Placebo are a band that have long divided opinion. I’m willing to confess that I really like an awful lot of their earlier material and own all three of the albums they released between 1996 and 2000. I’ve no reason to explain why I stopped paying attention to them other than I was moving away somewhat from the goth/punk/glam concoctions that they were so good at doing and finding myself mellowing out somewhat.
There’s one particular single of theirs that I have a lot of time for and it’s as much for the quality of the b-sides as it is for the greatness of the actual single which has guitar licks that the Wedding Present should sue for:-
mp3 : Placebo – You Don’t Care About Us (radio edit)
A #5 hit in 1998, it was made available on 2 x CDs (as indeed were most singles in that era). The first of them had a more than half-decent Placebo song as its b-side along with a fabulous cover that paid homage the huge influence that Marc Bolan had on Placebo and particularly frontman Brian Molko:-
mp3 : Placebo – Ion
mp3 : Placebo – 20th Century Boy
The second CD could have been a bit of a rip-off as it featured two remixes of an earlier hit single but avoids such an accusation for the simple fact that both of them are very good and different sounding in their own right and indeed one of them, by Les Rhythmes Digitales, is IMHO, THE definitive version of the song:-
mp3 : Placebo – Pure Morning (Les Rhythmes Digitales mix)
mp3 : Placebo – Pure Morning (Howie B mix)
Enjoy
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
Probably sacrilege but I just sold my vinyl copy of the debut placebo record for £50 on ebay.
I had heard “Pure Morning” on my local college station and fell in love with it, but when I bought the Placebo album that featured it, I found I had been bitten by the remix snake; the LP mix was a non-event. Ah, the scourge of the 90s! I never found out which mix of “Pure Morning” was the one that got its hooks into me via old fashioned, terrestrial radio, but I quickly traded off the Placebo CD and never looked back.
Always like Placebo from the first time I heard ‘Teenage Angst’. Sure, they wavered a little from time to time, but their recent stuff is pretty damn good. If you compile all the singles to date you’d have one hell of a record!