Live music: Placebo - Olympia, Dublin

4/5

Middle age is problematic for many musicians. For the not-insignificant subset whose first flush of success was strip-lit with melodramatic angst and a fluid attitude toward gender norms, however, it poses particular difficulties. A case in point are Placebo, an angry goth band of the early ’90s who became notorious for singer Brian Molko’s penchant for dressing like a sad young woman.

Two decades on, Molko, now staring into the business end of his 40s, continues to front Placebo, and, judging by his lyrics, remains heartily ticked off at the howling indifference of the universe towards human suffering (specifically: his). But, no longer able to convincingly play the pallid waif, it seems a fair question whether he can fully inhabit Placebo’s older material.