Brian Molko has always liked to swim against the current and express his opinions without a filter, it’s normal that he admired Sinéad O’Connor and decided to dedicate Thursday night’s concert to her memory. I think that gave extra strength to a performance in which Stefan Olsdal and his partner decided to forget about his most popular album, “Without You I’m Nothing”and focus on the last one, “Never Let Me Go”which may be the best since that in a career that is on the way to thirty years.
The performance began with a request in Spanish, please, no cell phones during the concert, which was quite respected and which Molko was in charge of repeating several more times during the concert, even changing the lyrics of “Too Many Friends” to say “When all you counts do all day is stare into a phone”. There wasn’t much to complain about either, and they didn’t do much, the audience was mostly respectful of the request and embraced the band as if they were reuniting with an old friend, welcoming the first two songs, “Forever Chemicals” and, above all, everything, “Beautiful James”, as if they were already great classics of the band.
Molko and Olsdal were in front while the rest of the musicians, Bill Lloyd on guitar, multi-instrumentalist Nick Gavrilovic, Matt Lunn on drums, and Angela Chan on keyboards and violin, kept in the background. Olsdal has more presence and stage than Molko and interacts more with the public, of course it is the singer’s sharp voice that continues to be the main characteristic of a band that, musically, continues to sound like its main inspirations, Joy Division, The Cure or The Smiths.
Of course, the concert was somewhat cold, they were playing very well but it didn’t seem that Molko was very involved, he sang his song, changed his guitar and little else. But then came that moment when before playing “Happy Birthday in the Sky”, the song dedicated to Bowie on his death, he took out a piece of paper and read his praise of Sinéad O’Connor in fairly good Spanish and decided to dedicate the concert in his memory.
In the next song, Olsdal, also in perfect Spanish (you can see that they are not a British band, but a European one), invited us on a trip to the past with the only song that played from their 90s albums, specifically ” Bionic”, from their debut “Placebo”, released in 1996. There was not a single concession, not a single song from “Without You I’m Nothing”. We already knew that Molko doesn’t like “Pure Morning” or “Nancy Boy,” his two biggest hits, but there was no “You Don’t Care About Us,” or the headline, or “Every You Every Me.” .
The gang has drawn a line in the sand and has decided that they don’t want to live off the rents of the past. On Thursday people crossed it with them, yes, the most intense moments of the concert were when they played “For what it’s worth”, “Slave to the wage”, “Song to say goodbye” and that almost fell when they played “The Bitter End” and closed with “Infra-red”. It was the peak moment of a concert in which they did achieve that connection they were looking for with their audience, the next day some will not have the video of the moment their favorite song was played but they will have the experience of having sung it giving it their all with the band .
The final encore was strange because they inserted a new song, “Fix Yourself”, between two versions of two great classics like Tears For Fears’ “Shout” and Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”, which they stretched out with endless distortion, which made the seams show too much and it was a little dwarfed. Probably it would have been time to include one of their own classics… Of course, I also have to admit that faced with the dilemma of listening to a band on autopilot playing their old hits and seeing a dedicated band defending their new material, even if it’s at the cost of losing repertoire, I prefer the latter.