Live on the edge

Guitarist

July 2002

"Most bands do live albums when they are old and fat," says Muse's Matt Bellamy. "We wanted to be different." Guitarist asks what all the Hullabaloo is about. 

"I don't think anyone should be afraid of live music, or releasing it" ~ Matt Bellamy. 

Maybe it's the fact that they hail from Devon, a good half day from the UK's musical hub of London, that makes Muse do things a bit differently. Maybe it's their fascination with obscure Benelux and Scandinavian bands. Or maybe it's the result of plying their youthful trade as Gothic Plague, Fixed Penalty and Rocket Baby Dolls which is responsible. What is certain, though, is that trying to predict the next move from the Teignmouth trio would confound Mystic Meg. 

COMBINING THE LUXURIANT histrionics of Radiohead with the tight Nirvana-esque angst that only a three-piece can really carry off. Muse have always been different to the average rock band. Not content with doing the unthinkable by taking their version of an Anthony Newley show tune into the charts (last years Feeling Good), they have eschewed all tradition by announcing Hullabaloo - a live album - just two records into their career. Not only that, but jettisoned is the vinyl/cassette/CD selection of formats: what you have here is DVD, CD and video. At this rate they'll probably release a new double A-sided single exploring chaos theory...

"OUR NEW SINGLE is two songs. Dead Star and In Your World," says Matt Bellamy, Muse's 24-year-old guitarist, singer and - Anthony Newby aside - songwriter. "We put them together as a double A-side just because we had them ready. Both were written around the 11 September period while we were staying out in Boston to record new demos. I didn't sit down to write about a plane crash, but I think some of the lyrics can refer to how we should be responsible for our individual actions and not blame other people all the time, which is related to the events behind 11 September. I believe in a butterfly, or ripple, effect and that any individual's actions will have a cause and effect that they might not know about, and not just on the people near them, but on others; sixth degrees of separation and all that. And that's what the songs are about." 

 Serious stuff, but no guarantees that either track will appear on the next studio album. "They probably won't make it to be honest," Matt confesses. "We're touring Europe over the summer, then we're going to America, so I don't think we'll be ready to do a new album until the end of 2002 or early next year. And we'll have new songs by then." 

 In the meantime comes Hullabaloo, a stunning documentary, B-sides and live album package available on double audio and visual formats. Recorded at Paris's Zenith arena, the live CD is a lot more than the standard end-of-career contractual obligation release. "The first Primus album released in the UK, Suck On This, was actually a live album," Matt says. "I always thought it was quite cool because it was showing what the band was really about, rather than some engineered version of it. I think what Muse are live is more honest than how we sound on record. I try to capture that on tape in the studio, but I don't think we've managed it yet because the songs are always so new and you don't have time to routine them properly. I think the live songs often become an improvement on the studio versions." 

 Speaking of which, a lot of bands supposedly live albums actually get treated to a fair amount of studio improvements before release. Suggest this of Hullabaloo and Matt becomes riled.

 "Absolutely not," he insists. "It's exactly as we played it. There's not one overdub. We're trying to bring live music back from hiding behind cheats, trying to show that humanity is not perfect, that we are not computers. If you use Pro-tools to record an album you can get some really exciting sounds, but that's not what we wanted to do here. We wanted to show the human sounds. 

 "I don't think anyone should be afraid of live music, or releasing it, but you normally get live records after you've done four or five albums then a greatest hits - we haven't had that many hits so we can't do that."

 So Hullabaloo isn't just a back door way of putting out a lucrative, "best of compilation."

 "The album doesn't have any of the singles on it, anyway," Matt explains. "It's a double CD and one disc is just B-sides from the two albums [Showbiz and last years Origin Of Symmetry]. The live disc is just album tracks, apart from the new single. We didn't just put Plug In Baby or Bliss or any of the obvious singles."

 Fans wanting the hits will have to splash out on the double DVD which features the full Zenith set on one disc, plus a documentary of life on Planet Muse on the other (the soundtrack of which is the B-sides from the audio CD). For anyone who hasn't caught the band in full flight, the DVD (and it's companion video version) will be an eye-opener. The songs themselves are pounding, majestic slabs of melody-based rock projected with intense assured attitude surprising for a young three-piece. But it's the 3D effects and multi-screen presentation which make this show stand out from the crowd. 

 "There's a lot of things featured that have never been done on live video," Matt says proudly. "Things like having cameras on the instruments to get new perspectives, and what we achieved with the screen. We did two nights at the Zenith, so one night we had the cameras set up for close-ups then the next we did the faraways. We ended up using the sound almost completely off one of the gigs, but we mixed the visuals to get cutaways. When we edited the video we wanted to treat each song separately and edit them in a different style, as though each was a one-off. We did a whole straight edit first, then we worked on individual songs. Then, as a band, we decided we wanted to add the split-screen effects you see, which pick out particular features of each song." 

AS MUCH AS ANYTHING. the video shows that the classic three-piece rock line-up is safe in the hands of Matt Bellamy, drummer Dominic Howard, and bass player Chris Wolstenholme.

 "We've gone through phases of getting a piano player or another guitar player" Matt reveals, "but we all got into bands like Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Police, Nirvana and Primus - all these three piece bands who managed to maintain their sound on their own. We're proud that there's only one song we do live that needs a backing track, which is Bliss. It has this synthesiser element which we activate with a keyboard, but that's the only thing that resembles something that isn't us three playing.

 "We get round it in various ways. When you have two guitar players in the band, the bass player drops back and doesn't really do anything apart from fill up the bottom end. With us, Chris bass goes through a bass guitar rig and a guitar amp, so you have this edgy distortion and a really clean bass sound as well. Often with three-pieces the guitarist tends to just do rhythm guitar to try to make the chunky chords, but we have it so that the bass and the drums between them are the heart of the band and what I do is on top of that, as opposed to helping to thicken it out. We try to find ways of mixing the bass and guitar together so they're not just playing the same thing, so I might be playing chords, and he'll play harmony notes underneath."

 Think of the classic three-piece line ups over the last few decades and most have a dominant writer: Kurt Cobain in Nirvana, Sting in The Police, Paul Waaktaar in A-ha (ahem). Muse are no exception, although Matt says the rest of the band get to input on his creations. 

 "I use the others for help on how a song should be played," he says. "Some songs are not formed when I show them, so I'll sit down and play the guitar or the piano part and sing what I think it should be. Them maybe Dom will say, I think it should be like this. On Citizen Erased, Dom came in one day with this funky James Brown beat and Chris just started playing along, and I applied the chord structure that I already had and it suddenly became a full-on metal track out of nowhere. Because it was so heavy for so long we decided to add another song on the end of it"    

AS BEFITS SOMEONE who manages to combine the responsibilities of songwriter, frontman, musical director and guitarist, Matt looks for maximum efficiency in his stage equipment. Custom built by south coast luthier, Hugh Manson, Bellamy's own-spec, "Matt-o-caster" guitar has internal pedal effects operated by hand from anywhere on stage. 

 "My main guitar is the aluminium-bodied model," he says, pointing to the one he'd just posed with for the Guitarist photo shoot. "I've got a phaser built in and a Fuzz Factory, which is very expensive, hand-painted by someone in Japan and very rare. A gate and compressor are built in as well, which is really unusual. There's a certain setting which means you can pitchshift the feedback depending on where the compressor is, which affects the note of the feedback. So you can get loads of feedback then pitchshift it up and down from anywhere on stage. It's a really mental effect that I can just drop into a song. 

 "Because of this I've got a pretty simple pedalboard. I just use a Line 6 delay pedal which has three delays and presets on it, and a whammy pedal and a volume pedal. I used to have a lot more but it was restricting my movements on stage."

 As well as easing Matt's movements during performances, the Manson models remove the need for any changing of instruments mid-gig, or even mid-song. 

 "In the old days I was using three or four guitars live because I wanted to use the ones from the recordings," Matt says, "They were all quite different. I used Gibsons, Les Paul-type things, with double cutaways for the heavy stuff and a Fender Stratocaster to get a really clean sound. I also had an SG and a Parker Fly, which I used because it had a Piezo built in, which is an acoustic guitar-type pickup. My Manson guitar can basically do all these sounds. It's roughly the shape of a Telecaster, but really the shape's not important. What is important is the fact that it's encased in about 5mm of metal which means it's really toppy in the first place. It's got a P-90 in the neck, which basically gives me the sound I'm looking for from a Gibson point of view, because it sounds like an old Les Paul or SG. Then down the bottom I've got a Mother Humbucker, which gives me the really clean, Stratocaster-type sound. And then I've got a Piezo built in. so that's the Fly. Basically, when I do a gig I only need this plus one other guitar, and I only use that because it's got seven strings.

 Even the 7-string is by Manson. It goes down to A at the bottom although, if I wanted, I could add another A string to my normal guitar because it has an extra wide nut. The 7-string has also got similar pickups to my other one because it has an electric coil one and a and a Piezo as well. I didn't use it on the DVD, but I use it now on In Your World and a few other things, like Citizen Erased."

The day of the Guitarist interview, Matt was excited about a new Manson. "Matt-o-caster" in the pipeline. "The new one is exactly the same as the aluminium one but it has a different finish and a slightly different configuration on the effects," he says of this new axe. "The aluminium one has the compressor and the tone on the outside; the new one has the gate and the volume on the outside."

 Rumours also abound of it having it's own built-in laser show. 

 "That's not right. Hugh had this idea that he wanted to try out but I don't think I'll use it," Matt teases. "But Maybe I will..."