(MUSE) Stairway to Devon - The Muse radio documentary
BBC 6 Music
c. September 2003 (had some replay in May 2004)
Twilight Zone music plays
"You are travelling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop; the mind-bending world of Muse"
"You are about to meet a man, mid twenties, black hair. He could almost pass for normal. But take a closer look, that's Matt Bellamy; singer, guitarist, pianist, and the principal character of our story.
He is not alone.
Witness fellow stargazers, Dominic Howard (drums), and that's Chris Wolstenholme, (the big fella, he plays bass guitar). Together they have written the soundtrack to the end of the world"
AUDIO CLIPS
"Officials in Washington have said American forces have begun a najor air war against Iraq..."
"...Forest fires are continuing to plague much of continental Europe..."
"...The Red Cross is expanding it's emergency relief operation in eastern Ethiopia..."
"...If the SARS virus spreads into China's vast rural hinterland, it's a question that everyone fears to ask..."
Twilight Zone music and voice over plays: "Late night, a music hack, racing to meet his deadline, Dan Martin from the New Musical Express, types the words "Muse have not only made the UK rock record of the year, but have created a scripture. The defining document of a new religion"
MATTHEW (sound byte): *Laughter* No...definitely not trying to create a new religion, no definitely not, no...
V/O: Here is Dan Martin...
DAN: I think the reason that we came to talking about Absolution in such hyperbolic terms is that everything about that record is completely to the extreme, and certainly the track Apocalypse Please, it's like the track says "this is the end of the world".
MATTHEW: There are various ways the world is going to end. I mean it is going to end. You look at the nature of the universe, it is gradually expanding, the way it's cooling down. The sun is eventually going to blow up and turn into a red giant, and then a white dwarf...I think that's in fifty million years of something, so it's quite likely we'll be gone already by then. That's the point you see. So if we're going to be already gone by then, so why are we going to go? Natural disaster? That's the next one down I suppose. Next one down from that is whether we just lose the plot and just blow it all, you know what I mean, through misorganisation and whatever...whatever we are going to call it, a bit of chaos. I panic going to bed sometimes. Every time it gets a bit dark, I'm sort of lying there thinking 'What's actually going to go through my mind that last minute?', you know what I mean? When you are just about to die - you know, how am I going to deal with that? I don't know. You could kind of say that the first song is saying, "Yeah, the end is coming whatever", but the rest of the album, the other songs on the album are kind of saying "What are you going to do in that moment?" I mean, what do you kind of do?
V/O: The end of the world is nigh. It may be fifty million years, it may be tomorrow, but Muse know that sinister forces are hastening our rush towards oblivion.
...cut to a small room deep underground, where unelected power brokers trade in all our futures, and time is indeed, running out...
MATTHEW: I think people are slowly starting to realize that we don't really live in a pure democracy. I think a lot of people are seeing like, the recent fumbling's that are going on in the government at the moment. I think just generally I think it's quite obvious that the people we think are in power, aren't really. You know what I mean? I think there are all sorts of people behind them. I want to make a video that is kind of taking the piss out of that a little bit. It's like a take off of that Doctor Strangelove film with us playing on a table, and a load of military secret government types dancing. It's like this kind of serious moment like they are all sitting around making decisions about the rest of the world, but really they are just having a laugh aren't they?
V/O: Who actually controls this planet? Who actually controls the monopolies that determine the course of our lives? His name is Jim Mars. Truth is the burden he was born to bear. He's a thorn in the side of government. A whistleblower writing dispatches from the edge of credence, and he's written a book, "Ruled By Secrecy".
MATTHEW: There's a song on album actually called, Ruled By Secrecy, which is kind of named after that book.
JIM MARS AUDIO CLIP: My book, "Ruled By Secrecy" traces the hidden history that connects the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and these groups that I call "The Secret Societies"
MATTHEW: The song's kind of like about some geezer who has come back from work, and he's just kind of like shot everyone, and blown everyone up, and he's come back to his wife with like, you know, loads of blood all over his hands, and sort of going 'I've just blown it, I've lost it. I've lost the plot'. And the reason being because it's kind of slowly dawning on him that everything he is doing is out of his power.
JIM MARS AUDIO CLIP: When you look and you realize, that most of us are all pawns in some giant machine, it's very easy to throw up your hands and say 'Well, there's nothing I can do', but it's not true. There's more of us than there are of these manipulating elites, and our knowledge is growing daily. Study. Read. Learn. Learn about these secret societies. Learn what various people have written about them. Learn what they say about themselves. Read their own material, as I have, and you will find that it's all very real.
V/O: The truth is out there, somewhere...and Muse found it in the flickering half light of a half remembered television series from the 1960s, "The Prisoner".
THE PRISONER AUDIO CLIP: Good people, it is my pleasure to present to you, the one and only, Number Six...
MATTHEW: Hullaballoo, the front cover, we were trying to do a mockup of "The Prisoner", it's like kind of, some geezer - I think he's a secret agent, who's retired, and obviously because he's got loads of information about the government - he just suddenly wakes up one day, and he's in a strange surreal town that he's stuck in and everyone refers to him as a number, and doesn't use his name, and he can't escape. Every time he tries to escape, large white balloons chase him down a beach.
THE PRISONER AUDIO CLIP: I am not a number, I am a free man! (Maniacal laughter)
MATTHEW (CONT): So I think for the album cover, we wanted to do like a picture of us kind of like dressed up like that geezer from The Prisoner.
KAREN LANGLEY: Right, um, I have the cover of Hullabaloo in front of me, and on it Muse are wearing white dinner jackets and white top hats, and standing in front of a large white balloon...
V/O: Karen Langley is not a number, she's a free woman, and the organizer of "Six of One - The Prisoner Appreciation Society".
KAREN LANGLEY: The large white balloon is very accurate because there is a balloon called Rover in The Prisoner, which is the guardian, who catches people trying to leave.
THE PRISONER AUDIO CLIP: Do you still think you can escape, Number Six?
KAREN LANGLEY: The white suits are a little bit off, as they should be dark dinner jackets if they are trying to look like the The Undertakers.
MATTHEW: We kind of said lets get the suits in, and you know you turn up on the day and there's like these kind of circus jester suits. I mean, hey, what can you do? It's too late. All the shops are shut. You know we turn up at 5.00, it's too late to turn back. What are you going to do? Winge or just put 'em on, looking like The Backstreet Boys?
KAREN LANGLEY: Yes, I can see that this is more Backstreet Boys than Prisoner...the whole concept of The Prisoner series was a man fighting against unseen forces, and there was a feeling that you could not get to the bottom of things, and you couldn't get to who was in control of things. Certainly in the last episode, McGoohan and his cohorts, actually gun down all the people who are trying to oppress them in the village, and that sounds very much like it's relating to the whole Doctor Strangelove ethos, and the song on the new album about somebody literally destroying everybody because he can find no other way to express his frustration and anger, at being controlled by unseen forces.
THE PRISONER AUDIO CLIP: Be seeing you!
V/O: And Muse are pitted heart and soul, against these unseen forces...but what do these forces want? What are they looking for? Indomitable seeker of truth, Jim Mars has the answer.
JIM MARS: There was a great civilization that predated the Egyptian civilization and that was of course the great Sumerian civilization, which was centered in what was then called Mesopotamia, and today interestingly enough, this is called Iraq. I'm even now compiling information to suggest that the unprecedented US attack on Iraq, may have been precipitated less by the desire to bring freedom and democracy or to search for weapons of mass destruction, or to take over their oil, than it was on obtaining ancient tablets which might provide the key to future technology, which could include limitless free energy, faster than light travel, and even perhaps inter-dimensional or time travel. So you can see why the military minds would want to get hold of such information.
V/O: Hmmm. I see you're not convinced. Meet Zecharia Sitchin, author, ethnologist, visionary and occasional chronicler of ancient tablets. He claims that 450,000 years ago, aliens crash landed in the Persian Gulf. Still not convinced? Read his book, "The 12 Planet". Muse did.
ZECHARIA SITCHIN AUDIO CLIP: My book "The 12th Planet", tells the story as recorded on clay tablets from almost 6,000 years ago. According to which, earth has been visited from another planet in our own solar system.
MATTHEW: They are called the Nibiru. I think about eight foot tall actually, pretty thin. I think reasonably large eyes as well, as far as I heard. They kind of came down to earth and did experiments, cuz they were just looking to muck around, and I think they mixed their own DNA with the DNA of apes and stuff.
ZECHARIA SITCHIN AUDIO CLIP: Those who came from that planet, at some point requiring workers engaged in genetic manipulation and upgraded us to become homosapiens almost overnight.
DOMINIC: The book kind of starts off talking about how there's like quite a short space of time between Neanderthal man, and all of a sudden, man that has started creating civilizations.
MATTHEW: Darwin's Theory of Evolution is pretty solid, you know? It's pretty believable, but it doesn't explain how we went from apes to us. If we can find fossils of dinosaurs, then surely you can find fossils of variations between apes and us, but it's almost impossible to find, and that's one of the main pieces anomalous data which goes against Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and the "Twelve Planet Theory" kind of fills in that gap, so that's kind of why I give it some weight too maybe.
ZECHARIA SITCHIN AUDIO CLIP: All the material on which my writings are based, can be seen actually on view in the British Museum, in the Louvre in Paris. In the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This material and what it says is not contested. The only question is, is it a myth? Or did it really happen? And I've taken the position that it really happened.
V/O: Space. Muse like space. They won't stop going on about it. 1994. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, pens a book called "Hyperspace". Little guessing that his theories would inspire Muse's magnum opus, "Origin Of Symmetry"
MATTHEW: "Origin Of Symmetry" came from a book called "Hyperspace", and he was talking about the next major book on science or something would be called "Origin Of Symmetry". When you read that book, I kind of found it as like the truths about science are actually sometimes more fantastical and more exciting, than some of the lies of previous religions, do you know what I mean?
V/O: Professor Michio Kaku...
MICHIO KAKU AUDIO CLIP: "Hyperspace" talks about the origin of symmetry. All the symmetries we see in the universe, the symmetry of snowflakes, the symmetry of crystals, all of them come from The Big Bang and the origin of the universe itself, which we think comes from higher dimensions. Dimensions as high as eleven dimensions. So think for example, of a crystal. A beautiful emerald that existed at the beginning of time, but it shattered. And when this beautiful three dimensional crystal shattered, it landed on a tabletop...and all the people on the tabletop are trying to piece together the crystal to find the origin of symmetry. And they can't do it. No matter how they move these pieces of crystal in two dimensions, they cannot assemble a three dimensional crystal. Think of for example, a carp. A fish swimming in a pond. Fish swimming in a pond think that their universe is two dimensional. They can swim forward, backward, left and right, but the concept of up beyond the pond, is beyond them. They cannot visualize the world of up. We are the fish. We spend all our life in three dimensions. Moving forwards, backwards, left and right, up and down. Not realizing that there could be unseen worlds, unseen dimensions. We physicists now believe that if we take these pieces of crystals and move them in higher dimensions, then you can form a perfect emerald that existed at the beginning of time. So we think that the secret of the universe is the origin of symmetry.
(Fades out repeating "the origin of symmetry")
V/O: Let's go back...
Cutting Crew, "I just died (in your arms tonight)" begins to play
V/O: Further back...
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No.2 in C Minor begins to play
V/O: 1916. See that man at the piano? That's Sergei Rachmaninoff. He's a musician too. Quite good as it happens. But what part has he to play in our story? Well, the spaceships were fine, but Matthew's admiration for the work of Mr Rachmaninoff really raised a few eyebrows.
MATTHEW: I would never try and consider that we are anywhere near that level. If you have heard me as a piano player against any of the people I'm influenced by on the piano, then it just looks like a chimpanzee trying to play the piano or something, you know what I mean? It's a different ball game.
V/O: We told classical music buff, Verity Sharp, from Radio 3's Late Junction, we'd found a chimpanzee, who could play the piano. Her verdict?
VERITY SHARP AUDIO CLIP: So we're now listening to Blackout, this is a very lilting waltz feel to this piece. That is a very kind of classical form.
(BLACKOUT piano clip plays)
VERITY SHARP (CONT): I think this is rather beautiful actually, this has got a very, um, lilting feel to it, which is a very kind of relaxed feel...and his voice really compliments the strings in that way. Everything's very soft. And to have something in three four is actually quite a novelty. Pop tends to be four square. I do think that works. Now this is possibly pushing the limit, I think. The end of Butterflies and Hurricanes, what with the uh, percussion section, strings, piano...and hey (laughs) you know, I mean, you've got to try these things, haven't you? (Laughs) A bit of Rachmaninoff actually quoted...Rachmaninoff be turning in his grave...there is a lot of feeling in there. You know, there is a real commitment, and he's kind of (I would have said) being quite honest about what he wants to do, because he is going to get a lot of criticism for doing that sort of thing, but you know he's got the guts kind of to do it, and I respect that. I think he's being a bit hard on himself to say that he is a "chimpanzee" in relation to Rachmaninoff or Boëly. There is no doubt that to be able to have the sort of skill that Rachmaninoff or Boëly, or all those sort of people had, there are very very few people who can do that, and he shouldn't put himself down I'd say.
MATTHEW: I'd rather always set my sights as a musician way higher than what I think I can even achieve you know? I know that those piano players are so far beyond my own mathematical and emotional understanding of music, that I like having a goal that is so ridiculous I'll never going to get there, you know what I mean? But it means I'll keep trying.
V/O: Muse are normal. To most, pop music is not about Nibiru, dead composers, time travel and white balloons. To most, pop music is mundane and one dimensional. Muse though aspire to eleven dimensions. But the question is, why?
AUDIO of SHEEP baaing and BIRDS SINGING.
V/O: October 1995. Cornwall, and future Muse manager Dennis Smith stumbles upon three young men, who will irrevocably change his life.
DENNIS SMITH AUDIO CLIP: Well, I went first to see them at a little show in a Cornish venue. From there, I recognized that there was something very special here. Matthew has an incredible range of thoughts, he's got such a restless and imaginative and creative mind, which was obvious even in those early days, always challenging and wanting to get into very deep conversations. Things that you know maybe took me, uh, twenty years of adult life to come to terms with...maybe some spiritual issue, some deep meaningful thing. An older head on much younger shoulders is how I have always seen him.
V/O: But Dennis doesn't know that young Matthew has been keeping older company. Much older. When you dabble in the Black Arts and Ouija boards though, that's what happens...
MATTHEW: I noticed that my parents were kind of staying up late and telling me to go to bed quite early, and I wasn't sure why. I kind of went down one night and found them all with candles and talking to the you know, dead people and um (giggles) so I got a little bit um, interested in it. Is that unusual? I don't think that's unusual.
DRAMATIC MUSIC, FOLLOWED BY THE SOUNDS OF BIRDS
MATTHEW: We sat in Dartington Hall gardens. It's got meaning to me, this place. I came here for a school trip for a couple of weeks once in the summer when I was about sixteen, and this is all like pretty haunted vibe around here. Like this little secret cemetery over there. We kind of climbed into it, and we're hanging around by the gravestones sort of singing weird tunes. I was playing guitar with a couple of these girls who are kind of improvising singing and stuff. They were kind of going, 'wooooo' and making weird ghostly sounds in the hope of conjuring up a ghost. I think that's definitely influenced the way I sing, and that weird kind of, 'woooooo' stuff. I think how the Ouija board and all that relates to the music and all that stuff, is that we considered the absurd...(laughs)...as I did when I was fifteen. I don't think much has changed really.
V/O: And Muse's taste for the absurd, has left some people scratching their heads.
(PLUG IN BABY PLAYS)
CHRISTOPHER: I remember when Origin came out. I've never really seen any other album get mixed reviews like that. I mean they went from naught out of ten, to ten out of ten. I don't know. I think maybe it was from some of the over the topness. You know, some people found themselves really attracted to that side of it, and you know other people found themselves thinking it was just a load of bollocks.
MATTHEW: I was impressed that it got like a lot of kind of strong opinions. It's quite interesting to create something that kind of causes that, you know?
V/O: Dan Martin from the NME
DAN MARTIN AUDIO CLIP: They don't care, and to be fair, they never have cared. You know he goes on talking about space and the end of the world, but you know, if you're going to talk about these things then you have to be prepared that people are going to think it's ridiculous, and people do.
V/O: But not the Muse fan. A fervent worshipper, whose every waking hour is concerned by thoughts of Muse. In a world of surface dwellers, the Muse fan delves deep.
MATTHEW: Around the time of the first album it seemed there was a few people, around Europe especially, who were just following us around everywhere and every time we'd open the bus door there'd be like you know a couple of girls just crying. Like, not crying as in joy, just crying. Just like depressed and sad, and like we would you know shut the doors and go on to the next...and as soon as you opened the door, they would be there again just crying as we opened the door (nervous laugh).
V/O: AMSTERDAM 2002
MALE FAN AUDIO CLIP: We are at the Melkweg, and we're going to see Muse in just about two and a half hours.
FEMALE FAN AUDIO CLIP: I've been here since um 11am, and it's now seven o'clock.
MALE FAN AUDIO CLIP: Muse after all is uh, the God of poetry, and I think about the galaxy and the earth. There are much poetic things about that I write poems myself, and there's a connection there between me and the bank I think.
FEMALE FAN 1 AUDIO CLIP: She got a Meet & Greet, she went to Meet & Greet
FEMALE FAN 2 AUDIO CLIP: Yeah I did
FEMALE FAN 1 AUDIO CLIP: She's sick now...
FEMALE FAN 2 AUDIO CLIP: She's got to puke...
UNKNOWN AUDIO CLIP (MATTHEW?): I expect uh, a wonderful sensation this evening
MATTHEW: We've definitely received some letters of a pretty intense psychological nature. I've read the word "suicide" a few times. I don't know if it's anything out of the ordinary to be honest. Maybe it is. There was weird painting someone did, Dom kept to kind of try and wind me up.
DOMINIC: It's kind of like this really Gothic romantic painting of Matt looking really thin and naked with like long hands and fingers, a bit like an alien or something, and he was just kind of holding himself in this really strange pose...but there was lots of detail in this picture of all the little things that Matt kind of wore and liked, and it's kind of maybe a little bit disturbing how much thoughts kind of went into that really, and how much research went into that...but it's quite a nice piece though. I've still got it...
(LAUGHTER)
V/O: The time is September this year. The place, a music venue. The Melkweg in the heart of Amsterdam. The cast of characters? Three musicians and eight hundred Dutch people.
FAN 1 AUDIO CLIP: I'm a little deaf now
FAN 2 AUDIO CLIP: I thought it was absolutely fantastic
FAN 3 AUDIO CLIP: Beautiful. Best gig ever. It was awesome...
FAN 4 AUDIO CLIP: It was incredible...really...
FAN 5 AUDIO CLIP: They're a great band, one of the best in the whole world.
FAN 6 AUDIO CLIP: When I heard "Sing For Absolution", I wanted to cry.
FAN 7 AUDIO CLIP: I'm really tired now, but I can't sleep tonight. I just want more.
DOMINIC: Hell, we're in Amsterdam at the moment, just doing an obscene amount of press...
MATTHEW: In a church...
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEW (CONT): We're like, we're like in this company thought it'd be a good idea to come to this old church from the 13th century, you know. It was a good idea until all the questions are asking me, 'Do I believe in God', and 'What does Absolution mean'? and (sighs) oh blimey, lost it. I found myself playing one of the biggest church organs* in Europe while being filmed by MTV as well. They kind of said, 'We want you on the organ. Play! Play something now!' And they started filming me. It was like (giggling) it was like it was pretty um...(DOMINIC can be heard laughing in the background)...it was pretty scary, I've never played a bloody massive...well I did play one, but not one this big anyway, it was um pretty bizarre.
DOMINIC (in the background): That was amazing
MATTHEW (sharp exhale of breath): God, they take it so seriously here, don't they? I have to go through the Seven Deadly Sins (laughter) I'm serious, this interviewer just sat down and took me through Seven Deadly Sins, and asked me what I'd committed. You know what I mean? What was I going to say, you know what I mean?
V/O: "Weird"...a word meaning "strikingly odd" or "unusual" - "strange". Some might say Muse are "weird". But what is "weird" to Muse?
DOMINIC: When we kind of noticed things were getting weird was when we would go out in the daytime before the sound check, and go to a shop, and we'd buy all these strange masks and hats, and we started um, buying like bags and bags of all this stuff and kind of like setting it up backstage, and inviting people back.
MATTHEW: They're kind of like those like Zorro and um like Zorro and cowboy hats, and moustaches and flowers (?), and kind of like clown masks. Section of traditional theatre.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEW (CONT): I remember one evening when we were tired and went back to the bus, and it was like about twenty people, and it just got loose with masks and hats, and no one knew who anyone was. You know what I mean? It was just a bit of a loose time. I remember a couple of bums...seeing Tom's face and a couple of bums...(laughter)...that kind of thing...I found myself half naked in the toilets with one of those, you know, those rope lights, wrapped all around my body, just twitching in a corner, with a load of kind of crying girls just poking me (giggles), and I kind of said just why we should knock these parties on the head, 'cos it got to the point where they weren't normal...
V/O: But if you think that's weird, then wait one moment...Muse haven't even started...
("WE WILL ROCK YOU" drums play)
MATTHEW: I'd like to do a musical. I saw that Queen musical you know, and I thought 'that's pretty funny', and it made me laugh. But I thought, imagine if the actual band was there, you know, actually playing as well. But years ago we talked about doing a gig where we're going to have like a big circular rotation stage in the middle, with like four different sets. Like one with us all wearing like nice jumpers, like the Beach Boys with a like a coal fire in the background, and kind of like sitting around clicking our fingers. Kind of like singing a few acoustic songs, and then like the stage rotates around and there's like this big metallic just horrible sort of weird metal set, and we all come on all dressed up weird and then sort of just play weird techno rock. And then it sort of spins around again, and it's us kind of doing a full on Opera. I mean, I mean, I think the idea of like a stage that rotates around with four different set designs, on which shows the four different faces of the band, that would be a good direction...(Laughter)
V/O: But what does Paul Rodgers, producer of "We Will Rock You?" think.
PAUL RODGERS AUDIO CLIP: It's to be applauded, but curtailed I think, about this idea of wearing nice jumpers like the Beach Boys with a coal fire in the background (chuckles)...this is Sunday night at the London Palladium stuff. They're going mad. Don't even go there Muse, if you're thinking about it.
V/O: Radio 3's Verity Sharp...
VERITY SHARP AUDIO CLIP: If they could dream up the kind of next generation of musicals, and yeah maybe have a story about aliens and spacemen, but make it good. Obviously, it's not going to be really serious, but if they made it good, and put that kind of a sound as a backdrop, that could really catch on I reckon.
V/O: Whatever you expect from Muse, expect the unexpected.
CHRISTOPHER: We've never really felt too musically restricted, to any genre in any way. You know I've always felt like we could move forward and do what we want. I'm sure there has been songs we've done in the past we're where we sort of come up with the idea originally, and then kind of thought you know, 'Is that pushing it?', we just thought we'll do it anyway.
DOMINIC: You force yourself to make a bunch of asses of yourself, it happens naturally.
MATTHEW: I think it's one of those things that you won't know you're making an ass of yourself, until much later down the line...I think it's sometimes a good thing to make music when you know, ten years later you look back and go 'oh my God...what was going on there?", but I'm not sure if that would happen, um I think it's approaching that time where it looks like it could happen.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEW (CONT): I think we will just take it naturally, and where it naturally takes us could be, you know, well outside of what is publicly acceptable. But I think we'll go there if needs be, if it's what we like.
V/O: Dialogue from a play; Hamlet to Horatio. 'There are more things in Heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' There are "more things in Heaven and Earth" than can perhaps be dreamt of, and somewhere in between Heaven and the Earth lies the world of Muse...my head hurts...think I'll lie down now...
Notes
Church organ playing: A similar thing is on the Hullabaloo footage
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