When your previous record is entitled Black Market Music and it sells a whopping one million copies in the United Kingdom and Europe alone, coming up with something to top that takes some doing. Their fourth record, Sleeping with Ghosts, is now a reality after a career just shy of seven full years. It is, without question, Placebo’s most accomplished and immediate record yet. Producer Jim Abbiss (of Unkle and DJ Shadow fame) and the band strung the 12 emotional, thought-provoking and equally motivated melodies together. The band is not strictly British, American or European — the pint-sized, multilingual lead vocalist Brian Molko is United States-bred, bass player Stefan Osdal is Belgian-born and drummer Steven Hewitt is British by birth. The only other Union Jack link is their British record deal with Virgin offshoot label Hut.Placebo have spent the better part of their career quietly building up an army of happy resistance to the mainstream. They are certainly not regular visitors to the top of the charts. But the passion they share with the multitudes has taken their brand of homophobic rebuttals, drug-culture comments and now relationship-wrestling rhetoric way beyond the borders of the European Union and on to the US, Australia and the Far East. “We’re refreshed and really hungry to get back out there,” Hewitt confirms. In recounting Molko’s description of what ties the new disc together, he reveals: “He [Molko] describes the album title as being about carrying the ghosts of your relationships with you, to the point where sometimes a smell or a situation or an item of clothing he or she bought brings a person back. For me it’s about the relationship that you have with your memories. They inhabit your dreams and sometimes these ghosts can even pop up when you’re on the job. There can be a lot in the future that’s going to remind you of the ghosts of relationships past. So I see the album as a collection of short stories about a handful of relationships.”Comments like these come from a trio fast coming into their own, but still as juvenile as the genre of rock itself. “The thing with rock bands is that the people in them don’t seem to grow up as quickly as those who are not,” Hewitt confirms with a schoolboy-like chuckle. “Being in a rock band allows you to stay young, to a certain extent. I suppose there is a certain amount of maturity involved, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Placebo have grown up as a band — not yet, anyway.”With each album come new stories, new situations and, most importantly, the treading of new musical ground. “Something that we are never comfortable with is churning out what we’ve done before,” Hewitt reinforces. “You don’t want to be repeating yourself, especially not in this day and age, because people would spot it a mile off. You cannot pull the wool over people’s eyes today.”The bigger the band gets, the harder it gets to deliver to what is ultimately — from our side anyway — a perceived expectation,” Hewitt says. “I think this time round the single biggest change for us was the fact that this album was not self-produced, as was the last. Make no mistake, we are very proud of the last album, but working with someone as talented as Jim was a great experience. He has a strong electro side to what he does and we thought the marriage of what we do as a band and what he does could make for something interesting and, in some respects, dangerous. But when you listen to the album, the most obvious constant is that we have not turned our back on what we are, which is fundamentally a rock band.”With music lovers spoiled for choice, why settle for a CD like this, especially at a time when retro-rock is the flavour of the week? “Everyone still wants to sound like they’re in the 1960s [cue The Strokes and White Stripes],” Hewitt agrees. “We, on the other hand, want to sound like we’re in 2060. To us, all of that has been done and done well by the likes of The Doors and Led Zeppelin. Don’t get me wrong, we love the Rolling Stones, but why would anyone want to even try to compete with that? I’m shocked by the number of lazy bands out there. They can’t be bothered to get off their arses and do something different, so they rehash The Kinks or try sounding like an early Mick Jagger.””We came out of the back end of the Brit-pop shenanigans in 1996. It’s now 2003 and there are only four bands, excluding us, from that time that still exist today.” The others Hewitt refers to, at an informed guess, would be Oasis, Radiohead, Supergrass and Jamiroquai. “The progression has been very natural for us. I suppose we are just lucky like that,” Hewitt concludes.