(MUSE) Resistance is FUTILE
Q Magazine
October 2009
Paul Rees Issue Introduction
"The apocalypse is coming.
At least so says Matt Bellamy, who is, as this months cover line reveals, hunkering down with an over-supply of baked beans and a chopper in preparation for our planet's impending doom. But then, as we shall see, he also believes that the human race is enslaved to aliens and dear old Queen Liz is a lizard. While all of this might suggest the wee fella is not playing with anything like a full deck, it is terrifically entertaining stuff nonetheless"
There are those who thought Muse could get no more OTT and their singer Matt Bellamy is no stranger. They were wrong.
"What you do is lift its beak upwards and snap the neck backwards," he says, breaking the stick at what would presumably be the chicken-neck level. "But the important thing is to feel it. You are killing an animal. For food."
Bellamy did this for the first time at home in Devon at the end of last year. He had "rescued" several birds from a local battery farm that no longer wanted them and "gave them a good life." Then on Christmas Day, he killed two of them and cooked them for lunch for his mother, girlfriend and other assorted family members.
"There's guilt," he says in a pensive, man-must-kill-to-survive tone. "But I just don't believe you can leave the responsibilities to the supermarket chains. Killing your own animals connects you to real life and everyone could do with a bit of that. It may become important."
Sitting on a sofa with his broken "chicken", Bellamy exudes the air of pig-shit splattered "real foodie" Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall-meets-post-apocalyptic-scavenger. As well as the poultry, his Devon home is also "30 to 40 per cent self-sufficient in vegetables", the singer growing them in an allotment by the side of his house. It's all part of what he calls "preparing". And given these strange times of eco demise, terrorist threat, financial meltdown and pandemic frenzy, who can blame him? Recently Bellamy's geo-political jitteriness was so overwhelming that he decided to take more extreme action. Reasoning that tinned food will last up to two years, he went to his local store and bought the entire stock of baked beans, 50 tins in all. Then he went to a hardware shop and bought an axe.
"I read somewhere that a seven-day blockade and the UK would run out of oil," he said intently. "Another seven days and we'd run out of food. That's why I bought the beans. The axe would chop the firewood."
Bellamy's long-term girlfriend, Gaia Polloni, is a psychologist. When she found out what he was doing she urged him to take a more rational perspective. The tipping point came when he was thinking about buying a crossbow.
"She's Italian. They've seen it all there, haven't they? The Roman Empire came and went. She's more laid-back about history and politics. But to me it all feels so tenous sometimes. Especially in the UK. We are an island, and we're vulnerable."
Thankfully, Bellamy's survivalist skills are not required today. We are sitting at the opulent rooftop bar of Madrid's De Las Letras Hotel. A balmy breeze blows. The sun burns at 34 degrees. On the table in front of us sits a lunch of fine hams, succulent tortilla and exquisite pastries, none of which we have killed or grown ourselves. Bellamy's boyish face looks crumpled and pale, though. He slumps sideways on to the sofa for support, clad in black cords and a green t-shirt that reads "Death For Fun." This languor is not entirely down to the imminent apocalypse. He arrived on a flight from Oslo in the early hours and went out drinking. He is not a regular drinker, and after seven vodka tonics he was surprised to find himself on the dancefloor boogieing to The Jacksons. This morning he woke up and vomited, before finally rousing himself for our interview.
"It's the new album," he says. "I've been around Europe talking about it. I suppose it's quite dense and heavy subject matter. I needed a release. Vodka and The Jacksons were it, but I'm paying the price now."
Few bands have embraced the job of soundtracking the end of the world with quite so much relish as Muse. For years they were a cultish rock act whose knack for radio hits has helped keep prog concerts and operatic flourishes largely under control.
All that changed with their fourth album, 2006's baroque, portentous prog-rock-disco-metal opus Black Holes & Revelations. That record found them embracing everything that was epic, histrionic and occasionally camp about rock, then dialling it up several notches further. Live shows were no less restrained, not least their two watershed gigs at Wembley Stadium in 2007, a full on sensory assault featuring NASA-style lighting rigs, huge video screens and dancers hanging off giant balloons. It's typical of Bellamy that he talks today of the shows being "ever so slightly compromised", pointing out that they wanted a helicopter to swoop over the audience with acrobats descending on ropes until Health & Safety put a stop to it.
Remarkably, The Resistance tops even that for sheer grandiosity. Futuristic, operatic and quite possibly barking mad, it's the sound of a band walking the line between convention and folly. It features an orchestra, air combat sound effects, a llama's toenail (stimulating the sound of camel hooves) and, in the shape of final track Exogenesis, a three-part, 15 minute symphony.
"I wanted The Resistance to be a culmination of everything we knew about music," says Bellamy. "Every style we have ever played. Every idea we have ever had."
Given their fondness for monumental statements, it's no surprise that a loose concept narrative threads through The Resistance. Setting a microcosmic romance against bigger themes of socio-political turmoil and impending doom, takes a large scale civil unrest (album opener Uprising), the rise of an imagined geo-strategic superpower (United States of Eurasia), and the eventual abandonment of the planet (the aforementioned Exogenesis). It's George Orwell scored by Queen, or Green Day's American Idiot if the protagonists had ended up on Mars.
With the sun high in the sky, Bellamy puts on a pair of white Prada shades that make him look half rock-star, half giant fly. With his scattergun verbal delivery and shrill manic laugh, he comes over like a crackpot professor who has tried one too many of his own potions. Q tells him The Resistance sounds like the last broadcast from a desperate planet.
"No," he says carefully, as though trying not to disturb his own hangover. "Defiant. A defiant planet. We can fight back. And we will. But The Resistance is supposed to be less about conspiracy and the fantastical than the rational and the real. It's hopeful and positive. I have been through periods where I've felt quite paranoid about the world. But I also believe in the power of people and (their) love to change things. There is a romance to fighting back against malevolent interests. The last album was dark and angry. This is all about resisting the corporate-ocracy."
Muse have been fighting a kind of rearguard action ever since they met as teenagers in the rock wasteland of Teignmouth, Devon, in the early 90's. Back then Bellamy. drummer Dom Howard, and bassist Chris Wolstenholme, were students at Teignmouth Community and Coombeshead college, and members of different bands. The one thing they had in common was that none of them wanted to sound like Nirvana.
"Being in a rock band was an act of rebellion at the time," recalls Howard. "Everyone was into dance and rap. But within the rock clique there was a great resistance to trying new ideas."
Bellamy and Howard are boyish indie kids; both slight and fine-featured, they possess a startling resemblance to each other. Wolstenholme is taller and burlier. From a distance they look like two funky estate agents and a removals man.
When Q meets Wolstenholme for a coffee earlier in the day, it is clear that he is not animated by apocalyptic worries. Fag-smoking blokieness is his calling card. He has his children's names tattooed on his arms and back. He likes to go and see his beloved Rotherham United play (he was born there). You can imagine going for a pint with him and at no point in the evening would he try to convince you that the pork scratchings had been bugged by the CIA. It is entirely in character that he was initially the drummer in a Teignmouth band called Fixed Penalty. He was eventually kicked out for being into Status Quo.
"We were shit," he says with an amiable shrug. "Everybody wanted to be Nirvana. There was nothing original going on at all."
Dom Howard's family moved to Devon from Stockport after his dad landed a job making bishop's robes in the town. Anticipating the Muse ethos, he formed a band called Gothic Plague. At the same time, Bellamy, whose own family had moved from Cambridge, was serving his guitar apprenticeship in a band called Carnage Mayhem.
"My band was cooler and so Matt left his to join me," says Howard.
Bellamy rocked the Gothic Plague boat by suggesting they wrote their own songs. The other members left. Bellamy, previously just a guitarist, became a singer and songwriter too.
"I realty didn't want to," he says, "We couldn't find anyone else to be in our band. That sense of being a reluctant frontman has stayed with me."
Wolstenholme followed shortly, and it was only once the trio gelled that they realized the common factor: they were all interlopers in the town.
"I wouldn't say it was a 'redneck' attitude but people would say, You're not from round 'ere, are you?" says Bellamy. "It can't be a total coincidence that we formed a band made up of misfits."
It wasn't all plain sailing, Wolstenholme remembers an early gig at the Cavern Club in Exeter where Bellamy could barely make eye contact with the crowd and mumbled the words to his songs. Afterwards, the sound engineer told Howard and Wolstenholme they should get a new singer. The criticism had an extraordinary effect.
"The next gig Matt opened his mouth and we could not believe the sound he made. He had this powerful clear voice. It was like he'd gone home and thought. Right you bastards, I'll show you."
In many ways, Bellamy is an unlikely rock star. While he's polite and self-deprecating, there's an undercurrent of neurotic intelligence, a sense that he's constantly trying to work everything out.
"My mum says I've always needed an explanation for motives for things," he says. "When I was four or five and learning to write, she says I used to throw the pen on the floor and shout. But why?. I want to decipher the motives and the beneficiary behind things. Like Catholicism. Is it about God? No. It strikes me as more likely being about power, money and child abuse."
When his burgeoning musical talent made him prime candidate for the role of frontman, he didn't feel he had anything of himself to put into his songs, reasoning that "no one would think I was interesting." Instead he resorted to books and theories for material.
"I usually get passed the conspiracy books Matt reads when he's done," says Howard. "I think we are all aware that the world operates in weird ways. It's not simply paranoia. And I think Matt does write in a personal way. He imagines real people in surreal environments really well."
Wolstenholme, on the other hand, says he had no idea what United States of Eurasia was about until he stepped into a studio booth to record backing vocals. "It's Matt's business" he says gruffly. "As long as he's not offending anyone." But he is still sometimes taken aback. There is one track on the new album called Unnatural Selection that Wolstenholme thinks may address the idea that the Royal Family are actually descendants of giant lizards, a theory proposed by former football-pundit-turned-conspiracy-theory-poster-boy David Icke, among others.
There are, says Bellamy, several factors that have shaped his worldview, one of which is the West Country itself. The singer songwriter insists Devon and Cornwall have quietly doubled as a giant nuclear bunkers over the years.
"During the Cold War, people moved there in expectation of major cities being hit by a nuclear bomb," he says, "There's a strong sense among some people down there that they want to get away from mainstream life. We're cut off. We're going it alone. Maybe that comes through in what we do."
And then there are the magic mushrooms.
The singer recoils at the idea of hard drugs today, but hallucinogenics played a part in shaping the teenage Matt Bellamy's vision.
"I did mushrooms four or five times when I was 14 or 15," he says. "You get really good ones on Dartmoor. Looking at trees and nature on mushrooms is incredible. Total heightened awareness. And you think, if the world can look so different, then all perception is construct. I was a couple of trips from becoming John Lennon and sitting on the bed in the nude, and talking about peace."
Earlier this year, Wolstenholme was back in Teignmouth clearing out an old lock-up garage that he uses for storage. In it he found a box containing videotapes. One of them showed an early Muse gig at the Cavern Club in Exeter. He watched it and was about to turn it off when the video ran into a grainy recording of Wolstenholme and Bellamy sitting in the former's kitchen table, aged 14, discussing the meaning of life.
"We sat there all night recording it," the bassist says. "I think Matt nearly got there, to the ultimate meaning, but then the tape runs out. Annoying."
Eleven AM on a weekday morning and half of Milan seems to be lounging on chairs outside pavement cafes. Inside the dark, tatty building that houses the Officina Mechanique studio, the atmosphere is less relaxed. Matt Bellamy and Dom Howard are here to oversee one of the final recording sessions for The Resistance. They're joined by 23 members of Milan's finest classical musicians, who are rifling through sheets of paper featuring the sort of impenetrable notation only classical musicians can understand. Meanwhile technicians battle to re-boot the 100 track recording desk computer, which has just crashed, partly because Bellamy and company are trying to feed guitar and drum solos, classical piano and towering Queen-style harmonies through it.
As we wait, a young viola player comes across to ask Bellamy for his autograph. Perhaps more used to the staid classical concert environment, she seems genuinely charged by the idea of recording with a rock band. Q asks her if she is a particular fan of Muse. She says that she is, "And" she adds, "also many times we are playing the music of composers who is, how you say...dead."
Dead composers are a subject close to Matt Bellamy's heart. As well as his house in Devon, he also lives in a villa by Lake Como, just north of Milan, that was once inhabited by 19th century composer, Vincenzo Bellini. The singer has soaked up the influences; a hint of Bellini's Casta Diva is even discernible in the waltz-time strings of United States of Eurasia. But his relationship with the ghosts of the classical world goes further. When he sits up late into the night playing Chopin on his piano, he says he sometimes feels as though the great classical pianist is actually there with him.
"My girlfriend says this is a mild schizoid experience," he says. "Rationally, I know he's not there, but it can get very creepy knowing you're playing something composed centuries before."
This supernatural classical influence has bled into The Resistance. Today, the orchestra will add Arabian-flavoured strings to United States of Eurasia, a song conceived on an epic scale even by Muse standards. A rallying cry for the "Eurasian" land mass that stretches from Portugal in the West to Japan in the East to unite, it develops into a faux national anthem before culminating in a sombre Chopin-esque piano sonata called Collateral Damage. Only Muse could write a soundtrack for the rise and fall of a fictious empire in four minutes. As the tape plays, the speakers bulge with martial cries of "Eurassssia!!"
"Not everyone gets the Monty Python aspect to our music but it's there," says Howard. "There are some serious ideas, but a lot of the musical accompaniment and flourishes are done in a spirit of fun. We are often laughing as we record."
Bellamy has written the score himself, though today it is orchestra conductor Audrey Riley who is shuttling from sound room to recording desk ensuring the notes are interpreted properly. The musicians have had barely five minutes to sight read the score before recording it. Bellamy bobs around the mixing deck excitedly, all smart-checked grey trousers, Chelsea boots and multi-directional hair.
Riley says the eerie string section has a "Mahler quality." If Bellamy is flattered by the comparison to the symphonic 19th century composer he doesn't show it, preferring instead to bite into his cheese sandwich as he makes notes on his score. The Resistance boasts many such classical flourishes not least on the climatic Exogenesis, which finds Earth's population leaving the planet for good as Bellamy plaintively pleads, "You must save us all."
"I'm imagining the moment when people or perhaps just scraps of human DNA are sent to Mars or elsewhere to start again," he explains. "But the theory of exogenesis actually explores the idea that we evolved on another planet and came here later."
There is unfinished family business here.
Bellamy's father, George, was the guitarist in '60's band The Tornados, who enjoyed a huge international hit with Telstar, named after the groundbreaking telecommunications satellite launched in July 1962. Produced by tortured visionary Joe Meek, it became the first US number 1 by a UK group. But The Tornados' moment of glory was short-lived and George Bellamy left the music business and later became a plumber.
"That is something I've thought about," says Bellamy, Jr today "It is eerie. Before my parents split, my dad's record collection was a major inspiration. They wrote about a satellite, which was major news back then. Fifty odd years on and we're discussing extra Earth colonisation and it doesn't seem that far off. The fact that NASA are talking about a Mars landing means all those
'60's sci-fi shows have now become almost science reality."
"It's a beautiful part of the world," says Bellamy wistfully. "Lisst and Chopin composed there. And Winston Churchill was supposed to have taken a two-week break from World War 2 to paint there, too."
"Nice lake, nice house," adds Howard with a snigger. "So yeah, it's a good place to imagine a 1984 style cataclysm."
Matt Bellamy has established himself as rock's chief agitator against a sinister, omnipresent "Them". But unusually for a premier league stadium band Muse have overtly never backed a major political cause. What exactly do they stand for? Back on the roof in Madrid, Q offers Bellamy some random rock band associations. U2: drop world debt. Coldplay: eat Fairtrade bananas. Radiohead: Recycle. What about Muse? The answer is surprisingly prosaic.
"I've held off backing a cause like Bono or Chris Martin", he says. "They do a great job but I'm not naturally good with attention. I feel I'd look an idiot being a spokesman. But I'd be happy for a track like Uprising to be associated with a campaign for the House of Lords reform. It's unbelievable the second chamber is unelected in the age of internet. So yeah...constitutional reform."
As I watch two twin suns begin to dip in the lenses of his wrap-around shades, Bellamy starts to look like an intergalactic life form, albeit one who wants to find his manager so he can send out for some Neurofen Plus. But it's clear single-issue politics are not really his thing. It's more a general sense of human crisis that troubles and inspires him.
"I think we are a generation who have not really been tested in the way that wartime generations were," he says. "I sometimes feel we've had it too easy. My nan is 97 and she used to hoard food. There are things she knew that we don't. Resistance was a concept that was very real to her generation and it should be for ours."
Matt Bellamy may be unsure of the world's long-term future, but he's got plans for Muse's own medium-term trajectory. There is, he says, another epic live concept in the pipeline. Set designers from the opera world are hard at work creating what he calls "a multi-platform totalitarian world." It has whiffs of doom mongering, but Bellamy's take on worldwide-conflagration will be a lot more fun.
"It's not about a grim battle for survival," he notes. "It's about a resistance you will be proud and uplifted to join."
The interview is done. He's ready to leave to meet with members of Muse's management team to discuss the recruitment of "secret agents" for a global internet treasure hunt that involves a series of hidden USBs containing partial clues allowing the United States of Eurasia to be downloaded for free. Later still, he will meet the other band members for an evening meal. But its been a long day. In all likelihood, on this occasion the food will have been killed for him.
Links
Comments
Post a Comment