(MUSE) Axl Meets Muse
MTV
October 2007
(Please note that parts of the video, especially in the earlier stages of the interview. have either been edited, or there is some kind of MTV glitch, which makes parts distorted)
AXL: I gotta start off with first of all, thank you so much, Matt.
MATTHEW: Cheers
AXL: Pleasure. I got to start up okay, rest in peace James Brown, but after hearing all the travel you guys did. Thirty hours from Ukraine to Russia, I am sitting with the hardest working man in show business, Matthew Bellamy of Muse. It's good to have you.
MATTHEW: It's good to be back. It's great to be back.
AXL: We gotta go back in time. I want to talk about, um, you came up...you're all from Devon.
MATTHEW: Yep
AXL: And um, your first show, you had...or...it's probably not your first show, but you had a show as sort of like this band. 'Battle Of The Bands' type of thing.
MATTHEW: Yeah
AXL: You trashed the whole place.
(Footage plays of MATTHEW trashing guitars etc)
(MATTHEW chuckles)
AXL: Uh, you try to make a statement, and after that, you guys won?
MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. It was weird. We were kind of kids. We were like well...we used to have sort of concerts in each others houses. Like, we'd play in the bedrooms or in the living room when our parents were away, we'd have parties, you know. Try and get girls around, get them drunk and that kind of thing. So you know, we really didn't take it too seriously, it was more like just for having fun, but we would always end up in a kind of pile of equipment, like Nirvana style like trashing all the equipment. You know so, we kind of took this on to the stage of our first ever concert, which was a 'Battle Of The Bands' concert, and uh, we kind of did this to kind of sort of uh, take the piss a little bit out of the...out of idea of the competition, but for some reason we won that competition, and I think uh, at that point it changed us because it made us think that maybe we have something else that we can take seriously, not just being stupid.
AXL: You took it pretty seriously, like we're gonna move, we're gonna quit our day jobs. Change the name to Muse, and this is what we're going to do for our life.
MATTHEW: Yeah, that was it. That was when we were probably about sixteen or something, but um...it wasn't really...we were touring for about three or four years. Not touring, but playing concerts in little places around the country. Didn't really make any money, so we still had to have day jobs. I was working as a painter and decorator. Dom was packing Spice Girls t-shirts. Yeah that's pretty sad. Chris was working in a guitar shop, so we kind of had to...we kind of moved away from home when we were about eighteen, and we sort of lived together in various different sort of uh, cheap student type housing for a number of years. But it wasn't really until about 21...2021 that we got a sort of break, and uh we started to sell...we started to sell records in Indie shops, and um, we made our own records and we sold them in our concerts, and uh...
AXL: How did that work for Dom? As you said, he was selling Spice Girls t-shirts?
MATTHEW: Spice Girls t-shirts, yes.
AXL: And then like, one of your first tours was apparently supporting the Spice Girls?
MATTHEW: Uh no, apparently it says this on Wikipedia. I don't know where it came from. I think it was an elaborated story from Dom packing their t-shirts.
AXL: Okay, all right...
MATTHEW: I think we fantasized about touring with them, but we were never lucky enough to be on tour.
(There is a kind of hard edit, and MATTHEW seems to pick up half way through saying something)
MATTHEW:...dull really, pretty boring, but some good things. Some bad things, you know. But mostly bad things. But our first album, I think represents a lot of that frustration. Wanting us to get out. You know.
AXL: Nobody really has a love for the place they were born in.
MATTHEW: Exactly. Yeah. But the love's come back for me now for the first time. I've missed it for the first time, because I've not been there for maybe three or four years.
AXL: You moved to Italy, right?
MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. I lived in London, and Italy now, and I'm actually gonna go back, cos we hear that the town Mayor is going to name the road sign. He's going to put Muse on it, so says "Teignmouth. Home of Muse."
AXL: Oh brilliant. Brilliant.
(ANOTHER hard edit)
AXL:...so the first guitar genius of the 21st century?
MATTHEW (a little embarrassed): I'd never use the word 'genius', no that's an insult...an insult I think to other guitar players.
(HYSTERIA live clip)
MATTHEW: I think I do...I do a few things which may be new, but I don't think there...there's not...it's not very difficult what I do. I think it's very...I...I tend to do things quite in a quite simple way, because....because I'm concentrating on singing, so the guitar playing has to kind of move around the vocals you know? So, whenever I stop singing, I just do something on the guitar. When I'm singing my hands are just kind of automatic, so I don't think...I would never...there's other guitar players, I mean people like Tom Morrello, I regard as genius. You know, maybe...or you know, Jimmy Hendrix. These are the kind of people that...that are in the...in the upper echelons of greatness in guitar playing. I've always found it quite amusing, actually, that people, um, regard me as a good guitar player, because I definitely don't regard myself as a good guitar player. I think maybe, maybe there's some innovations, but not definitely. Technically, I'm not very good at all.
AXL: Tom Morella has like two (then there is another edit which cuts AXL off half way through)…you get successful in awards, like the MTV Awards, how do you sort of uh, when was the first time it hit you when you guys were like, 'Whoa'? What happened?
MATTHEW: Well, it's just uh...I think it takes time, I think it takes a long time to really absorb where yoy are, cuz it's very easy to become detached from the fans, when you're...when sometimes you're playing, and you don't get much time in the city, you're moving on very quickly. Um, but I think this year we've um had much more chance to meet the fans after concerts, and we socialize a lot more, and I think...I think that really is when it starts to dawn on you that you are meeting the people that you are playing for, and especially in far away places like Asia and Australia, and you know, South America, South Africa. These kind of places that we've been to for the first time. Um, you kind of...uh, you really start to feel something from the fans, and uh, you get the idea that music is spreading, you know, outside of where you came from.
AXL: Okay, we talked about...we talked about Showbiz, but it was actually the first album. There was speculations. There was Radiohead, which was obviously an influence on you guys, and um, the first album that really um, really brought you into that light was Origin Of Symmetry, right?
MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah
AXL: And um, you were listening you...you were listening to Jimmy Hendrix, you were listening to Tom Morello, that kind of sound, and it was the first album when...of course people are going to compare who...I mean, you make whatever original, and people are always going to find something. That was the first album that you were compared to like, Queen. That's a big statement right there. But still, you sort of went left in that way?
MATTHEW: I think the band is always...uh, we've always had a lot of different styles, and...and a wide range of sort of the softer and the more harder side of rock music. I think even before the first album. Uh, I think when we were about eighteen/nineteen we were probably more progressive sounding than we are now, but um, when we went to...when we went to make the first album, we were working with producer John Leckie, who actually worked with Radiohead, and I think that we ended up picking a selection of songs which were more like classic song-writing, and not so much the really heavy rock stuff, you know? And I think this was why on the second album, Origin Of Symmetry, we felt that maybe this was a mistake. You know, uh, because we felt it wasn't representing everything of the band. So you know, the second album we made we kind of did the opposite, we did all the songs that were just very rock, you know. So I think that really somewhere in the middle of the first and second album, you can find really, I suppose the...the sound that we have, and I think we found out more so in the third album. Some in the middle of the first.
AXL: Matt is vocals, guitar, keyboards. Dominic, he does keyboards. You all do keyboards as well?
MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah.
AXL: And the three of you make up most of the sounds you do? It's not about bringing in producers. You bring in like a producer, who takes more of a...like an old school producer stand, right? Just check out the...
MATTHEW: More like engineering...
AXL: Exactly, so it's not about actually getting a ready made hit song?
MATTHEW: Yeah...we've always pretty much...I mean the first few albums we did everything ourselves really, and I think um, the...the only outside musicians we have used have been like for if we use orchestration, you know, or strings and stuff, but we've tried on the last, most recent album, Black Holes and Revelations, we tried to kind of like learn about the electronic side a little bit. You know, introducing samples and some synthesizer music, and I think its something that we felt that we'd have to do ourselves in order to make it sound like it comes, you know, from the band, and I think that we've learned a lot on the last album. I think that, hopefully, we'll always be learning new things. I think whenever you're making an album you should always, uh, there should always be some element which is brand new to you, that you have to learn.
AXL: Do you write songs when you are touring, or do you have to have a certain period where you can focus on songwriting?
MATTHEW: Um, I think you...you write songs whenever they come, you know, but I think that they tend to come more often when you take a break, you know, when you take a break from touring, and uh...uh, I think songwriting always comes when you are in situation when you are alone, but it was it was not your choice to be alone, so say for example like you miss a plane or something, you know you're stuck in the airport for four hours. I find myself writing songs very very quickly, you know? Or like your girlfriend. You have a fight with your girlfriend, and she runs away and leaves you for like two days, and you are in the house alone, and it's not your choice you know, whenever you are alone, it's not you're choice to be alone.
AXL: Especially Black Holes and Revelations, just the record art. It's the story of The Four Horsemen, or it's a picture of The Four Horsemen...The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse, right? From the Book of Revelations. And then looking back at the videos, the song, lets say as um, Song For Absolution, there's the story about um, you're flying over to Mars to see what sort of a scene? Tell us about...cuz in your songwriting you're all about um conspiracy theories, about...
MATTHEW: I think...I think sometimes I use like analogies of space to describe big emotions. You know, I think...I think um some people get confused...I think there are some songs which do talk about, you know, some conspiracy stuff. Songs like maybe Take A Bow, talks about the idea that we're kind of led by a group of people, which have a, you know, have a secret agenda which is against what is good for the general public, you know. But in terms of space...when I sing about space and some of these references, I think it's to describe large emotions. Big kind of passionate emotions. I think in in the same way that you know in the 80s, someone would song 'Oh, I'm going to cross the ocean to be with you', 'I'm going to climb the mountain', all this...all this kind of thing. You know, I think for me I'm using like space as a way to describe some larger emotions, you know?
AXL: How do you sort of keep on being influenced? You obviously read a lot. I mean, conspiracy theories; there's a lot of people who publish books nowadays about them, and it seems like I mean, the general public as well they get into it. I mean, looking at sort of 9/11 or how the US Administration or however it works. There's a lot of things ain't really black and white.
MATTHEW: Yeah, it's an interesting time, because I think the...the internet has managed to...lots of information which is not normally available, is now becoming available, you know? I think a lot of people are realizing that a lot of the agendas behind our governments are not really in favour of the public, you know, and I think that this kind of distance between the um, what you are voting for, and then the reality of what happens once you're voted is very far, you know, and I think that for...for young people, they are feeling uh...well, me anyway...I feel a little bit powerless, you know. Like there is nothing that you can really do you know, so you kind of read and you explore, and you try to learn about why we got ourselves into this position, you know? And uh, there's many different explanations you know? Many different conspiracy theorists who explain why things are the way they are, you know? But, but I think it's definitely time...I think, I think if you look through all of it I think you...I, I tend to feel that's its time for things to change and in some way, and I think um, I think...I think the way that um the way that we vote for example has to change. I think the internet should you know...there's a chance for pure democracy now with the internet...you know, I think in England it's so old fashioned you know? You have all these old men sat around in a sort of a...this old bureaucracy style which like dates back to something like the 17th century, and it's not changed at all, but I think with the Internet, I think we can bypass this old fashioned method of having uh, you know, members of Parliament represent you, and you know, cuz I don't think they represent us very well, you know? I think we can represent ourselves better. I think it's just a case of uh...uh, of you know, trying to democratize the internet in someway.
AXL: You performed at the uh, Live 8, there was this case about Nestle. They wanted to use a song, and you refused, and then you came back to it, and you used and then it was a lawsuit, and the money it went straight to the people?
MATTHEW: Correct. Yeah, yeah. But we said no...we said no, but then they did it anyway, you know? Because these companies, because they're so big and so powerful, they think they can fight you, you know? So...so...we...we had a like a lawyer, and we tried to have a battle with them, and it took a long time. But in the end we won, you know, some money. But the money we gave to charity, because were not really wanting the money, we just did it to prove the point.
AXL: Exactly. They can do whatever they want.
MATTHEW: Yeah. But yeah, these big corporations you know...you got to...you got to...fight the power man, got to fight it,
AXL: Dom, it was an in an interview, he spilled the beans. You're working on some new stuff? You're working on a more dance influence album?
MATTHEW: Well, I mean there's plenty...there's always new directions that we have, and it's very difficult to predict what's going to end up on the next album. I think you know there's...I mean...there's some things that I've uh, that we've come up with that are kind of uh more...more...even more symphonic...than what we've done before. More like working with a full orchestra, as opposed to just strings. There's also some electronic more dancy things, maybe something like Goldfrappe or something. More kind of disco...disco orientated, or the BeeGees maybe (laughs). That kind of thing, but like a modern version you know. We...we've always been interested in trying to get this kind of...you know, I really like what Franz Ferdinand do in terms of getting really dancing grooves in with guitar music, you know, so I think uh, we've...we've been trying to gradually bring some of that stuff into our music so, but it's...it's difficult to predict which...if there's going to be...you know, I think...I think our albums always have a mixture of new ideas n them, so I think...I think the next album will probably have at least three or four things which are you know, surprising to the fans, and would not have expected...and then probably, you know, three or four songs which are something traditional, you know?
AXL: How do you sort of work it? Do you have a concept? Do you have some kind theory before you start it, or do you just go into the studio, demo something out, try something out, or how do you...?
MATTHEW: I think...I...I suppose Absolution and Origin of Symmetry are both...were quite conceptual based. I mean, a lot of the songs were themed and had something in common, but I think Black Holes & Revelations, the last album, is kind of more like uh lots of different experiments. Lots of different types of songs. I think maybe it's because of the iPod, uh, the way that I listen to music now. I don't really listen to continuous albums so often. You know, I think I listen to lots of different songs, and I put together playlists, and I think it's changed the way, uh, we create music a little bit. I think...I think it's much more...we feel much more free to uh, to have completely different styles of music on one album, you know? So, I think I'd only do like a continuous album again, if there is a very particular theme, or very particular concept which works throughout the album, but otherwise I think you know, just a collection of really good songs is a good way to do an album.
AXL: It does sort of seem the way like nobody really does albums. The album comes together if it comes together. Also with you guys, um, you took an album and made it into a more bigger experience. I'm talking about Hullabaloo. With the CD and the DVD, and the whole sort of movie. How do you see Muse as a band like that? Did you try to bring that up as well?
MATTHEW: Well I think...I think....I think really, the live thing is where you get to experience the band at it's purest form, you know? I think that you see both the visual performance, and the musical performance, as well as all the kind of video stuff we do. I think the live is always the kind of priority to us, and I think that a lot of people who have got into the band, sometimes they are not really sure about the album, but when they come to see it live, they really start to understand what the band means, you know?
AXL: Definitely, can't wait to see you guys live. They were giving me this side...okay, thank you so much...
(They shake hands)
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