Placebo

Placebo – there's no point denying it – were for a long time one of my favourite bands. This is partly because they were one of my first "independent" discoveries as a budding listener: I was ten years old when I stumbled upon "Taste In Men" and was utterly floored by it. I got my father to buy me "Sleeping With Ghosts", which stayed among my favourite records for years. In 2006, the poor guy was even forced to hunt down "Meds" across half of Milan, and the record thrilled me – perhaps more for the unconditional love I had for Molko & co. than for its actual quality (though it did have its fair share of standout tracks). I also remember the indignation with which I read the panning the album received on this very site, courtesy of the man who's now my colleague and friend, Marco Bercella. Then came "Battle For The Sun": it was 2009 and I was 14. A total letdown, a colourless, flavourless record, with no peaks, plastic and sterile. The loss of a style, of an identity: no glam, no huge riffs, no depression; in their place, an awful lot of utterly predictable melody and syncopated rhythms. An experience to be shut in a drawer, the key thrown away, and forgotten.

A few days before the show I was listening back to "Sleeping With Ghosts": behind the parade of memories and images that each track brought to the surface, something initially mysterious was lurking, something that, as the minutes went by, increasingly took the shape of a ghost, a shadow. That same album, which I had listened to non-stop for years, was now practically unable to give me anything. A nice collection of pleasant songs, a few peaks strong enough to hold their ground; but overall, a sense of general flatness, of "heard it a thousand times before". Put to the test of time and of my own ears, Placebo came out of it remarkably diminished.

The show in Rome was supposed to be my chance. The chance to shout at all the band's detractors that this was not "four eternal teenagers, half-rebellious, half-depressed", all smoke and no fire. That yes, they had gotten one album badly wrong, but in the end, who hasn't? It was supposed to be the occasion for Molko's revenge over my recent doubts and, in a way, for my own revenge over myself and over the band's detractors.

And instead? Instead, what's left after the closing show of Rock in Roma is the collapse of a myth, the feeling of having genuinely misjudged things, of having spent years dreaming about a band that is no longer a band, if it ever really was one.

The story of why is a short one. The first part of the show is essentially devoted to cuts from "Battle For The Sun": whatever little good there was is ruined (the title track, an epic-chorus nursery rhyme turned by Molko into a funeral march), the rest is copy-pasted straight from the album, devoid of any expression, so much so that perhaps the only way out is the synthetic rock of "Bright Lights", something that could have been produced by a collaboration between Simple Plan and the Jean-Michel Jarre of the disgraceful "Calypso".

Then there are the "big" songs. Or rather, the ones that used to be big, and should be even bigger live. But here too, total darkness. There's "Every You Every Me", perhaps the least interesting track on the excellent "Without You I'm Nothing", performed so emptily that it blurs into the latest stylistic slip-ups. There are the four gems "The Bitter End", "Infra-Red", "Post Blue" and "Song To Say Goodbye", played only out of obligation, with vocal shifts, missed notes and one wrong pitch after another, capable of wiping out any trace of their original pathos. There's "Meds", handled like boy-band merchandise, and there's "B3", a catastrophic preview of a possible new album to come. There's Molko getting the lyrics wrong, mixing them up and confusing them, and after a "Special Needs" battered by mistakes and misplaced shouting, he starts, unsteadily, to hold forth on the crowd not getting hyped enough, on generations and technology, on iPads and on whores (verbatim), before wrapping up with a request (unheeded) to the crew to switch off the big screens that give even the people at the back a glimpse of the stage. There's the crowd, sizeable but not that sizeable (around 3,000 people), desperately looking for something to hold onto to have fun, but struggling terribly to find it. And in the end, you don't even notice the absence of "Taste In Men", "Without You I'm Nothing", "Pure Morning", "Special K" and "Sleeping With Ghosts" – and honestly, it's probably for the best: at least their own particular magic can remain undamaged.

It would be nice to think that, that night, Placebo weren't even really there, that it was a cover band or some Gorillaz-style holograms. The harsh truth, though, is that in all likelihood, the band on that stage wasn't the Placebo I had fallen in love with, but the real ones, the ones that Mauro Roma first, and Marco Bercella later, had kicked around. Perhaps, at the time, they had been a bit too harsh, but with hindsight they were probably right all along.

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