Placebo at the Coalface

The Zeche Zollverein in Essen is one of those places that earns its UNESCO designation by looking exactly like it should. The double headframe of Shaft 12—that massive steel lattice structure rising over the Ruhr valley—was built for industrial efficiency and ended up being architecture. The colliery closed in 1986, the coking plant in 1993, and what remained was this immense monument to the idea that heavy labor could produce something lasting. At night, lit against a November sky, the thing is genuinely staggering.

Placebo played there in late November 2013, and the pairing makes a certain sense. Brian Molko has always written songs for people who feel too much in public—the melodramatic, the queer, the chemically adjusted, the perpetually bruised—and Zollverein has the same quality of dignified damage. Things built for one purpose, repurposed, still somehow standing.

Loud Like Love had just come out, which means the setlist leaned toward the new record alongside the songs people show up for: Every You Every Me, Pure Morning, the Kate Bush cover that somehow became more theirs than hers over twenty years of touring. Running Up That Hill in a disused coal mine in the Ruhrgebiet is either the most overwrought staging imaginable or exactly the right one. I genuinely can’t decide.

I would have gone. That’s the thought I keep returning to.