MUSE: Cold gold live in Iceland
March 2004
Stunning. Glacial. Weird. Muse and Iceland are made for each other.
They like to do things their own way in Iceland. For example, in a bid to keep their language as pure as possible, a committee of linguistic experts routinely set about renaming foreign inventions using Icelandic words. As such, fax machine is known as "bréfasími" (literally "letter telephone") and omelette became "eggiakaka" ("egg cake"), They've yet to be asked to come up with a word to described Muse's demented pomp-rock, but a girl in tonight's audience called Bjossa reckons "trufla" might be a good one. It means, roughly, "mentally disturbed, in a good way".
British bands don't often come to Iceland. It's too much hassle getting all the equipment over. Coldplay played in 2001, and Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple dropped by in the '70's. Understandably, when bands do turn up it's a big deal. Even at £35 a throw, all 6000 tickets for tonight's show at the vast Laugardalshöll handball stadium - went in 20 minutes. Statistically, that means one in 25 of Reykjavik's population are here tonight. But, given that none of them appear to be over 21, it's possible that every kid in the city is a Muse fan. Either that or they just fancy a night out for once. "We like Muse because they are real," explain Jón and Hulda, a blonde couple loading up on Sprite and Domino's pizza in the "bar" (alcohol is banned from the venue: 50 years ago beer was illegal everywhere in Iceland). "Muse talk about the future," says Ragnar, in his Nirvana t-shirt. "They are fucking awesome."
Of course, Iceland's bizarre climate is just the right backdrop for Muse's biblical bombast. "It's real extremes," singer Matt Bellamy will say later on. "Hot liquid coming from the ground and loads of ice and glaciers. We love it here."
Icelanders might roll their eyes when yet another tourist exclaims that the landscape looks "just like the moon", but really there is no better cliché; volcanic, virtually treeless and frozen Persil white at -4ºC. It's a little wonder Laugardalshöll quite possibly boasts the world's largest cloakroom. Today, the sun rose at 11.25am, glowed weekly for a bit, and pushed off back to bed around half two in the afternoon. After that, darkness.
If the Foreign Words Embargo Committee have done a fine job of keeping the language essentially the same since Viking times 1300 years ago, Iceland would also do well to keep their gene pool to themselves. With Hollywood cheekbones, Timotei hair and Karen O's clothes, tonight's audience could have come en masse from castings at Models 1. And that's just the boys.
MUSE PLAY for an hour and a half, their set drawn mostly from the recent Absolution album. Previously, they've drawn criticism in the UK for being too silly, and been dismissed as a sort of histrionic Radiohead knock-off. The rest of Europe, however, has always been more partial to a bit of goth and drama and tonight's loudest screams - though there's not much in it - go to 1999's Muscle Museum and 2001's Plug In Baby singles.
He sounds a bit ridiculous too, screaming in falsetto, mostly about the end of the world and the coming Apocalypse, Absolution's recurring theme. It's all Greenpeace car bumper sticker wisdom - our time is running out, you've got to change the world etc - and Bellamy's never going to win the Jarvis Cocker Award for Sensitive Lyrics, but then that's not really the point. Muse are rock's equivalent of Brian Blessed in the movie Flash Gordon: they descend upon you, roaring.
Just when you think it can't get any sillier, three screens appear and show outer space rushing past, then the sun, some clouds and the Alps. It's rather like watching pantomime, a metal gig and the Living Planet all at the same time. And it's brilliant.
They encore with Stockholm Syndrome.
Two grand's worth of confetti blows out stage left and right and half a dozen 10-foot tall balloons get bounced around the auditorium.
"We have been accused of being over the top," says Bellamy, 20 minutes later, crumpled into a couch backstage alongside bass player Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dom Howard. "And there is a lot of doom in our music, but we're also trying to get hope across too. It's like. Our time is limited, so lets enjoy it." He thinks about this. "Basically, human beings have fucked it. But we've had a go. We got further than other civilisations. Yay hay!"
Indeed, far from being the portentous sourpusses song titles such as Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist lead you to expect, the boys of Muse turn out to be surprisingly jolly. They goof about, chucking Doritos at each other and amusing themselves with a pineapple and some bananas from their rider. Frankly, they don't look old enough to be in the audience, let alone onstage. Then they tell their Celine Dion story.
"She's doing a residency in Las Vegas and she wanted to call it Celine Dion Muse," explains Howard. "Our lawyers had to put a stop to it. It looked like we were her support band. Or her backing band."
"Which," says Bellamy. "I would actually have done. Imagine - we'd have a nice Las Vegas hotel, get paid more and I reckon we could have done a decent rendition of that Titanic song. It's got a good chord structure."
If this is the end of the world, then Muse are clearly feeling fine. The following day, the band spend the rest of their time in Iceland, taking om the scenery and bombing around the glacier at 60mph on Skidoos, investigating a giant waterfall and, at geothermal spa The Blue Lagoon, rolling around in the snow then diving in the water while laughing at my swimming trunks. "Trufla" indeed.
(Article by Johnny Davis)
SETLIST
Apocalypse
Hysteria
New Born
Sing 4
Thoughts
Citizen Erased
Piano Interlude
Space Dementia
Endlessly
Sunburn (P)
Butterflies
Micro Cuts
Forced In
Muscle Museum
Bliss (Short Version)
T.I.R.O
Plug In Baby
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Blackout
Stockholm Syndrome
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