Steve Hewitt (Placebo)
March 2001
New York

As notorious for the gender-bending antics of front man Brian Molko as they are for power-pop hits like 1996’s “Nancy Boy” and 1999 anthem “Pure Morning”, Placebo have never hesitated to question boundaries and question the rules we all think we have to live by.  Formerly with Breed, K-Klass and Boo Radleys, drummer Steve Hewitt’s unmistakable sound has propelled Placebo to the top of charts worldwide. Although Steve contributed to Placebo’s first-ever demos, he was unable to join the group for their first LP (which featured drummer Robert Schultzberg) but came back on board full force just after its release in 1996.

Steve phoned in from New York City prior to the release of Placebo’s third album Black Market Music and U.S. tour.  (And for the record, he’s the straight one.)

What was Steve Hewitt’s 2000 like?

We spent most of the year in the studio putting together Black Market Music.  I’ve been very focused…2000 seemed to be the beginning of something stronger and bigger, actually, like an organic change within the band, where things have got a tighter bond.  We’d finished touring Without You I’m Nothing; we’d spent fifteen months on the road with that.  We had four weeks off and then we went into this little urban studio in London at the end of ’99 and started writing Black Market Music because we’d been on the road for so long that we were just dying to get some new music done.  We spent three months putting that together, writing and experimenting with ideas, and then like the first or fifth of January 2000 we went straight into the studio to start recording…and it was amazing.  It was one of the best recording experiences we’ve had as a band.  It was a lot of camaraderie.

All due to that organic change?

Yeah!  We all came off the Without You I'm Nothing tour practically half-dead. Brian was in hospital, Stef had a broken arm, I was going mad.  That was just because we were worked and worked and worked and worked, and we were like, “We’re never going to do this kind of thing again!” And here we our now, eight months into an eighteen-month world tour!  (Laughs)

What are you going to do differently to prevent the kind of breakdown that happened before?

Well, I think it’s just a level change. It’s the third album now, the band’s doing very well around the world – the only place where it isn’t going as well is probably America – so…. Things change, like the quality of press you do, and the quality of shows, the quality of travelling where things are slightly more comfortable – it’s little tiny things.  You’re not doing small fanzine interviews and you’re not speaking to a lot of idiots, basically.  It helps because when you get to talking to intelligent people you start making some headway at expressing and people are understanding, you know?

Right – you get to feed off of them and what they’re asking you instead of being drained by annoyingly repetitive questions.

Yeah!

What about recording while you’re on tour?

Yeah, that is happening now – there are three of four songs that we’ve done when we’ve had spare moments in the studio that we’ve actually got down and recorded, ready for the next album. And there’s a few other things knocking around.  So yeah, we’re pretty well on course for what’s going on.  It’s still exciting – you know even we’re raising our eyebrows going, “Mmmm!”

What do you like personally more – recording or touring?

I love it all!  I decided what I wanted to do at the age of eleven, which was to be a drummer in a fucking huge rock band.  (Laughs)  Voila, here we are!  I love all the processes; I mean, the touring’s getting easier, because it’s just becoming…I think you learn and you get used to how to do things – get a lifestyle within a lifestyle kind of thing.  So I love that, but I also love being steady, being still for like nine months in the studio and just working on music, enjoying that aspect of it.

You mentioned that it’s not going well in America, but the new album’s not even out here yet.  Are you guys disappointed that it wasn’t released in the States at the same time as it was around the rest of the world?

Not really. It was partly our choice, because we had “Pure Morning” off Without You I’m Nothing, which is our biggest hit to date in the States, and then we had “Every You Every Me” because of the movie [the track appeared in the film Cruel Intentions].

It just came down to the corporateness of the American record company, really – it’s something that we try and control, you know? We try and keep complete control over everything that we’re doing, but the American record company came round to us and said, “Right, next single – there’s no more singles off Without You I’m Nothing, so let’s release ‘20th Century Boy’!”  (Scoffs)  Well, we said fuck off!  We call that Joe Cocker Syndrome – which is doing somebody else’s song.

Right – making your career off covers.

Which is something which is very popular over in America, but it’s something that we’re not interested in.  That’s when we walked and said, “That’s it now for America, because if that’s our only option, we’ll see ya’ later!” 

This time with Black Market Music it was like, “Unless the right people aren’t going to be with us putting the work in that we’re going to put in, there’s no point in us doing it.” It’s like a bit of a restructure of the record company – stuff that we tried to demand and changes that needed to be done for us to feel comfortable to be able to come out and actually work this record.

Were you tempted – since “Pure Morning” was such a hugely successful single – to rehash that sound in Black Market Music?

Absolutely not, no.  We don’t believe in that kind of philosophy.  Anytime you make an album, people expect you to come out with a load of “Pure Morning’’s or “Nancy Boy”’s which isn’t gonna happen because we wouldn’t be satisfied if we did that – it’s far too easy and we’ve done it already, so there’s no point.  It’s about progression, trying to move forward, experimentation, trying to constantly change and evolve, really.  The band’s got no musical boundaries, so we don’t really have any exact sort of idea of what Placebo should sound like anyway.

Speaking of experimenting, how do you feel about being branded as a sexually ambiguous band?

Well, a lot of pressure is put on this angle because fifty percent of this band is gay, you know?  A lot of people do try and get off and knock me about the sexuality thing because I’m straight.  They’ll come out and say, “Right, you’re straight – we all know what you think!”  (Laughs)  No you don’t, actually!

Sometimes its like I’m in a band with two chicks, you know?  (Laughs)  They can have their hissy fits, and this that and the other, but usually it’s fantastic.  But I mean I think it’s important and I think it’s great that the band’s got that kind of, um…what’s the word…

Appeal?

Appeal, yeah. I think it’s interesting and it’s good to be part of a band that’s got all these kind of angles and covers so many bases.  A lot of gay people or bisexual people or straight people or older people or younger people are all into the band’s philosophy, which is promoting freedom.  We’re against prejudice, racism, those sorts of things.  Our main philosophy is that you must be yourself – freedom is the key.

Now are you guys tempted to get more political in your lyrics by attacking those things that really drive you nuts, like the prejudices you just mentioned?

I think on this new record there’s signs of the band actually maturing.  It’s less looking in and more looking out now.  I think you can only sort of search inside and express your pain for so long until you start finding yourself a little bit and understanding exactly what you’re about.  So you start looking around you, you start seeing what’s going on and taking that and using that as inspiration.  If you can do it right and express politics within music, then it should be done.  Like the song “Spite and Malice” on the record; basically, it was inspired by the May Day Riots in London.  We were in the studio that day putting that track together and when the words came we got Justin Warfield, an intelligent LA rapper. He isn’t like bitches and ho’s and my money and guns and shit, he’s like Shakespeare and stuff like that, hip-hop with a message, which we’ve always been interested in, like Public Enemy. 

Trying to get an expression like in a song is important – we were impressed by the May Day Riots because it was this huge youth movement reacting to British government, which actually makes you smile because not everybody’s brain dead and not everybody’s believing what they’re being told. They’re saying, “What is this?  This is wrong – let’s do something about it!” and I think that’s amazing!  It’s great to see that kind of movement happening still in this day and age because it hasn’t happened in a long time.

Is it Brian primarily writing the lyrics or do you and Stefan ever contribute words when you’re in the studio?

Yep, it’s Brian writing all the lyrics but if he’s struggling or stuff like that we all brainstorm – we’ve all got our own lines in songs, basically.  But we’re all mentally connected when it comes down to the lyrics and the music, so you’re always scoping on what Brian’s writing about to make sure you’re inside it and understand exactly what’s going on so that everything you’re doing makes sense to all of you.

When does an album become old to you?  I say this just because of the delay between the release of Black Market Music here versus when it came out internationally last October.  Now that you’ve done press on it around the rest of the globe you’re back to doing it heavily here in the States – is the album “over” and do you think, Oh we can’t possibly say anything else about this?

Not really.  I think this album has got itself more of a longevity to it than the previous records.  I always think the musician is always like two years ahead of the listener, really.  By the time you’ve made that record and you’ve toured it or you are touring it….

We were doing [Black Market Music] in December ’99, so these songs have been living with us for so long, but this record doesn’t feel like it’s ever tiring. It feels different – it feels completely revitalized, it feels like a stronger record.  So it’s actually working closer with us.  Again, it’s like this shift that I was talking about earlier – it all feels different.  The songwriting’s a bit more complicated, a bit more structured, a bit more mature; it feels more convincing, it feels much more emotional. So we’re definitely not tired of it yet.  (Laughs)

What tracks came first and what was the general progression of the writing and recording of Black Market Music?

We pretty much went into the little rehearsal studio with nothing because we were so busy on the Without You I’m Nothing tour.  We didn’t have much time to write in sound checks and stuff like we’d done for Without You I’m Nothing.  So we pretty much went in fresh.  I think because we’d been on tour for so long and we hadn’t had a chance to express and we were just dying to be creative and just hide away and become a rock band again as opposed to performing monkeys, it was like all this stuff just flowed.  We just threw a load of shit at the wall and just saw what stuck!  (Laughs) 

Some tracks just happened – things like “Black-Eyed” just happened like that [snaps fingers].  A lot of it was quite spontaneous and quite instantaneous, really, and just stuff that we felt was really good.  We actually came out of that studio with like forty tracks, and it was like a process of natural selection where these songs just sort of volunteered themselves.  It was a really good process – not being scared of trying things or reworking things or just tearing things apart and starting again.  And there was never any point in anal retention.

I think the hardest one to record and actually get finished was “Haemoglobin” – it was such a wall of sound! (Laughs)  We’ve never actually tried to mix anything like this before so you come out positive because you’ve actually attempted something you’ve never done before.

In my opinion, each of Placebo’s albums seems to have a track that really sticks out as a catchy hit that’s going to be picked up immediately. Those tracks are “Nancy Boy”, “Pure Morning” and “Taste in Men”.  Does it seem that way to you and do you see those songs on a different level than the other songs?  Or do those tracks fit into their respective albums and sound cohesive to you?

The albums feel cohesive, but…. “Taste in Men” was probably one of the oldest tracks on the Black Market Music.  That was the same sort of style as “Pure Morning” – it was recorded in a B-side session, not long after we actually put “Pure Morning” together.  So that was around but we sort of threw it back up and reworked it because we thought, “This is really fucking good!” and had lived with it for a year and a half.  It’s one of those tracks you don’t sort of instantly go, “Mmm, that’s good!”  You have to live with it and think, “Actually, there’s something there…”.

Yeah, I think that does stick out, but at the same time I think it was purposely put on the album to be like, “This is something else we are enjoying at the moment and it should be heard.”

I agree with you – it’s fabulous.

All the British music press instantly went, “Right – we’ve heard that – now the band have gone Smashing Pumpkins.”  And that’s just what they thought the album was without hearing the rest of the album!  But that’s the British press for you.

The more I talk to musicians – especially ones from the UK – the worse I hear about the British press.

Really!  They’ve got the knives out straight away, you know?

How does that make you feel about talking to people from the rest of the world?  Are there countries you like speaking to more than others?

Yeah – all the rest except the UK!  (Laughs)  The quality – as soon as you set foot outside the United Kingdom, that’s it.  There’s intelligence, there’s knowledge, people have got their shit together completely and you instantly just enjoy talking and being there.

How have you guys felt as a band in the wake of all the debate about online music sharing?  In particular, how do you feel about Black Market Music having been distributed all over the world online, especially to fans here in America who were pissed off at the late release date?

It actually is a little joke, the title of the album – it was a wink towards Napster to be like, “Yeah, we know our fucking album’s gonna go on the Internet two months before it’s released anyway.”  All the downloading and everything is bad.  It’s bad for bands and I think it’s bad for the artists concerned really, because if you carry on downloading bands off the Internet that means your favorite bands aren’t going to be able to make money to be able to carry on making music.

So you don’t feel that the positive impact of it – exposing people to more music and giving new music a chance – outweighs the negative?

Um…I’m not sure.  I mean, I think it’s a fine line, because the Placebo machine is such an active thing around the world, I don’t see any reason for people to be able to download the whole album and go, “Yeah, brilliant!” Me as a music fan, I mean, I’m not particularly interested in downloading music from the Internet because I actually want to go to the shop and get the whole thing, you know?  I want to feel part of that thing.  I think there’s a certain nakedness which comes from the Internet that’s kind of…. It just feels cheap to me in some way.  I feel like you’re missing something, really.

There’s no tangibility to it – you’re not getting the package as the artist intended.

It’s like half the picture.

Do you have any plans on becoming more involved in your Web site?

Oh, yeah!  We’re full on with Placebo World at the moment; it’s just been voted eighth best Internet site in Europe.  That’s not just music sites – that’s business sites and everything!  So we’re really pleased with that.  Placebo World was something that used to be called Brick Shithouse, run by a man called Lee. We actually bought it off of him and employ him now because he did such a great job!  (Laughs)  I think we’ve got a great site; we’re doing tour diaries and we’re putting all kinds of stuff on the Internet straight from us through our man Lee.  And we feel it’s a great way to bypass the media and go straight to your fans, so there’s a lot of activity there.

After doing “Without You I’m Nothing” with David Bowie, did that spark an interest in future collaborations of any kind? Do you guys have a wish list of people you’d like to work with?

We’ve got a wish list as long as your arm!  (Laughs)

Anything special in the works?

I think collaborations are just something that falls out of the sky, really – that’s what it takes for a collaboration to work, unless you got something really different going on.  I think we’d love to work with PJ Harvey – yeah, that would be really good.

Velvet Goldmine was a spectacular film and the roles the three of you had were pretty great cameos – not to mention your cover of ‘20th Century Boy’. Has anyone else approached you do to any more film work?

We were offered a film called Metal God – we got a phone call from Hollywood asking us if we wanted to play Judas Priest.  (Laughs)  And we went, “Okay, send us a script!” and me and Brian opened the first page and we saw the line “Straps on cod piece with massive platform boots” and we just went, “Nope!  Not doing that!” 

We’re not wearing spandex in a desert.  We refuse to be sort of rent-a-band for the film industry.  We turned that down, but I think we’d love to do more movies if they weren’t music based, really.

What about working with Todd Haynes again?

That would be amazing, actually!

How did you guys end up working together?

Brian’s always been a fan of Todd Haynes and I saw Poison as well – amazing film. They were casting at the time “Pure Morning” was out, and they were trying to get all the London rock bands into this film, so we were approached by Todd. Brian got a part and he said, “Well, you’ve got to get the rest of the boys in the film!” so we all got in the film, and they asked us if we would perform “20th Century Boy” and we said, “Well, we’ll just re-record it for you!”  We’ve become very good friends of Todd Hayes now.

What about contributing to scores?  You guys have done loads of instrumentals as B-sides and extra tracks – have you ever considered scoring films or have you been approached to do that?

Well, that’s what we’re looking to do at the moment – that’s something we’re actually kind of ready and waiting to do, and we’ve got people sending out the feelers for us really.

Do you guys feel that you’re all three equally considered spokesmen for the band, or do you find that Brian is taken more seriously?

We’re a democracy, and I think people’s perception of rock bands is very different from the reality of it, you know. Yeah, Brian does get a lot of attention and stuff like that, but between the three of us, we’re all very, very close friends. We work together very, very hard, and we’re all entitled to our opinions, and we all talk at interviews. But sometimes it’s actually a blessing in disguise, like, “You go on, Molks – you talk to ‘em!”  (Laughs)