful. ‘Bullet Proof’ for instance, instrumental opener from the latest ‘Sleeping With Ghosts’, fell flat on record but is atmosphere whipping on here, especially given the aid of a big white drape and some strobes.
‘Black Eyed’, ‘Every You Every Me’, ‘Without You I’m Nothing’ and select others live up to their original promises, thriving live and revelling in their own confessional pseudo-personalities. Others like ‘Allergic’, ‘Bitter End’ and ‘Plasticine’ are comparatively anonymous, again drawing your attention straight back to Molko’s incessant posturing and artificial persona. They wheel out Frank Black for the final track, a fairly faithful cover of ‘Where Is My Mind’, which actually serves to do the lead Pixie more damage than it does them, so ending with a surprising snatched goal. There are highs, middles and lows, but as if a live DVD was going to solve anything anyway. It just underlines all the things there are to love and indeed hate about Placebo.