Muse New Album

Earthbound asteroids, evil lizards and fans disguised as gasmen ...

Muse are on their fourth album - and still finding plenty to worry about, finds Alexis Petridis

Friday June 16, 2006
The Guardian


A counter-balance to well-mannered rock ... Muse

The past few days have been trying for Matt Bellamy. First, there was a press junket to America, where his band Muse are tipped to replicate their multi-platinum, stadium-packing, festival-headlining European success. The trip was not an unqualified triumph. It started well, with a helicopter ride around New York, but ended with the singer cancelling a raft of interviews. One persistent rumour claims Bellamy excused himself from any further Stateside promotional duties on the grounds he'd heard an asteroid was about to hit America and it was therefore imperative he leave the country immediately. Whether this was a genuine fear or merely the best excuse a pop star has ever come up with for avoiding the music press remains open to conjecture.

Back in Italy, where Bellamy lives with his Italian girlfriend, a psychology student, things continued tryingly. There was the usual round of Italian TV shows to promote Muse's new single, titled, with the kind of shy understatement for which the trio are renowned, Supermassive Black Hole. Muse are huge in Italy - a country where outré prog-rockers Van Der Graaf Generator once topped the album charts for 12 weeks was likely to find Muse's blend of Queen-like bombast, metal guitars, quasi-classical flourishes and apocalyptic sci-fi lyrics hard to resist - but the nation's unique take on music television remains a source of bemusement to anyone born outside its borders. Muse were spared the indignity meted out to Coldplay, who were required to perform, for reasons unexplained, accompanied by a septuagenarian female acrobat, but nonetheless, the shows proved as incomprehensible as ever to three twentysomethings who grew up on the relatively straightforward Top of the Pops and Later. "They set up a big outdoor festival in a square, and then you mime," frowns Muse's drummer, Dominic Howard. "You get all these cheesy Italian pop stars, then us doing Supermassive Black Hole."

Most troubling of all, yesterday Bellamy received a letter at his new home near Lake Como, an address he enjoys not merely for the exquisite scenery, but for its musical past. Perhaps uniquely among the current crop of alt-rock frontmen, Bellamy is famed for his love of classical composers (he may well be the first rock star in history to dismiss the suggestion that his band's music occasionally sounds a little over the top by referencing Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts Requiem) and is thus excited by the fact that Vincenzo Bellini, a celebrated but short-lived 19th-century opera composer and noted dandy, lived near his new house: "When I'm in playing the piano, I know I'm in the same place where a couple of hundred years ago some great music was being written." The letter was from three Muse fans, "saying they know where I live, and they'd found my address on the internet, which is quite scary. I just moved in, and I didn't realise you had to make yourself ex-directory, as in the UK, so I think they just looked me up."

One of the reasons he moved from London was to escape what he calls "invasive problems". That sounds like something a doctor might snap on his rubber gloves to examine, but turns out to mean the unwanted attentions of die-hard fans. He is not the only member of Muse to find the band's burgeoning fame impinging on his private life - recently, when dropping off his eldest child at primary school, bassist Chris Wolstenhome was startled to find himself mobbed by "a hundred fucking eight-year-olds", including a little girl who made the devil's horns sign with her fingers and told Wolstenhome he "seriously rocked" - but, as befits the band's frontman, Bellamy was attracting the attentions not merely of excitable pre-pubescents, but the kind of persistent Muse fanatics he once described as "berserkers".

He thinks he understands where their obsession stems from - "there's a lot of bands out there who will edit themselves to create a more generic type of sound, but we don't do that: you're getting quite an unedited version of who we are through the music, so the fans maybe have a feeling of being closer to us than they would to a band that's editing themselves" - but that doesn't necessarily mean he wants them turning up on his doorstep. "A couple of guys dressed as gasmen asked to come in and read the meter. I knew straight away that something was up because they were too young, they were about 16 or something. I asked to see some ID, and one of them blurted out, 'You've changed your hair colour, what's happened with your hair?'" he sighs, "which kind of gave the game away."

Nevertheless, as he sits in the lobby of a plush Milan hotel, Bellamy seems in good humour. His hair, once dyed blue and red and spiked in a manner recalling the alcopop advertising Judder Man, is now a more demure black. Any fears, real or otherwise, about imminent asteroid collisions seem to have subsided. "Oh yeah," he says, airily. "There's an asteroid called Apophis that was on a relatively close course to the Earth, but I think it's veered off now. I don't think it's due until 2030 or something, so there's no immediate concern." His face clouds over. "But if we were ever to stop something like that happening, there needs to be immediate action taken. There's no doubt that these things happen."

He is rightly pleased with Muse's fourth album, a record that, while more optimistic in tone than its predecessor Absolution - "well, I don't sing 'this is the end of the world' on the opening track if that's what you mean," demurs Bellamy - may be even more wayward, inventive and wildly, unashamedly extravagant. It numbers among its multifarious delights crashing orchestras, thundering horses' hooves, massed mock-choral vocals, deafening military tattoos, a burst of what can only be described as flamenco metal, and songs called Map of the Problematique and Knights of Cydonia, the latter named after a region on the northern hemisphere of Mars. It could be the work of no other artist: indeed, Muse appear so aloof from musical trends that Bellamy doesn't seem entirely certain who the lead singer of Babyshambles is ("Doherty," he suggests hopefully, "or whatever his name is").

Like Absolution, however, it seems destined to attract the kind of reviews in which praise for its originality is tempered by the use of such adjectives as ridiculous and absurd. "If you're sitting in an office with music on in the background, listening to the Strokes and then Muse come on, we probably sound pretty silly," concedes Bellamy. "But if you're listening to it on headphones on a plane going through severe turbulence, it would sound completely different. It's all contextual."

The trio formed Muse while at school in the Devon town of Teignmouth. They were barely out of their teens when their 2000 debut album Showbiz was released, to muted response from critics, who dismissed them as little more than a Tesco Value Radiohead; in contrast to the swift trajectory of the modern "firework band", their rise to massive success has been slow and steady. The band's relationship with Teignmouth, meanwhile, has proved a troubled one - after Bellamy made some disparaging remarks in the press, Wolstenhome remembers the town's mayor appearing on the front of the local newspaper, "throwing a copy of our debut single into a wheelie bin" - and, even now, several million album sales later, the three still carry the faint but detectable aura of the small-town outsider about them. Howard is polite but seems slightly prickly and suspicious: you get the impression he seldom ranks encounters with the press among the highlights of his day. Wolstenhome is an enormously affable father of three who has chosen to stay in Teignmouth while his bandmates have moved away, but feels Muse's torrid live shows, with their propensity to end in smashed equipment and physical injury, may be rooted in their past. "Maybe it's a feeling of all the shit you can't express in everyday life, or to people walking down the street or whatever. I used to be a lot more aggressive," he says. "I was always getting into shit at school." Did they get picked on? "Me less than the others, I had size on my side. Dom was always getting his arse kicked for having long hair."

And then there is Matt Bellamy. Over the years, he has developed a reputation as a bit of a fruitcake: perhaps an unavoidable side-effect of cancelling interviews on the grounds of imminent asteroid-related apocalypse and telling the NME you believe in the theories of Zecharia Sitchin, a writer who claims the human race evolved as a result of visiting aliens carrying out genetic experiments on apes. Today, he pronounces himself a fan of David Icke's recent book, Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Expose of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free ("the first few chapters give you a really good concise history of conspiracy theories, but the last few chapters are all claiming George Bush is the fifth cousin twice removed of the Queen, so he lost me a bit there"). He says that if he weren't in Muse he would "probably be a full-time conspiracy theorist", and launches into a lengthy and impassioned harangue about global finance: "It's absolute fucking corruption and enslavement and that's what we live in," he says, before checking himself. "Anyway, I'm starting to slide down the hill. It's a slippery slope, and before you know it, you're on about lizards controlling the world."

As with some of Muse's more florid musical moments or the more spectacular aspects of their live show - their last tour featured a giant keyboard-cum podium known as The Dalek that lit up as Bellamy played it - it's difficult to know quite how seriously you are supposed to take this sort of thing. On the one hand, Bellamy delivers it in an earnest, high-speed chatter. On the other, he regularly punctuates it with a high-pitched and rather mischievous sounding giggle: "Hih-hih-hih-hih!" He is clearly both fiercely intelligent and genuinely interested in what he calls "the massaging of information by governments and the media", but there is also the sense that he feels talking about this kind of thing is part of the rock star's job description, that he likes playing up to it a little -he took to the stage for the band's headlining appearance at Glastonbury two years ago clad in what looked like a nutty professor's white lab coat - and in doing so he provides a counterbalance to the massed ranks of well-mannered, dressed-down Tims and Toms prevalent in rock.

"I think that one of the freedoms I do have is freedom of thought," he says. "I'm allowed to have views of an alternative nature, whether some of them are a bit abstract or out there maybe. If you're in a nine-to-five situation it's difficult to entertain alternative thoughts because you're very entrained, by the people that are above you, to think and behave a certain way. Obviously most people, including me, are in debt to the bank, and that's a perfect way of maintaining a certain form of reality where you have to behave and perform certain duties to society. My aim in this band is to try to escape that. Through the process of doing that you start to develop slightly alternate ideas of reality. I think anyone would, if they could step out of it."

So he isn't bothered if people think he's a nutcase? "I'm not that conscious if there is such a thing as an image being portrayed of me out there. I think it depends what articles you read. It's in motion, it's not fixed. I don't think I'm quite as mad as David Icke yet. On the way though, hih-hih-hih-hih!"

In any case, he has other things to preoccupy him. He has vague plans for Muse to write and perform an extended classical-inspired instrumental piece. There are beserker fans to worry about, and a new live show to plan for. "I'm getting a piano this time that's on wheels, so I can wheel it on," he enthuses. "No, it's not going to move about when I play it. Well possibly it is." His eyes light up, his speech gets faster than ever. "It could skid a bit. They could wheel me out when I'm playing. That would be brilliant."

· Muse's new album, Black Holes and Revelations, is released on July 3 on Helium 3/Warners

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Muse official site

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