‘Boys think I’m a girl and then get mad when they find out my name is Brian’: how Placebo made Nancy Boy | Culture

Brian Molkosinger, songwriter

Nancy Boy was on the verge of retaliating against the homophobic slurs he constantly hurled at me because I had long hair and wore make-up and make-up. When I go into a bar and people give me insults, or guys think I’m a girl, they get really angry when they find out my name is Brian. I thought I could regain my strength by writing a sex-fest that was so obnoxious that it would anger the people who despised me the most.

Also, (Suede singer) Brett Anderson recently told NME that he was “a gay man who had never slept with a gay man”, which I thought was ridiculous. I thought he was a prostitute. We know each other now and he is an interesting person – back then we all said cheeky things to the effect – but part of my goal was to write songs about a bisexual man who had a bisexual experience.

I was living on a grant in Deptford when I came up with a musical instrument, but I thought the music was too catchy or mainstream. I wasn’t sure if I liked them, but when I played them at Stefan’s – he lives with his parents – he said: “Man, that’s a hook.” In the gym it became a twisted punk thing.

The words almost wrote themselves. I was trying to tell the story of a wild night, so I started: “Drunken state, throw away my clothes, throw away my oil.” It was a night we lived often but our lives were not yet. “I was helped by insect methods” I mean Spanish Fly or anything that makes you angry – you can buy GHB in stores there. The line: “The holes in the paper bag, the greatest glory I’ve ever had” was also an insult, because at school people would point at girls and say: “I can’t catch her with a bag on her head.” I was a very green songwriter and it’s not my best voice.

When we recorded Nancy Boy on our first album it didn’t have our energy. So we re-recorded it with Phil Vinall. Phil has helped us to start twisting. When we did it Top of the Pops there were 43 complaints because people couldn’t tell if I was male or female. This song changed everything for us and it had a purpose: it made people who felt like outsiders feel less alone, and became our audience.

Stefan Olsdaljust, a songwriter

In 1994, when we wrote Nancy Boy, I was in an illegal relationship, because I was 19 years old and the legal age was 21 for same-sex couples. This was probably in the ether for Nancy Boy, so when I heard Brian’s music I was hooked. I was interested in the idea of ​​wrapping dark, disturbing or sexually explicit words.

We did a show in Deptford, hired a studio between midnight and 6am because it was cheap, and the tape somehow ended up on David Bowie’s bus. We ended up helping him before we made our first album. So when the proper recording of Nancy Boy wasn’t quite right we tried to bring down the drums faster to bring the energy, but it didn’t have the punch. By the time we re-recorded it we had a lot of live events and were so disappointed with the first version that the energy went to the mainstream.

I still don’t know how it got on the radio, but maybe the wordplay helped us get away with it. There’s no sarcasm in Nancy Boy and I don’t remember us saying: “We can’t sing this – we’re going to be in trouble!” When we first started touring, we got kicked out in Middlesbrough, and in the southern US the supporters of Weezer threw pennies at us, but many embraced us. The success of this song gave us a lot of freedom. As people to recognize who they were in front of people, it gave us a lot of confidence, and skillfully we realized that we could push the boundaries and we didn’t have to conform to expectations. Nancy Boy is a flash in the pan, but 30 years later it’s part of who we are.