When their first album was released a couple of years back, Placebo seemed to be the shot of adrenalin that the British music scene needed. Here was a band who had songs that married a knowledge of the past with an awareness of the future and, in Brian Molko, a mouthy, marketable frontman who ensured that the band got the press coverage that it needed to get their abrasive post-goth noisepop into the charts.

But then it all seemed to go a bit wrong - tales of tour excess and some ill-advised quotage from Brian tipped the balance away from Placebo the band. Brian filled the void left by Richie Manic’s disappearance as the pop star who made it okay to be fucked up and wear badly-applied eyeliner.

"It detracts from the music, it’s very boring and it places a great deal of undue pressure on me, which I resent," complains Brian. "I think at one point we became cartoon character versions of ourselves, and the impression was that Placebo was my backing band. I am mainly responsible for it and we’re doing everything possible to correct that situation. In many ways it felt like I was Dr Frankenstein and I’d made this monster that was running around the village killing people and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. But the villagers are the journalists and they’re all fired up, and in the end they’re their own lynching party. I would question whether it’s actually me and what I believe in that’s been the significant factor in being lynched. I think that it could be any one of a number of other people and the same kind of vitriol would still be there".

As for the obsessive fans, those beautiful losers who dance badly at your local indie disco, he continues, "I’ve been quoted in the past as being quite nasty towards people who have chosen to model themselves aesthetically after me, but I think to a certain degree my comments were misconstrued. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I’m certainly flattered by it - it’s kind of part of the reason why I cut my hair, you have to stay one step ahead of your clones but I certainly don’t harbour any nastiness. I simply find it strange that people want to model themselves on somebody who doesn’t feel very secure in themselves anyway".

But now they’re back, with a new album, a slightly deeper sound and a part in Michael Stipe’s Glam Rock flick ’Velvet Goldmine’. The glam tag is something that Placebo feel a little uncomfortable with. "I think we’re a long way from being influenced by anything that really truly is glam," argues Brian. "When I discovered ’Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ to me it was a great rock album and it created a kind of trampoline onto bands like Iggy & The Stooges and The Velvet Underground. Glam for me is things like Gary Glitter and The Sweet, essentially lager louts in their mother’s underwear. We had a lot of ’you are in Velvet Goldmine, therefore you must be a Glam band’, which demonstrates a certain lack of depth. We’re not trying to revive Glam in any way."

"I think we’ll leave that to Marilyn Manson," grins unfeasibly tall bassist Stefan.

New album ’Without You I’m Nothing’ is certainly not Glam. Where ’Placebo’ was a hedonistic rush through pick-up joints, massage parlours and sex with machines, this is a slightly more introspective album, the sound of a band who have toured and matured together.

"The title of the album works on several different levels," says Brian. "First of all, it’s a message from us to each other, it’s a message to our fans as well and in the case of the actual song it’s about one particular person, but I’m not about to divulge who that is.

"We wrote the rock stuff when we were on tour, and we wrote the more pensive, more downbeat stuff before Christmas in a demo studio in London and I think at that time as our professional lives were shooting out of the stratosphere, our personal lives were kind of falling apart. There’s a very schizophrenic element to this record, and a very extreme one mood- and atmosphere-wise. I think you make a decision at one point in your career as a musician, it’s about sacrifices, about whether you’re prepared to sacrifice emotional stability for achieving a certain career goal. Once you make that decision, make that sacrifice, so much falls by the wayside...".

One of the most poignant moments on the album is ’My Sweet Prince’, which seems to follow in the footsteps of ’Perfect Day’ and ’Golden Brown’ as a song about drugs dressed up as a love song. But, as Brian explains, "’My Sweet Prince’ vomited itself forth during the time we were demoing the album. It’s a very very personal song, and it’s a song that deals with a lot of very dark emotions and dark situations. It’s possibly the most tender and vulnerable thing that’s come out of Placebo. It’s a very romantic song, and it’s about the degeneration of a very close relationship, it’s not really about drugs". Anyone listening to the lyrics about holes in veins and chasing dragons might disagree, but a love song masquerading as a drugs reference pretending to be a love song is a twist on an old idea that could only have come from Placebo, who seem determined to mess with stereotypes at every opportunity. In a musical climate obsessed with Cool Britannia and Union Jack guitars, Placebo are a band with a Swedish bassist and a singer from Luxembourg, something which they see as quite important.

"We’re not concerned with one kind of national heritage," says Stefan. "I think we’re a very European, Cosmopolitan sort of band. London is just the place where the band started, and until Steve [Hewitt, drums] joined there wasn’t a British person in the band. I think it opens doors, it’s a lot of freedom for us".

Brian continues, "It gives us freedom because we’re not concerned with being the next in line to any Great British Songwriting Tradition, that doesn’t interest us in any way. Our influences are pulled from different cultures and different scenes where we grew up, hence our love of disco. It kind of pissed us off when we were framed as this post-Glam Gothcore band, because we’re far more interested in disco".

What this could mean for either the next album or future film appearances I shudder to think, but as long as Brian keeps coming out with the soundbites, you just know that it’ll sell. As with all great monsters, Brian’s creation isn’t quite dead, just in case it has to come back in a sequel.

Placebo were talking to Tim Sismey, in October 1998.