(MUSE) The Sky's No Limit
August 2011
Seventeen years ago, three teenagers from Devon sketched out a plan to conquer the world. The odd "wild toilet escapade" and a battle with alcohol aside, it didn't prove too testing for Muse. So next they're going into space.
It is Friday the 13th and from the back room of Big Sky photographic studios in North London comes an almighty crash. Seconds later, Muse frontman Matt Bellamy and drummer Dominic Howard emerge, wide-eyed but unruffled. "A huge mirror just fell off the wall and nearly hit me and Dom," Bellamy announces. How huge, Q wonders? Seventy-years'-worth-of-bad-luck huge? "Probably," shrugs the singer. "But the important point is it didn't break".
In other words, there's very little chance of Muse's luck running out soon. Seventeen years after their first coming together as a trio of grunge-obsessed Devon-based teenagers, they have stealthily ascended to their current position as one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As such, they can afford to take almost the entire year off. Aside from half a dozen South American dates with U2 in April, performing to over half a million people in total, followed by a handful of gigs in Russia and the UK, 2011 is effectively one long weekend for Muse.
Today, however, there is work to be done, namely being photographed and interviewed by Q, chiefly to trumpet the trio's upcoming appearances at the Reading and Leeds festivals, where in an effort to top their 2010 Wembley gigs performing beneath a towering cube of video and light, they plan to mark the 10th anniversary of their 2001 album Origin Of Symmetry by playing it in its entirety for the first time, amid an elaborate stage set based upon its artwork. They started rehearsing for the shows yesterday, working through songs they hadn't played in years. So, Q ventures truthfully, how's it sounding?
"Hmmm, it's alright," offers affable, perma-frank bassist Chris Wolstenholme. "We ran through Hyper Music for the first time in seven years. It sounded like a school band cover of 'Hyper Music' to be honest."
Reading holds a special place in the hearts of Muse members, since it was the first festival they ever visited together from Teignmouth, camped together, got stoned together, and moshed together to Rage Against The Machine.
"And it was definitely a place where a lot of my early sexual experiences were," says Bellamy smiling at the memory of his formative in-tent fumbles. "I didn't lose my virginity at Reading. I'd lost it just before, but I definitely followed through and learnt a bit more how to do it there. I've got some other pretty unsavoury memories which I'm not sure I should be sharing..."
Oh, come on, do tell...
"Well, the guys would never want me to share this," he half-whispers, "but I remember one time when the toilets weren't functioning because it was rained out and we had no choice but to find other methods of evacuating."
You're telling us you crapped beside a fence?
"Exactly! There were definitely some wild escapades."
Given it's literally grungy nature, too, the festivals crowd, of course, has a reputation for sailing horrible projectiles stageward. Muse have some experience of this type of behaviour from the band perspective: there was this festival in Moscow where they were showered with coins, the one in France where glass bottles rained, the metal fest in America where they served as moving targets for brown matter which they hoped was mud.
But, back in 1993, as punters at Reading, did they ever engage in the ritual of throwing a bottle of piss toward the stage?
"No, I haven't ever done that," says Wolstenholme. "I've been showered by a couple, but I've never actually thrown them myself."
"I haven't thrown a bottle of piss, no" says Howard. "I wormed my way down to the front once, though, and got my head kicked in and sprinkled with piss."
"I can't say I've delved that far down," Bellamy states, erupting with gaspy laughter, "I definitely remember getting covered in wet bog roll in the moshpit at one point. I'm not sure what was going on or exactly how it got to be wet..."
Muse have clearly come a long long way. Ask them why they figure that - in their estimation - such an "uncool" band has become so humongously successful on a global scale, and it prompts much initial head scratching. Then various theories are floated. Chris puts it down to them "having toured our arses off", Dom reckons its because they're "outsiders" operating on the fringe of musical fashion.
"I dunno, really" Matt says. "I mean, I love the music. A lot of people have picked up on some of it being tongue-in-cheek. But to me it's only tongue-in-cheek when I'm listening to it. When I'm playing it, I believe it, man (laughs). I'm in there. I mean, Knights Of Cydonia, I'm going with it into these strange emotions. So I can only assume that people get that feeling too. But I have to say, sometimes when I listen to our music or hear it in the distance, I go, Is that actually the band I'm in?"
"There are certain gigs you do which jump out as almost being a little out of your league sometimes, " admits Wolstenholme. "Like the stadium tour we did last summer. You feel like, "Christ, we've really got up here."
At a table out on the photo studio's balcony today, where the three members of Muse will be interviewed separately, the bassist chains Marlboro Lights and rabbits away in his effusive, slightly edgy manner. Wolstenholme is tall ("6'1"), well built, slightly balding and the one member of the band for whom existence as an international rock star has had the least impact on his personal life, due largely to the attentions of his long standing wife and five kids back home in Oxshott, near Leatherhead, "where all the Chelsea players live."
Bellamy and Howard, meanwhile, might be brothers, such is their shared, comparatively diminutive stature ("5'7" and "5'8" respectively), almost genetic facial similarities and identical choice of living arrangements, dividing their time between London and LA. The former talks rapidly and fidgets inside a stripy Vivienne Westwood suit, all piercing blue eyes and a slight "woo" to his "T's". The latter possessed of a certain rock star drummer cool, much like his former hero and now friend Roger Taylor of Queen. With his subtly sculpted hair and impressively white teeth, there is the slight edge of the playboy about him - he collects pieces of pop surrealism art and is single, or "relatively commitment-free", as he puts it.
In being purveyors of high-concept, over-the-top-of-the-top heavy rock, particularly on an arena and stadium level, Muse are operating in a field of their own and have thus reaped the rewards. Their last album, for example, 2009's The Resistance, topped the charts in a staggering 19 countries. By deploying large helium-filled UFO balloons and flag-waving hordes marching across a stage, they've grown to become a live act that matches the epic proportions of their music. Thwarted stage set propositions for Muse live shows have included their notion to cover the entire Wembley audience with balloons dropped from a helicopter and their plan to fly the biggest zeppelin in the world over the crowd at the Coachella festival in 2010, both schemes deemed too costly or frankly dangerous.
In employing such ambitious staging, of course, Muse leave themselves open to the dangers of Spinal Tap-styled set malfunctions. Their US arena tour of autumn last year, for instance, saw them perform on individual hydraulic towers, beginning the show behind pillars of curtain that would dramatically drop at a crucial point in the opener Uprising. On the second night in the Staples Center in LA on 26 September, however, before a crowd including representatives from the Grammys and a smattering of Hollywood stars, Bellamy's fell, nearly smothering him, and Wolstenholme's failed to drop at all.
"What I forgot," the bassist recalls, wincing, "was obviously there's cameras there, so people could see me on the screens going, "What the fuck's going on?" It was a bit humiliating."
"Mine dropped and got caught on my head, so I just looked like a giant ghost," laughs the singer. "I was stuck in it. Halfway through the song I managed to shake it off and so it was just me and Dom visible and then Chris's came down as the song finished. So it literally was Spinal Tap."
Not that it put off the Grammy organisers, who subsequently invited Muse to perform at the 2011 ceremony on Sunday 13 February in L.A. On the night, before an audience compromising such disparate heavyweight stars as Neil Young, Jennifer Lopez, Nicole Kidman and Lady Gaga, Muse waltzed off with the award for Best Rock album for The Resistance. Having been warned even by their American managers that they stood, "no chance" of winning it, they were stunned when they actually did, as evidenced by Matt Bellamy's garbled speech.
"I'm definitely not a speech maker," he squirms today.
"Terrible onstage as well. I need to go through that King's Speech therapy. I said, "Thanks very much, wow, great surprise. It was just kind of vague. Barry Manilow was sat just in front of me and I was distracted by his whole thing..."
Later that night, Howard threw a Mexican-themed post-Grammy's party, replete with mariachi band, at his Spanish-style villa in the Hollywood Hills, one of the notable features of which is a dark, wood-panelled bar where Hollywood socialites danced the night away on top of his pool table.
"Lindsay Lohan was there apparently," he notes with a combination of mirth and insouciance. "I didn't see her. I'm surprised we let her in, actually."
Theirs, he acknowledges, has been something of the classic showbiz whirlwind romance. Having met briefly in 2007 where Muse were on tour and Hudson was making a film, they got together at the Coachella festival in 2010. Twelve months later they were engaged. In July, the couple were expecting a baby.
At Coachella, the singer initially impressed Hudson with a display of chivalry; she'd lost her friends and he offered to help her find them. "We bumped into each other and we remembered each other and sort of hit it off, y'know," he chuckles. "Pretty instantly, you could say."
Did it in any way remind him of his teenage Reading festival experiences? Did you take her back to your tent?
"[Laughs] On what did we have there? Little cabins. Caravan type things."
Now, of course, the gossip mags frequently depict shots of Bellamy and Hudson shopping or bike-riding in LA, wandering through airport corridors and canoodling at posh al fresco restaurant tables. Does this in any way bend the head of his former Teignmouth boy?
"Well, they're looking at her," he insists. "So it's fine. I don't like looking at it. Some it filters back. Suddenly random people you've never met before start talking about gossipy things. You don't realise until you're in it how much is made up. There's been scathing stuff as well and the whole legal side of it is strange. People can just make up lies about you."
For Howard, Bellamy's LA neighbour, his bandmate's sideline existence as a pap target is clearly the source of some amusement. "Yeah, pictures of Matt on the beach or walking around in his pyjamas," he grins. "It's a bit weird, but that's what happens when you get involved in the Hollywood world. All of a sudden it's a very different kind of thing for him to get used to. It's not something you ever get used to, really. But he's happy."
Bellamy says that hanging out with his future in-laws, Hollywood stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, has given him some insight into how to counter-balance the warped reality of fame with a reasonably normal family life. "Goldie's an amazing woman. Incredibly down-to-Earth, family first, and all that stuff. As a family they are unique from what I've seen, from people I've met out there. It's good not to take all that glamour-y-stuff too seriously. So it's been very nice to be around her."
At the opposite end of the scale, in terms of glamour and sophistication, where his public profile is concerned, is the Facebook fan page set up in honour of Drunk Matt Bellamy, inspired by his wholly bladdered appearance at an awards ceremony in February. In a backstage video interview that inevitably went viral, the singer blows repeated raspberries in Howard's face as he attempts to give a sensible answer to a question, while coping with interjections from Bellamy of the slurred, "Who d'you think you are?" and "Fuck off. you cunt" variety.
"Yeah, that clip of me acting weird and drunk," the frontman notes, with little apparent shame. "Maybe the veil of the band was lifted briefly there. People saw what we were like for real."
"No, not at all," he laughs a touch nervously. "I'd always been a big drinker, pretty much from 16-, 17-years old. But I think being in the band, having it around you all the time and then obviously having the stresses of trying to balance the band and the family life...it was probably around the time of The Resistance where it got quite bad."
As he candidly recounts today, in the manner of someone who has peered into the void and emerged anew, the bassist was killing himself with alcohol. He feels that this was in some way a throwback to the chronic alcoholism that killed his own father at 40. At his worst, Wolstenholme says he would start his day's drinking with a pint glass half filled with spirits, half with squash, before he moved on to an afternoon of constant beers, topped off with two bottles of wine in the evening and another pint of spirit-squash as a nightcap.
"I was actually losing my mind," he says. "I had to drink to get out of bed in the morning. It got to the point one Christmas morning where I was actually puking up blood. But you're so out of it. My rational point at the time was, "Oh, I won't drink spirits today. I'll just drink beer. You just don't think properly. You don't really consider that you're killing yourself."
"Or even if you do," he adds, falteringly, "you get to the point where you just don't care about anything any more."
Matters reached a head while recording The Resistance in 2008, when the bassist was largely absent or drunk in the studio.
"He was definitely a bit vacant around that time," Howard admits. "That was a bit rough on me and Matt. He was definitely a bit drunk doing some of the bass takes."
"The thing with him, though," Bellamy adds, "is he's such a good musician that his motor skills or something just aren't affected. So he would come in and play brilliantly and then we wouldn't see him for a bit. For us, we didn't always notice it as much as we should've. We'd have a great gig and we'd come off and he'd go to his room and we wouldn't really know what was going on. So it took years to actually really notice that behaviour."
Both Bellamy and Howard found it hard to broach the subject with Wolstenholme, although they both say they tried.
"We just didn't know how to deal with it," says the drummer. "Like, why is he taking himself to those kind of levels and those kind of excesses? Sometimes when people have got problems, it can be a bit of an avoidable subject. You want to skip around it. We did confront him with it a few times over the years, but it's something that you don't really know how to go about talking about. Because it can sound like you're just having a go."
For Wolstenholme, turning 30 in December 2008 prompted an emotional crash. "I had my 30th birthday and suddenly realised how unhealthy and unfit I felt. Literally, one day, something just hit me. I had a full meltdown really." Having on one level been self-medicating with alcohol to combat the panic attacks he'd experienced since his teens, when the bassist quit drinking, his anxiety intensified horribly.
"I had about a week of hell," he admits. "Lying in bed. I didn't sleep for four days. Not quite Trainspotting, but it wasn't far off (laughs). I genuinely thought, "I'm fucking dying here. If I ever have moments where I think I want to drink again, I just remember that week and think, Well, either I start drinking again and drink until it kills me, or I have to give up again and go through that again."
When Wolstenholme announced to his bandmates that he'd finally quit drinking prior to the release of The Resistance, it understandably caused a huge wave of relief within Muse.
"We're very happy for him now, very happy that he's come out of the bubble of booze," says Howard, "Because I think he's been living under a dense cloud for about 10 or 12 years, pretty much."
"It's something he came to terms with in his own way," says Bellamy. "He's done very well, y'know. He's been off it for a long time now."
"I'm happier than I have been for a long time," says Wolstenholme. "And I think my relationships with the guys in the band, my relationship with my wife and everybody that I know, maybe the one or two per cent of times where I got stressed out and feel like a drink, the rest of the time I'm actually very, very happy. So it's a kind of no-brainer really."
If from the outside, it appears Muse have enjoyed something of an unblemished rise, the band members themselves admit that it's not always been the case. For all the stadium-proportioned highs, there have been plummeting lows. Howard points to the period around 2006's Black Holes And Revelations, "where we were getting a bit excessive with our consumption of things and we were all just fucked at the end of it." Bellamy, meanwhile, thinks that 2001's Origin Of Symmetry found Muse in their darkest days.
"That was the first time doors started to close," he notes. "We got dropped from the American record label and it wasn't doing that well in certain places, even though it did very well in England. Then we fell out with our manager and ended up going into legal stuff and it cost a lot of money. That was a hard period."
"We were touring so much," Howard points out, "and just taking it all too seriously and getting really stressed out a lot."
In their anger and frustration, Muse would smash stuff up. Bellamy recalls one incident where the band were due to open for Gwen Stefani's punk ska mob No Doubt at an MTV Germany show and were unceremoniously dumped at the last minute. "We ended up trashing everything in the dressing room to the point where we built this weird pyramid of fridges and rider and tables and chairs and just rubbish. Then three or four days later the bill came through." At another gig around the same time, the singer rolled his guitar amp into an onstage mixing deck, totalling it. "We got charged £15,000 for that," he reflects ruefully. "And then we got banned from ever renting gear in the whole of Europe."
Only on a few occasions have intra-band arguments spilled over into actual physical fights. There was the time at Sawmills Studio in Cornwall in 1998 while recording their Muscle Museum EP when intense bickering between the singer and bassist resulted in the latter throwing a chair at the former.
"It was like, Jesus Christ," Bellamy laughs. "I learnt at that point not to mess with that guy. Me and Dom have had playfights which have had weird things going on behind them that end up turning into almost real fights. But it usually ends with him, like, holding my face on the ground or sitting on me, just pinning me down in a position until I calm down. I'm pretty good with verbal fights, but then if I win too many of them, I'll find myself with my face on the ground."
Howard, meanwhile, it undecided as to who might be the top scrapper between himself and the frontman.
"It's probably reasonably even," he mulls, "I can hold him down, but he can get a little bitey. A little bit scratchy".
Chris could probably kick the shit out of both of you, right?
"At the same time. We don't pick many fights with him."
Back inside Big Sky studios, the three members of Muse sit around a table, snacking on sushi and talking about the future. They want to record an "intimate", possibly more Pink Floyd-y-sixth album to perform a worldwide stadium tour (in the US they're currently stuck at arena level); and to take a trip on Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's day-tripping space shuttle.
"We're trying to blag a free trip on it," Bellamy says. "I'm gonna try to convince Richard Branson to let us make a music video or record a song up there. I think that would be cool. Would I be scared? I think I'll be all right."
And so, for the trio, it seems, even the sky is no longer the limit. Alongside Coldplay, Arcade Fire, The Killers and Kings Of Leon, Muse are lining themselves up for the ultimate prize. Biggest band in the world, anyone?
Howard grins, "Well, U2 can't last forever."
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