"It's almost bordering on cliche but Hewitt and Olsdal are my best friends in the world...They are like my two husbands. I've never felt more at home anywhere. I love them more than I have loved any other men on this planet in my life. They are both very beautiful people, as fucked up as I am -- true. Acts of God aside, this is why this band will be here for quite some time."
Brian on the band
"You need to be told to shut up, that your full of shit. After seven years of living in a bubble you wind up spiritually, physically and emotionally spent. We were conscious of the fact that to write anything decent again we had to reacquaint ourselves with everyday human contact - take the tube, go to the supermarket. It was as if the choice to take a break was already made for us."
"I think we'll do it. We're damn tenacious. We just won't let them not love us. They really have no choice."
"If we have cut down, it's been through necessity. We're not 21 anymore. In the past we've probably been guilty of putting lifestyle before music, but we've grown up a little bit. Delivering 100 percent to our fans is now more important."
"There's a difference between 'glamour' and 'glam rock'. Glam rock, to me, is a bunch of straight, hairy, football-liking lager lads dressed up in mother's castoffs. And glamour is a certain sophistication, a certain other-worldliness, a certain unattainableness, which I think we certainly calculate. We believe that a band should be slightly larger than life-you should be transported to an alternate reality. I'm giving you some really good answers here, I'm very proud of myself."
"I've still got a bit of a baby face, so I'll be alright."
"The first I heard Sonic Youth was a very, very important thing for me. It was my 16th birthday and I was very stoned and I'd never really heard anything like it before in my life. That was the year that I started to play guitar so that had a very, very big effect on me. After I moved to London I heard PJ Harvey for the first time and the emotional intensity and depth of the album, Dry, also had a very, very big effect on me. I guess when I went into the idea of a band I kind of wanted to marry the kind of dissonant, atonal beauty of Sonic Youths experimentalisation with the kind of pained confessional and highly emotional quality that PJ Harvey's music has."
"Eminem for starters. Then Fred Durst, from Limp Bizkit. Let's throw Britney in there. Then Marilyn Manson - just because he's sick enough to enjoy it. And the last one? Tony Blair. He's such a great disappointment - and he plays roulette with other people's lives all the time. It'd be good to see him sweat for a change."
Brian on who he would play russian roulettes with
"We're only now learning how to say 'No'."
“After five years of being on tour you learn what you can do to keep yourself out of trouble, hence the Ping-Pong."
"I'm twice as much man as you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever get"
"My father wanted me to grow up and be a businessman like him. My mother wanted me to grow up and go to heaven like her."
"People want me to be fucked-up and strung out, taking it to Kurt Cobain levels... That drug entered my life and left my life a long time ago. We did everything in our first couple of years and got it out of our systems so now we can concentrate on the important stuff."
Brian on heroin
"I don't have the constitution that I imagined I had, on either a physical or a spiritual level. I just can't go any further, any more. And a lot of my pleasure-seeking was fueled more by self-disgust than anything else. A lot of it was an attempt to block out the pain, block out the loneliness and the fact I didn't like myself very much. And because you're on that treadmill, you become too self-destructive. A lot of bands go in to that, but they don't come out the other side. But we have. We've been staring down the edge of the cliff or awhile and now we're thinking, 'Nah. It's too far down'."
"They can rub me up the wrong way for hours on end, but they won't find anything. Then when I'm on my way out, I'll tell them, 'Next time you want to stick your finger up a boy's ass, just give me a call."
Brian on airport security
"Phil Collins makes us want to commit suicide."
"Placebo is music for outsiders, by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts, which is cool."
"I check out the Placebo chat rooms and have a bit of fun trying to find out what everybody thinks. It hasn't backfired yet!"
"I was a bit of a dick."
"Paris has a gay mayor. That really impressed me. I think the big change is that the stereotypes are breaking down. It's cool that I'm included on your cover (Attitude magazine, 2002) alongside someone like J.T. Leroy, because gay culture can sometimes still not be welcoming to people who don't conform to the stereotype. I don't hang out at Love Muscle, you know what I'm saying...?"
"I think that most people expect us to be lying in the gutter with needles hanging out of our arms, quoting Oscar Wilde to the stars. But that hasn't happened in years."
"The only people who know what I'm like are Steve and Stef - they have to live with me 10 months of the year. Your persona is just something people feed off."
"This band gets me off more that any drug."
"I just enjoy fucking with people's heads. For the first half of our gigs, there's normally some guy convinced I'm a girl, and a pretty cute one at that. As the gig continues, it begins to dawn on him that I'm a bloke, and suddenly he has to ask himself some serious questions. Ha ha!"
"My sexuality is very fluid but it's very real. I have had confusing and contradicting emotions since I have awakened sexually, and it's something that I have come to terns with and that I have manage to live with in a very positive way. I have never been a homophobic person and one of the reasons I stopped going to church, because my mother used to take me to church a lot, was because of the church's attitude to homosexuality."
"My heroes aren't really decadent, they're quite masculine. Bruce Lee was beautiful. I probably fancied him and didn't even realize it."
"There's one on my wrist where I put my arm through a window trying to open it; the glass missed Mr Vein by a millimetre. It healed in the shape of a Nike Swoosh. They can't buy advertising like that."
"I think Robert had a very big problem with me being the personality that I am. I guess being more flamboyant than him, receiving more of the attention than him, being more of a focus in the band than he was. I just became increasingly tired of being the focus of Robert's rages against the world. I did a lot to gain his trust, but it was never enough."
"It was quite special, actually. I was 14, she was French, and my first girlfriend. It happened in my room and we lost our virginities together. I convinced my mother that I'd had a nosebleed on the duvet but she said, 'You must have been lying in a strange position."
"If some guy comes to one of our gigs, and spends the first half thinking that I'm a girl - and a cute one at that, one that he may fancy - then halfway through the gig he may realize that I'm a guy and he has to turn in on himself. I'm not trying to give any definitive answers to what it is to be a man or a woman, I'm just trying to provoke questions."
Heathcliff x