Music / goth
Review: Placebo, Colston Hall
Placebo last graced the Colston Hall in 2003, and before that it was 1997. Now in the bands twentieth year, the crowd at this 2015 show contained individuals who were present on one or both of those nights, alongside those who weren’t even born for the first.
Teenagers howling along to tracks from the outfit’s latest effort, Loud Like Love, stood next to those who played the 1996 self-titled debut album to death when at that age, and, ever the showmen, Placebo offered up the perfect setlist for both and everyone inbetween. The older contingent was appeased with a brilliant offering of I Know.
Unlike some 90s bands still around today, Placebo have managed to win a new legion of fans as an ongoing proposition. And remarkably there’s little friction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ fans. The fact that they can pull off a gig almost 20 years on from when they were first popular yet barely play any songs off their first few albums, is amazing.
is needed now More than ever
Classics Every Me, Every You (a reworked version and not as good as the original) and Special Needs fitted in to a first hour which was, at times, a little too Loud Like Love-heavy. The songs were well received though, and Brian Molko’s powerful whiny vocal is still as potent as ever, set over an ever-present trio of screeching guitars.
When the title track from 2006’s Meds rang out around two-thirds into the set, the hits arrived and never left, with a bombastic quartet of Meds, that album’s finale Song To Say Goodbye, Special K and The Bitter End. From that moment on, Placebo were kings of the Colston Hall, and their twelve year absence evaporated into nothing.
After an extended, indulgent encore break that seemed to never end (we’ll give you this one Molko, the performance just about deserved it), the band returned for a rendition of their Kate Bush cover, Running Up That Hill, before ending with Meds highlights Post Blue and Infra-Red.
It’s commendable that twenty years into their career, Placebo are still putting so much faith in their new material that it forms over half of their current setlists, and it is received well, but things were always going to take a step up when the classics were unleashed, and, ever the entertainers, Placebo knew exactly that and gave the Colston Hall exactly what they wanted.
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
