(MUSE) Muse Not To Amuse

Sunday Tribune

Sunday 26th August 2001 

Muse have genuinely become a high profile rock band. But they don't know it. Oh, and they're broke too, moans frontman Matt Bellamy. 

THERE'S a man that thinks that Muse is the worthy successor of Bach. His name is Richard, he's 62, he comes to the band's gigs, but hasn't heard another pop or rock record in years. His house is a classical music library, and he lends the singer piano music to brush up his skills. The members of Muse seem flattered at their place in history: it fits in with everything else about the band that screams: our music is IMPORTANT. 

But even though the single is shooting up the charts, the slick videos are constantly on MTV, and the music is the tortured and ornate seriousness of Mature Artists, at heart Muse is still just a struggling school-boy band - loud, confused and broke. 

  "The weirdest thing about all this? Honestly? Lack of cash," scowls singer and songwriter Matt Bellamy, shivering with cold in a backstage festival portacabin, clutching a can of beer. "It's a long story, it involves videos and deals and festivals. To me that's the oddest thing about it all."

  Defiantly cocky, the Muse members are known for being difficult interviewees, yet they still don't really know what direction to head in next. They seem far less sure-footed once they have dropped the exuberant front, and they don't even know how famous they are. If I am amazed at the fact that they don't have folding wads spilling from every pocket, it is nothing to the band members' reaction when I tell them that they are doing rather well. They are genuinely, and touchingly, surprised to hear that they have become a high profile rock band. 

  "It's relatively impossible to know what you're doing, which may be the industry's major cruel trick it's playing on its artists. You can watch MTV and get a feel, but all you ever hear from your record people, business partners and the people who're here for the money is, 'it's not good enough', that's all you ever hear, 'it's not good enough'. 

  But Muse has been quite good enough for a legion of rock fans so far, fans who have embraced the band as an alternative to the empty headed simplicity of US college rock flooding the rock sections of record shops. Muse have brought a highly worked complexity to the power trio format, adding layer after layer of rich sound until the air is overloaded with thick dense suffocating sound. The band members are aware that they might be losing their raw edge by such production trickery. 

  "I'm thinking about the way the next album will go," says Matt turning to the other members for discussion as if there isn't a journalist in the room at all. "We could go further down the road of production, being experimental with sounds or we could go [makes big guitar sound] this is what we've been all along. The third album we might just work out a song and play it the three of us and just wait until the guy captures it in one live performance. Part of me is thinking that might be the way to do the third album. I'm not sure what the best thing would be to do in the future."

  The band might be wise to change. The new album, Origin of Symmetry, descends effortlessly at times into a parody of pomp rock, with cathedral organs, cellos and the odd quick drop into half tempo to add extra emphasis. I half expect the three rather well-spoken young men from the English commuter belt to break into giggles and tell me it has all been a gag, an arch parody.

But they couldn't be more serious. 

  "The philosophy that went along with the album was the appreciation of history. On this album I wanted to make a lot of depth, I wanted to use what is extremely modern, and what is extremely old, missing out everything in between. I tried to create something that had a sense of being beyond one lifetime," says Matt. He is a slightly aggressive joker, challenging you to pick him up when he is parodying himself or you, like a teenager testing a new teacher. But when it comes to his music, Bellamy switches to a serious deadpan, and talks about the importance of the music and it's pan-historical potential with an entirely straight face. 

  Both Matt and drummer Dom Howard look like rock stars, but unassuming bass player Chris Wolstenholme doesn't even look like one of Muse's fans, never mind a band member. He looks like an ordinary 22-year old, and provides a deflating counterfoil to Bellamy's musical and descriptive excesses. Straight after Matt's flight of historical fancy, I ask how the band resolves their studio complexity with the need to get punters to jump around. How do they walk that tightrope? 

  "I think we can do it because we're a three piece," says Chris, and leaves it at that. "Yeah," adds Dom, after a pause. It feels a little like Spinal Tap.

  Seriousness is certainly a major Muse trait, and neither humour nor light-heartedness make any kind of appearance on Origin Of Symmetry. Radiohead is the band Muse is most commonly compared to, but they share not only the dense, rich textures, but also the producer who makes them, John Leckie. But Muse is so serious that even Radiohead members are quoted as saying that they should lighten up.

  "The whole thing about lightening up is that when people see us live they see we are in touch with the over-the-topness, we become what's inside us, you become ridiculously aggressive, forward people, which you can't be in normal life," says Matt. "The thing I enjoy the most is playing live, the chance to release all inhibitions and say, like it or lump it, this is how I am. At points in time I've had grandiose philosophies but they always go out the window when I'm on stage. There's only so much you can philosophise and think before you think 'hang on, I'm in a band - I should be getting laid'.

  Muse used to be simpler, used to make less use of overplayed intensity. The band's first success was winning a battle of the bands competition six years ago against more proficient groups. 

  "We were up against all these funk bands who were technically amazing, and when I joined the band it was the first time I'd really played the bass," says Chris. "Matt wasn't that good, but we got up and put loads of make-up on and smashed our gear up and somehow won the competition and realised that it wasn't all about technical genius, it was about feel and stuff."

  But all this overwrought, overplayed, over-the-top rock is slightly familiar. The excess, the intense seriousness, the po-faced earnestness is all, in fact, unbelievably camp. Add in the screaming guitars and you have a band that is perhaps closer to Queen than it is to Radiohead. 

  "That's cool, I've never thought of that," says Matt. "It's a sign of the times. None of us are gay, but none of us are embarrassed about expressing the feminine side of being male [he giggles embarrassedly]. I think that's quite fun. I sing like a girl and I couldn't give a shit, that's what I' saying. But over the top stuff is expressing something that is inside every human being on the planet, but sexism has said that was female; we are expressing those uncertainties in music."

  As ever, Matt has a theory at hand about the all consuming importance of his music, but he will soon have to decide whether to abandon these theories for good and simply rock out on the next album. I think Chris would look forward to that.

Article by Matthew Magee