2020 rings in the 20th anniversary of Placebo’s beloved third album Black Market Music. To celebrate, the band have completed filming of a four-part video-series – “Black Market Music Stories” – which sees bassist Stef visit treasured locations and walk viewers through the writing, recording, touring, and personal stories, that would shape the conception of the album. Featuring new and archive footage, it includes interviews with the people who were key to bringing the album into the world – producers, singers and other collaborators, managers and more offer their memories of the time. Episode 1 is available to watch now below. Subscribe to the series in full HERE.
The band comments: “With our chests out, riding high on the success of our second album, we entered the studio to record Black Market Music. We were full of bravado and confidence, and proceeded to create our most visceral, dark and poppy collection of songs to date. Here’s a humble nod to its 20th birthday.”
Black Market Music came together as the band saw their notoriety swelling exponentially in the wake of breakout successes with their self-titled debut, and the follow-up Without You I’m Nothing. Reaching #6 in the Official UK Album Charts and spawning the singles “Taste in Men”, “Slave to the Wage”, “Special K” and “Black-Eyed”, it is a record that by the band’s own admission was created during the height of their “party phase”.
Black Market Music was also released into a new world, one in which mainstream chart interest was moving away from late-era grunge and instead setting its gaze on rap-rock and nu-metal, genres that the album resultingly put in its cross-hairs as it rallied against the macho – and sometimes misogynistic and homophobic – image of the scene. The introduction of hip-hop MC Justin Warfield to “Spite & Malice” was done in-part to show that the style needn’t be constantly draped in aggression.
