Placebo - 36 Degrees

What this video is

Released July 3, 1996 as the second single from Placebo's self-titled debut album on Hut/Virgin Records, '36 Degrees' arrived during the peak of Britpop's commercial dominance while existing defiantly outside its lad-culture mainstream. Placebo — fronted by androgynous, openly bisexual Brian Molko — represented a queer, glam-punk counterpoint to the Oasis/Blur axis. The song's thematic ambiguity around body…

Why it matters

An early document of Chris Cunningham's developing visual language — physical extremity as emotional metaphor — before his widely canonised Aphex Twin and Björk work. Simultaneously a key artefact of Placebo's founding aesthetic identity: dark, androgynous, and viscerally confrontational. The…

The director

English music video director and video artist born in Reading, Berkshire in 1970. Early career included comic book illustration, prosthetic make-up, and concept work for films including Nightbreed and Judge Dredd. Stanley Kubrick recruited him to design…