magazine Muse in Q Magazine on 28th August

[Tofu]

 

IF you'd floated the idea to any of his mid-'90s peers back in Teignmouth that Matt Bellamy, fledgling frontman of local indie-rock combo Gothic Plague, would one day have any platform for self-expression in the wider world, they would've laughed you out of town. And probably given you a kicking into the bargain.

 

Muse have often talked of how their isolated upbringing in South Devon gave them the impetus to excel and escape. They were each born elsewhere in the country, and after their respective families moved to the South West each felt an outsider in their hometown—not least because of the ever-present threat of violence on its deserted streets.

 

Bellamy's father had "rock previous" as rhythm guitarist in The Tornados, protégés of doomed producer Joe Meek, and famed for 1962 Number 1 Telstar. Bellamy Sr quickly crashed back to reality as a cab-driver, and eventually settled his family in Cambridge. Soon after the move to Teignmouth, he and Bellamy's mother divorced. Matt, aged 10, was heading towards a wayward adolescence.

 

The first time the teenaged Dom Howard met Matt Bellamy, his future bandmate was wearing a pink florescent Umbro shellsuit and had a flat-top haircut, army-style. Bellamy's gang was called The Sports and Howard's were the Indie Kids, all long hair, DM boots and baggy, colourful trousers—the '90s look. "Matt was in a band at the time, playing mainstream pop, like fucking Dire Straits," Howard recalls. "Really uncool. He'd not even been exposed to the indie-rock stuff that we were into like Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Senseless Things."

 

The next time they met, at Bellamy's house, Howard started playing albums for Matt and asking him to play on guitar. The kid with the horrible shellsuit proved to be a talented musician. Howard drafted him into his band Gothic Plague. "It was like, I know you look weird, but you're a good guitarist, so I'm sure we can get along."

 

This was about 1993, when Chris Wolstenholme was playing drums in Mega City Four soundalikes Fixed Penalty.The future members of Muse were effectively driven together by circumstance. They were the only kids in town serious about making a go of music. Cue, as Howard summarises, "five years of farting around in crap clubs in Devon".

 

If you ask them today how they've held it together so long, they all point to those five years as bonding them more tightly than your average fly-by-night London group. Muse had to develop a colossal collective self-belief just to get noticed.

 

Bellamy had to grow into the frontman role. "He never wanted to be a singer," says Howard. "He felt like he had to sing because no one else wanted to." And Bellamy himself admits he was close to straying from the path of destiny.

 

"My teenage years were pretty chaotic," he says. "By 17, 18, I was living with a close friend, who became a drug dealer and went to prison. Looking back, I was very close to slipping down that road. Being in the band was very cathartic for me."

 

A crunch time came circa 1997, when many of their friends went off to university. Bellamy, Wolstenholme and Howard stayed put. They'd talked about it, even thought of trying to get into the same place. "But by that time we'd already been together for three or four years," says Wolstenholme, "And we all had it in our minds that music was something that we were gonna do."

 

Times were liean, until a series of lucky breaks—a free session at the local Sawmills studio, a gig at Manchester A&R-fest In The City, a showcase in a breathing space and accumulated confidence, that Muse stepped up a gear.

 

"I'd been quite an introverted person in those early years of the band," Bellamy reflects. "I was actually having a lot of trouble coming out of myself. Over the course of the first three albums, I gradually opened up, and something came out of me—a strange level of confidence that I didn't even know was there. In live performances, there was just a desire to smash this shy person."

 

Howard remembers his friend as carrying the whole world on his shoulders, and asking difficult questions of himself. In the mid-noughties Muse considered splitting up.

 

DOMINIC Howard is probably his generations paragon of guilt-free stardom. He is sometimes completely Spinal Tap without even realising it. "Roger Taylor [Queen's drummer] once said to us, Have a good time, all the time," he says, "and we really took that on board". Wen Q tells him that this is the self-same advice offered by Tap's keyboard player Viv Savage during the movie's end credits, he nods as if to say: exactly.

 

At the Chateau Marmont, Howard sprawls amiable on the banquette—blue eyes, blond hair, lightly suntanned, shades on, sporting a designer goth crucifix T-shirt. He is a man unequivocally home with the LA lifestyle, apparently immune to jet-lag. Doesn't it get draining flying back and forth between London and Los Angeles? "Nothing a couple of Moscow Mules won't sort out," he replies.

 

Howard loves LA: the rock and roll spirit, the Strip and Hollywood, the rock clubs that will never be shut down. "They're not gonna knock down the Rainbow like they did to the Astoria [in London], just to build a Tube station, are they?" he enthuses. "And, small and crap as The Viper Room is, it's still historic. That feeling and ideal still really exists in this town, and that's why I love it. [bellamy interjects that Howard has become friends with Axl Rose's "fixer", the guy who fixes Axl up with women and other essentials on the tour. "I think Dom's prone to becoming Axl," Bellamy smiles. "He definitely lives Axl's lifestyle."]

 

Howard is the one who staunchly pushed for Muse to expand its musical vision and its horizons in terms of venues. But his character and drive were sorely tested in an unimaginable few hours when the band headlined a night at Glastonbury 2004.

 

"It was just one of those nights where all three of us were bang up for showing everybody how fucking good we were," remembers Chris Wolstenholme. "It turned out to be one of the best gigs we'd ever done. We came offstage, we had our families there and were literally doing cartwheels, even though it was muddy. Then the next minute, we heard that Dom's Dad had collapsed."

 

Within an hour Howard's 62-year-old father, Bill, who'd been suffering from a heart condition, was pronounced dead. "It was an extreme high to an extreme low, very hard to deal with," says Howard, adding with a sad smile, "at least he saw a good one." The band cancelled their immediate engagements and Howard went back to his family in Teignmouth to grieve. A couple of weeks later he was back on the road.

 

"You can't do anything about it," he explains today. "The only thing that'll help matters is time. Family and friends were all saying to me, You're going to feel better if you move on with your life. Get back to work—which for me is playing music. It didn't feel I was being disrespectful in any way."

 

After 10 years' active service, they were still only in their mid-20s but carrying their fair share of war wounds. So Muse soldiered on. From the beginning the very key to their success was their willingness to tackle the lunacy of post-millenial tour scheduling head on.

 

After all they'd been through, Howard for one had no qualms about acclimatizing to the stadium milieu. Bellamy notes that when Muse were preparing for their virgin appointment at Wembley in summer 2007, Howard had fully embraced the concept, and was already dreaming of the day he could employ his own "sweat towel tech" to mop his brow through the show.

 

"The first night was just mindblowing" Howard states proudly, "We got out of there, I went back to my flat and by one in the morning, I was in bed staring at the ceiling going, "What the hell just happened?" Pause. "The party was on the second night, obviously..."

 

Obviously.

 

[Tofu]

 

SIZE has always mattered to Muse, but in their headlong rush for success, there has been one counter-intuitive "real" force at work. At times, it has brought chronic pressure into their mix, but it has also possibly rescued the band from disappearing up their own supermassive black hole. Chris Wolstenholme, their comparatively towering bassist—he's a good four or five inches clear of Bellamy and Howard—was already in a stable relationship before their career had ventured beyond the Devon border.

 

"It was good meeting my soulmate that early," Wolstenholme explains, "Kelly knew me well before the and was big, and I'd never be able to have that again with anybody else." This tested his relationship with the band early on, when Kelly fell pregnant in 1999. "What are you doing?" said the band, "We've just signed a record deal!" But there was no choice: tour, or give up your ambitions. Wolstenholme decided to balance band and family. By the end of the Absolution tour in 2004, he had two boys and a girl, all still resident in Teignmouth with mum, now Mrs Wolstenholme, while Dad bestrode the Earth like a rock colossus. "I was never at home," he admits, "I didn't want to leave the band, but I got ot a point where I was struggling."

 

His way of coping, chiefly, was booze.

 

"It wasn't a glamourous lifestyle thing," he says, "It was pure dependency, I never want onstage 100 per cent sober. I always drank five or six beers beforehand. I never felt like, Yeah, I'm a fucking rock star. If anything it was something that pulled me away from rock and roll." Wolstenholme would go missing a lot, or just sit in his flat drinking rather than go to the studio. "I don't think I realised how much it affected Matt and Dom, my wife, my kids."

 

One of his therapists told him that his addictive personality is a genetic problem. Wolstenholme agrees. His father was a pub landlord and an alcoholic who drank himself to death, aged just 40.

 

"The stuff I saw him go through," says Wolstenholme, "it wasn't the pleasant, sleepy death that people think it is. It's an incredibly painful death. It wasn't something I ever wanted to go through, or put my family through."

 

The benefits of drying out, though, were not immediately apparent. Wolstenholme felt like a big part of his personality had vanished. But he noticed physical improvement when performing live. When he was drinking, he used to come offstage drenched in sweat. At his first sober gig—in Teignmouth, where else?—he was seized with nerves for the first time in many years. But onstage, he felt on top of the world. "And then when we came off, I'm like, I've not even got pit stains! Dry as a bone…"

 

On the ensuing, grueling Resistance world tour, Muse decided to take a week off for every three on the road, so Wolstenholme could be with his family. But meanwhile Bellamy was splitting up with Gaia Polloni, and the band had committed themselves to a high-budget stage set, which made each night's performance into a trouser-soiling ordeal.

 

Onstage, there stood three towers not dissimilar to the World Trade Centre. Come showtime, amid much fanfare, a gauzy covering would fall away to reveal each member of Muse performing on their own mini-podium halfway up the towers. It was a jaw-dropping spectacle, but, in true Spinal Tap fashion, prone to amusing mishaps. Bellamy, for instance, got his tower's "sock" snagged on his head.

 

Less well publicised was the vertiginous aspect of actually playing up there. They didn't actually get up on the towers at full height until the first gig in Helsinki—for the pre-tour production rehearsals they couldn't find anywhere big enough to set the whole thing up. "So we get up there, at the full three metres," says Wolstenholme. "And it was like, fucking hell, how are we gonna do this? You just couldn't move. The slightest trip and you'd pitch off headfirst." The band had to communicate by radio mic, 50 yards apart and clinging on for dear life.

 

Then, when they played in Morocco City, the crowd starting jumping in time to Uprising. The towers began to vibrate. "I actually had to go down on the knees to stop from falling off." says Bellamy.

 

But for Dom Howard, ever the carefree stadium titan, it was all worth it. "It looked good man," he says laconically, "Anything for the show."

 

In early July Muse relayed the Olympic torch over the River Teign into their hometown of Teignmouth—the pasty faced outsiders now local heroes as well as international stars. The three has trained intensively for the event, says Wolstenholme, imagining themselves panting for miles to the sounds of Chariots of Fire, even though they actually on ended up running 400 yards each. The pavements, nonetheless, were lined with family, friends and, to Bellamy's embarrassment, the odd ex-girlfriend.

 

Wolstenholme has now fully vanquished the drink. "It was more than possible," he says eagerly, "to live a very happy life without any form of drug." The Family Wolstenholme has just moved to Oxshott in Surrey, which combines the peace and quiet of Teignmouth with access to London, where Bellamy and Howard also have their pieds-à-terre. This most extravagant of bands is attempting the most mundane of things: a work/life balance. "It's the first time we've all effectively lived in the same town for 12 years," the bassist says, "Doing the album was almost like a nine-to-five job, where you'd have breakfast with the kids, go and work in the studio for six or seven hours, and be home for dinner."

 

Now that Wolstenholme is puling his weight, Bellamy no longer feels he has to run things the whole time. The bassist even contributed two songs to The 2nd Law, pointedly entitled Save Me and Liquid State, both of which Bellamy encouraged Wolsteholme to sing himself. And they're not worrying about the album's reception either.

 

"I get more arduous about the practical thing of getting a massive tour together," says Bellamy, "All the gear, the screens, the videos, the crew, the politics of trying to manage 55 people's schedules…that's the stuff that keeps me awake at night."

 

Dom Howard described the moment before a tour as "such a big amount of tension, like a balloon about to explode." But in the next breath, he's back to rabbiting about how a stadium gig is better than headlining a festival—"we couldn't even get our flying spaceship into Reading," etc—and how he dreams of "having juyst one laminate that says "Muse World Stadium Tour 2012-14" on it.

 

"When we did Wembley," he continues, "some people were like, Where do you go from here? It's gotta be downhill. But it's nice, it's just the starting point. What we can do now is, more of it. There are still so many places we haven't played—still a few countries even, like India, mainland China and most of Africa," Pause. "That's pretty tough to achieve, but we've always been in it for the long haul"

 

There are, apparently, natural breaks in an operation as huge as Muse's. They'll finish a European tour and then it takes a month just for the gear to get to America—it has to go by ship. Chris Wolstenholme will need his own bus, they joke, for his burgeoning family. Maybe Bellamy too. "I'm still on the party bus, though," says Dom Howard, "I'm flying the flag for singles.com."

 

And so, off Muse go into the sunset to overreach themselves once more. Are there any limits to their ambition? "I don't think there'll ever be a band that appeals to the whole human race," says Wolstenholme—but here at least is a band willing to die trying. We live in grim times and it's odds on that the future will be even worse. Maybe Muse's spectacle, madness and ambition aren't distractions but necessities, ways to recharge ourselves, promises of something better. A chance to feel for a few demented minutes that we are winners too.

 

[Furygirl]

Thanks!

[Seaking]

Before I read this is there anything new or noteworthy that would make it worth it to read?

[Sirthas]

Before I read this is there anything new or noteworthy that would make it worth it to read?

 

Nothing about the album. Just anecdotes and personal stuff.

[Seaking]

Nothing about the album. Just anecdotes and personal stuff.

 

Neat anecdotes or we are promoting the album anecdotes?

 

Edit: Fuck it, I'll just read it.

[JessicaSarahS]

Still a fun read, though.

 

Neat anecdotes or we are promoting the album anecdotes?

 

Edit: Fuck it, I'll just read it.

 

Yeah. It's not too long.

 

Good read. Classic Dom.

[FabriPav]

It's funny that Dom hasn't said "hangin' around" at all.

 

Or probably he said it and Q Magazine didn't write it in the interview.

[Isia.x33]

Or probably he said it and Q Magazine didn't write it in the interview.

 

probably, they didnt print it because he said it too much

[FabriPav]

probably, they didnt print it because he said it too much

 

"How was recording the album this time?"

 

"Y'know... Just hangin' around"

[forevermusic]

Well, as much as I expected more album stuff, it was a good read. Dom as Axl Rose though... yikes.

 

EDIT: As well as a feature, is there an album review?

[JessicaSarahS]

Dom as Axl Rose though... yikes.

 

It was inevitable. Soon they'll probably pull an Axl and hire models to stand in the front row.

[CarrieB]

Yes thanks for typing up, but I agree there wasn't anything new really. Good to read for a new fan or someone unfamiliar with Muse I suppose. Not sure what to say about Dom's choice of lifestyle. Probably nothing is safest!

 

The only thing noteworthy, I don't know whether it's been said before, but Matt actually pinpoints a change in his own attitude after the first three albums which has lead to Muse not taking themselves as seriously.

 

Oh and he identifies one of the points in the album with makes him laugh which is of course the last note in Survival!

[mapoftheglorious]

Thanks Fabri,

 

Tofu and weirdF for the transcript, enjoyable read

[HannahG123]

Aw i love them all so much. And the final line was really nice

[CarrieB]

This paragraph was accidentally missed off the typed up version I think. I was just looking for it. It comes after the bit where Dom says that Matt was "carrying the whole world in his shoulders" asking himself important questions and they considered splitting up. It's quite important I think to what has happened to Muse and their musical direction so I've typed it up here.

 

"But that’s when I started having fun on stage”, Bellamy continues “almost laughing at what we were doing. It was like this may not all last very long, you might as well try and enjoy it. When that happened, when I stopped worrying what other people thought, that’s when everything started to work. We started rocking much more, playing things that were much more bombastic. That was the beginning of the whole thing that we’re still doing now – whatever, just go with it, do what the fuck we want” he smiles. “The libertarian approach”.

 

That part speaks for itself I think, and, as musicians, I personally think it is how they have to be, if they are not going to drive themselves bonkers. I can understand that.

 

However I was glad to see that the "do what the fuck we want" attitude hasn't quite extended to Matt's politics. Does he say somewhere in this article that he is a libertarian? I must admit my stomach clenched slightly seeing that in connection to this comment! Maybe I imagined it and was thinking of this quote only, but happily a tweet from someone who interviewed him confirmed that he is a left leaning libertarian!

[sebby aka pup]

Apparently there's a review of The 2nd Law in Q too and they gave it 4/5

[HannahG123]

Apparently there's a review of The 2nd Law in Q too and they gave it 4/5

 

Just been reading that. Beat greenday what did it mean at the end when it said download animals, panic station, madness

[Beibi]

Can someone post the review here?

[Strangeseas]

Apparently there's a review of The 2nd Law in Q too and they gave it 4/5

 

Apparently they gave

 

OoS 5/5

Absolution 4/5

BHaR 5/5

The Resistance 4/5

 

hmm...

[Seaking]

Just been reading that. Beat greenday what did it mean at the end when it said download animals, panic station, madness

 

Means those are the best tracks.

 

Edit: Normally it does. I'd have to see it to be 100% sure but I'd be surprised if it didn't mean that.

[HannahG123]

Apparently they gave

 

OoS 5/5

Absolution 4/5

BHaR 5/5

The Resistance 4/5

 

hmm...

 

Doesn't really mean anything then, since absolution > the other 3

[HannahG123]

Means those are the best tracks.

 

Edit: Normally it does. I'd have to see it to be 100% sure but I'd be surprised if it didn't mean that.

 

Ooh ok

 

And here https://mobile.twitter.com/ANDREW0675/status/239279051095805952

[Seaking]

Doesn't really mean anything then, since absolution > the other 3

 

Nah.

 

Ooh ok

 

And here https://mobile.twitter.com/ANDREW0675/status/239279051095805952

 

Ya that's what it means. Also you forgot to list Follow Me.

[HannahG123]

Nah.

 

 

 

Ya that's what it means. Also you forgot to list Follow Me.

 

Well it's certainly not at the same level as The resistance anyway. Yeh sorry