Some bands get better with time. Some start out sounding great. As calling cards go, they don't get much better than "Nancy Boy", Placebo's second single, first hit and nascent monster. Driving, swirling rhythms, shards of jagged guitar and the glammed-up Geddy Lee-isms of singer Brian Molko...it came out at the height of Britpop, and nothing could have sounded odder, more threatening, or more hair-raisingly exciting.
That Placebo have struggled to match the impact of that clarion-call is, as this double retrospective demonstrates, no reflection on the quality of their output over the years. For though Placebo have probably seen the last of the true limelight, they have, across four albums, produced more classic songs than you somehow remember.
Their tenure as genuinely startling androgyny revolutionaries lasted beyond the fabulous first album, whose hits, "Bruise Pristine" and "Nancy Boy", gave victimhood a defiant glamour Jarvis Cocker could only dream of, and made Brett Anderson sound like captain of the school rugby team. Their sophomore effort's lead single, "Pure Morning", was a fabulous subversion of the prevailing optimism and cheap pastoralism being peddled by Weller and co, spiking an exquisitely crystalline, clear-eyed groove with crawling skin, dark sex and the spectre of jangling, teeth-grinding coke comedowns. It still sounds thrilling.
This was the chic, Anglo-European trio's hour of influence. Courted and lauded by the elder statesmen and tastemakers from David Bowie to Trent Reznor - Bowie duetted with Molko on "Without You I'm Nothing" - they even, for a time, forced a musical establishment drunk on its own self-congratulatory Oasisisms to take them seriously, and on their own terms.
It couldn't last. "Black Market Music" may have been their best album - and the stone-cold groove of "Slave To The Wage" and hollow-eyed ketamine mantra "Special K" are two of the most darkly seductive moments in modern pop - but it found Molko in particular on the end of a strangely enthusiastic critical kicking. Yes, the band's eccentric; yes, Molko wears kimonos; yes, he's always seemed more at home in chinoiserie-bedecked opium dens than on the terraces at Maine Road...but suddenly those weren't music-informing touchstones: they were liabilities.
So, fittingly, the collection is rounded off with the fruits of wound-licking (and savouring) fourth album, "Sleeping With Ghosts", pointing to the future with "Protégé Moi", "I Do" and "20 Years", three of their most "Hunky Dory"esque celebrations of defiant oddness to date. They'll never outsell Beyonce, but a decade on, Placebo are still flag-bearers for a certain kind of alienated intelligence, still chroniclers of the other side of pop history. And who'd have bet on that?
