It’s taken Placebo years to agree to play some of their biggest hits again – and singer Brian Molko expects to ditch them again after their current tour.

The frontman will bring the band to the SSE Hydro tonight as part of a run of shows celebrating 20 years since their first album.

For a band who have prided themselves on always looking forward, a tour that’s heavily reliant on the past is a strange situation.

“It was painful looking back at everything,” says Brian.

“We have quite a dysfunctional relationship with a lot of our own material, and as it happens some of our most popular material are songs we don’t like as much as other stuff. However we had committed ourselves to resurrecting the likes of Pure Morning and Nancy Boys, which we hadn’t played in years and which we’d vowed never to play again.

“We decided to do that on the basis that we could play them this time and then never play them again if that’s how we felt, and that’s the lay of the land right now. They’re going down like a house on fire and we are enjoying playing them, but will we ever play them again? I really don’t know. Maybe for the 30th anniversary…”

Originally formed in 1992 by Brian and guitarist/bassist Stefan Olsdal, the group first made headway in the mid 1990s, thanks both to their music and a striking image that deliberately contrasted with the laddish and macho nature of Britpop, which dominated the charts at the time.

Despite going against the tide, the band became chart stars, and established a lengthy career that many of their peers failed to muster, with their last album, 2013’s Loud Like Love, being their seventh record in total.

Brian hopes that gigs like tonight, which kick off the UK leg of the anniversary tour, will showcase the whole career of the band.

“Being our harshest critics, we’d play some old songs in rehearsals and go, ‘jeez, people actually bought this’, he explains.

“We were almost shocked at how naïve some of the songs were. The struggle was to put a set together that represented the retrospective but also, to a degree, who we are today.”

The group will arrive in Glasgow on the back of a European tour that saw them visit various countries, including Russia. The group’s experiences on a previous tour of the country have formed the basis for a new documentary, alt Russia, which is currently touring the film festival circuit and shows the band performing before adoring crowds in the likes of St Petersburg and Siberia.

Placebo have regularly championed LGBT rights over the years, a community that still faces severe difficulty in Russia. However the idea of boycotting the country never entered Brian’s head.

“We’ve always been a very political band,” says Brian.

“The cross-dressing in the 90s, for instance, was a political act and saying **** you to homophobia, at a time when Britpop was alive and homophobia was quite rampant. So, concerning politics, it’s a case of realising that if we did not play in countries where we did not agree with the politics of the government then we would hardly play anywhere at all, including the UK.

“We’re not in favour of artistic boybotts, because how effective are they? The person that suffers at the end of the day is the genuine music fan, and we want to bring a message of acceptance and tolerance everywhere that we go – you need to go to places where that is needed, and try to connect with the youth of that country.”

Connecting with people is one of the things that Brian is proudest of Placebo achieving over the past two decades.

“Over the past 20 years I’ve seen that we can be effective simply by being ourselves,” he adds.

“So many young people have said we had a profound effect on them and that’s very, very humbling. It’s mind blowing because all we have ever done is speak our truth, and I guess we speak with enough vulnerability that it touches people on a very profound level.

“It’s been an incredible journey and I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it, and that includes all the darkness we’ve encountered along the way. But it hasn’t all been darkness, there’s been loads of fun with it.”

Placebo, SSE Hydro, tonight, £27.50, 6.30pm