No Biz Like Showbiz (200002 Melody Maker article)

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Transcript

No Biz Like Showbiz: Mark Beaumont (Words) & Stephen Sweet (Pics)

‘WE’VE ALWAYS FELT LIKE ROCK STARS WAITING TO HAPPEN’

REMEMBER WHERE YOU READ ABOUT THEM FIRST, BECAUSE MUSE ARE GOING TO BE OASIS-MASSIVE. WE JOIN THEM ON THE ROAD IN AUSTRIA AND FIND OUT WHY.

The snake-skinned woman unfurls her billowing wings and stands serene, smiling from all seven of her faces. Before her, at some otherworldly tea party, a beast with no face balances a teacup on each flipper, offering one to a devil child and the other to a head with legs sprouting from the chin and a spiral-painted dunce's cap.

Elsewhere, chaos reigns. A man is crouched on all fours, a building growing from his back, tiny cars driving up the road etched into his tie. A woman stands, transfixed with elation, as her partner’s head flips open and unleashes a psychedelic dragon with a television screen for a face. And overlooking it all, a 20ft Satan points his trident at a trembling Maker contingent and cackles.

Three incredible things. One, we are not on drugs. Two, they let children in. And three, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

For there, across a courtyard dotted with statues clearly designed by someone who’s spent far too long with the Super Furry Animals, is the most wondrous beast of them all. Writhing, jerking, shivering, throwing Beastie Boy shapes around a statue of a giant baby holding the hand of a tiny businessman, it's a formidable creature. Three heads! Six legs! It has the voice of a strangled Radiohead, the heart of a twisted Cobain, the claws of Courtney and the pulsating brain of a million Ashcrofts! It’s the beast they call Muse. The most fearsome, enticing, provocative, schizoid and passionate new band on the planet. And, unlike the monsters here, it really is coming for your children.

“They were pretty sick, those statues,” singer Matt Bellamy nods in acknowledgement as we jump in a taxi to an exclusive bar in the heart of Vienna. “It’s aimed at children, but some of those statues were too twisted.”

He can talk. The Maker came to Austria to witness Muse touring with Bush and what we witness are the entire careers of the Manics, Oasis and Led Zeppelin condensed into two days. Before we leave Vienna tomorrow afternoon, Muse will re-lived near-death air disasters; had their singer go AWOL three times; discussed the merits of having gaffa tape pulled off your nipples; played two thunderously fantastic gigs; destroyed a borrowed drumkit with their own guitar and – with one carelessly tossed microphone stand – gone some way towards starting a war between Britain and Austria.

At the count of three, boys, we go over the top. One. Two. . .

“I WAS looking for the tour manager so I could use his phone. . .”

Matt Bellamy squints against the sunlight streaming through the bar’s windows and ruffles hair still smelling of Pis(???). Gaunt of frame, unkempt of clothing and 33 hours down the No Sleep Expressway to Hangover Hell Central, he is trying to explain how, when his bandmates arrived in Vienna on their tourbus this morning, they checked Matt’s bunk to find that their enigmatic singer had been left 200 miles behind in a town called Graz.

“I fancied an early night,” he croaks, “and they said everyone had gone to this Irish bar and these two people said they’d give me directions. I got to the bar and no one was there, so I spent the rest of the night with these two strangers, going to some weird places in Graz. I ended up in a cheesy rock club where everyone was dancing to [pompous Seventies types] Supertramp and [ludicrous Eighties metallers] Mötley Crüe. I ended up staying there until about five, then went back to someone’s house for a few hours and got a train back at nine this morning.”

Often do a bunk, then, do we?

“All the time,” sighs the deceptively fresh-faced drummer Dominic Howard. “Every day.”

For Muse, every day is a potential fatality. Just four days ago they rushed away from an awards ceremony clutching a coveted Best New Band gong and jumped on a private jet to Germany for a gig that very night, without realising they’d accidentally booked one-way tickets to the bottom of the English Channel.

“it was a tiny little plane,” Dom explains, “just us on there, buffet, nice hamper of food, champagne. And then it caught fire.”

Holy mother of John Denver!

“I don’t know if it was fire,” Matt interrupts, “it was more like exhaust flames. So when the engine stopped, the flames stopped, but when it revved up, the flames revved up. It was ready to take off, but as soon as he gave it some nuts, that was when it went. He said he could fly on one engine, but he had to land straight away, so if we’d been over the sea, it wouldn’t have made it.”

He shrugs and smiles, ruffles his hair.

“It was our destiny. We were meant to die after winning that award. It would’ve been perfect timing.”

Uh-uuuuurrrr!!! The timing couldn’t have been worse if you’d place five grand on Garry Glitter becoming president of the NSPCC. Because after a year of false starts and chart disappointments, Space Shuttle Muse is finally rumbling on the launch pad. The re-release of “Muscle Museum” scratched the Top 40 and new single “Sunburn” looks set to tear open its flesh. Plus, people have finally started to realise that Muse are actually a damned sight better than Radiohead, as it happens. Wake up, world! It’s going to be a Muse millenium!

“Of course it’s gonna be a Muse millenium!” grins Matt. “The first album was a little faffy, a bit bollocks. Some of it didn’t have enough balls. On the next album we’re gonna track out what we do live a bit more. There’s something a bit more urgent about it and we’ll get that on the next album.”

Who do you see as your opponents in the battle for millennial rock mastery?

“There aren’t any. I’ve met bands in a similar vein as us in England, but none of them have got the sort of record deal we’ve got. None of them have got Madonna in their back pocket! This is a different ball game! Musically, I’m sure there’s a lot of competition, but. . .”

He throws his arms wide.

“We’ve got money coming out of our arses! Hahahaha!”

HUMOUR. Misery. Arrogance. Modesty. Scary, screamy bits. Moody, sensitive bits. Muse have certainly got the schizophrenic contradictions required to make them the perfect “spaced-age” rock phenomenon, the rocket-pack Manics. But do they have that essential superviolent edge required to survive in this nu-metal era? Do they, for example, reckon they could beat Bush in a fight?

“It depends if weapons were allowed,” says Matt. “If it was a bare-knuckle boxing match, we’d probably lose. Wrestling we’d probably lose. But if it was a street fight, no rules, we might stand a chance. They’re all quite muscly, aren’t they? They’ve all got arms. We’d have trouble beating up anyone with arms.”

What about musically, though? Could you take them?

“We’re the only band in England that people need to hear this year,” declares Matt. “I don’t think there’s any other band that I feel any connection to. I hope there’s more bands coming up. Every time there’s one band who are even half-decent, they’re massive before you know it – Korn, Stereophonics. . . It’d be nice if it was more evenly spread.”

In a new age of slickly packaged pain, we’ve come to expect our pop stars to arrive with a boil-in-the-bag personal tragedy. But Matt Bellamy breaks even this mould. Onstage in Graz, he flickers between sultry indie-windy moodiness and arm-flailing, gaggle-eyed falsetto fury. He intones operatic ‘Thank yeh-hoooooo-ohhh!’s between songs and wields his guitar as if it’s come alive and he’s struggling to stop it running away. He’s like a seriously f***ed-up mixture of Thom Yorke, Iggy and Danni from Cradle of Filth and he’s utterly, utterly beguiling. How many personalities have you got?

“I’ve got a good solid two,” Matt calculates, “but I’m sure there’s many, many more. When I’m onstage, I’m definitely moving between two. There’s the one wanting to connect with people, which is lame and sad and weak. Then there’s the other side that’s going, ‘Come on, you c***s!’ Some of the stuff is aggressive towards everyone in the building and some of the stuff is trying to embrace everyone. The front row of every gig so far has been a group of girls waiting for Gavin. No interest in music whatsoever. Just there to look at his pecs. If I see one of the girls that’s obviously waiting for Gavin, then I keep them in my firing range.”

The fury, however, lives onstage. After the gig, Matt’s inner Genghis Khan does nothing more dangerous than unscrew his dressing room door handle. To unravel a mind that, onstage, is as unhinged as Nicholson in “The Shining” and, offstage, fancies its chances alongside Carol Smile with a paint-stripper, we must clearly dig deeper. . .

TEIGNMOUTH, Devon, 1978 and Matthew Bellamy is born to one of the county’s more, um, colourful couples. Dad is a plumber harbouring a dark past as rhythm guitarist with early-Sixties janglers The Tornados (“He answered a Melody advert for a guitarist and two weeks later they were Number One everywhere with ‘Telstar’! But he got f***ed over by the Sixties record companies. So I’m taking revenge on the whole system on his behalf!”) and Mum. . . well, Mum is going into trances and speaking in Beezebub’s tongue.

“My mum became a medium,” Matt remembers. “Followed all that through for about five years, until she got to the point where she didn’t need the Ouija board any more – she just spoke.”

The spirits used to speak through her?

“Apparently. They’d tell stories about what they do. I believed it at the time, but looking back I think my mum was having a laugh. Or maybe you tap into something, but it’s not dead people. I think it’s more to do with, like, if something happens violently enough, the vibe will hit the walls. When a certain sound is hitting a wall over and over again, then the wall will just get shaped to it. And when the wind hits at a certain time, you get that vibe from it.”

Matt’s mother only gave up contacting the Other Side when she realised that Matt and his brother were developing an unhealthy obsession with Ouija boards.

“Ouija boards just open up more and more dark spaces,” he says. “It never answers the question you want it to answer and then it gets all moody and starts f***ing around. I was going, ‘Who’s going to win the Grand National?’, but it’ll never give you that. It’ll just give you mysterious hints toward things. Our fingers do push it, but there’s something making us push it and there’s some kind of subconscious information coming out there. It’s not contact with the dead. When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

As a pre-teen, Matt was an outgoing, loud, hyperactive (practically bordering on troublesome) child. But, around the age of 13, the dual blows of puberty and parental separation flipped the coin.

“I got to about 14, started doing music and changed. I went the opposite way. I became very quiet. Something happened and music is where my outgoingness has gone to. When my parents split up, I went through a whole change of who my friends were and I became friends with Dom. I was always into music, but I was never a performer. I was incredibly nervous and I never used to enjoy it at all. But around the age of 14, I became all right with that – something in me made me want to perform.”

Matt’s first stage experience was winning a school talent contest with a boogie-woogie piano act.

“I won that and everyone cheered and I went, ‘This is all right!’ I looked around to see what was cool and went, ‘Oh, look! Grunge!’”

And the rest, as they say, is “Showbiz”. Matt and Dom recruit schoolmate Chris; win local Battle Of The Bands contest by smothering themselves in make-up, calling themselves Rocket Babydoll and demolishing all the other bands’ equipment, listen to bucketloads of Nirvana, The Wedding Present, Elvis, Abba and Sonic Youth; tour the Devon pub circuit for four years; start A&R bundle with a scorching gig at in The City ‘98; get flown to LA by Madonna on Christmas Eve to unwrap a US record deal. And love every minute of it all.

“I’ve always felt like a rock star waiting to happen,” Matt grins, “but I think there’s a great number of people who feel that. When I was playing with Dom at 13, we thought we’d be world famous by 17!”

Christ, the past four years must’ve been a drag. . .

”I THINK a war is probably on its way.” Matt sighs, staring at the flurries of Viennese shoppers, presumably after a bargain on jackboots. “It’s about time. Whenever the population gets to a certain state, especially the male population, wars sort it out. That’s what they’re there for.”

War! What is it good for? Killing Nazis, right? And there’s a whole bunch of them in suits in the government chambers just round the corner, voted into half of the seats in the Austrian parliament under the name of The Freedom Party. Freedom, it would seem, for everyone apart from blacks, Indians, Chinese, any other racial minority or anyone who disagrees with them. The UN is poised to impose diplomatic sanctions, but Muse and The Maker are here now, with the ability to throw things very hard. Come on, lads! Let’s geddem!

“I can’t comment on that situation,” says Matt, shifting uncomfortably, “but there’s no proper way to manage any culture living together, not these days. There’s always gonna be somebody who hates the government.”

Apathy! That’s how Nazi Germany started! F*** commenting on it, let’s go and hit them with sticks!

Matt sparks up. “I’d do that. Not because I believe in it, but because it’d be a laugh.”

Ok, you get these empty Coke bottles and I’ll get some rags and petrol and we’ll mix up a few Molotov cocktails! It’ll be like The Clash and that!

“The main thing,” Matt stalls, “is that media studies needs to be taught. It needs to be taught from the age of f***ing six. I did media studies at A-level and I learnt so much shit. I looked back on everything I watched when I was young and thought, ‘it was all a load of bollocks!’ It plays a bit part in upbringing these days, the media.”

Eh!?! Thirty seconds ago you were willing to take a baseball bat to the skull of the nearest parliamentary scumpig and now you reckon we’re going to wipe out fascism by teaching toddlers media studies?!?

“Yeah,” Matt nods. “Definitely. That was how Hitler rose, by using the media. A lot of people swallow it without knowing. It’s just becoming like a new religion. It’s becoming too powerful, too influential. And the people in charge of it are not really that cool.”

So has the media blown this issue out of proportion?

Matt nods. “Yeah, probably.”

So you’re happy to sit back and see if they invade Poland?

Matt clears his throat. “I’m not sure we should talk about politics because we really don’t know much about it.”

Hmmm. But, still, you can’t expect three men who grew up in comfortable English homes to turn out all ADF. Muse are concerned with more spiritual matters – matters of the soul, the heart and the loin. Matt hates the way that “Science takes human truth away. It ruins things that are nice to think about. It’s nice to think that there’s a heaven to go to, then science comes along and goes, ‘What a load of shit!’ and there’s nothing left.”

Hence the theme of spectacularly grandiose new single “Sunburn”, a damnation of science’s ability to screw around with our natural reproduction instincts. Or something.

“Moths use the moon for navigational purposes when they want to mate,” Matt explains. “They don’t know that, it’s just programmed into their brain to fly at a certain angle to the moon all the time, non-stop. And then sometimes they hit a lightbulb. Can ou imagine what that feels like? Bzzzt. Bzzzzt. Yes! I’ve found my f***ing everything! So us going out to space and technology is just some weird reproduction programming that’s made us do something bigger than our basic function.”

What’s your lightbulb?

Matt laughs. “Women. The thing about the lightbulb is that it’s a man-made instrument that’s made a moth alter its course unnaturally. If there was no such thing as technology, we’d still be living like animals, still happy reaching for our moon. Science has come along and we’ve just gone down the pan.”

PHILOSOPHY. Inner turmoil. A vibrant stage presence. Pretty face in need of a pie or two. Impenetrable lyrics. Pert buttocks. You, Matthew Bellamy, are a nutter magnet, a freak bomb about to explode with slashed forearms, body parts in boxes and love letters in menstrual fluid.

“There’s been one or two,” Matt admits. “I was chatting to them like normal after a gig – they seemed really cool, down-to-earth people. But it came to the end of the evening when I’m about to leave and they’ve just lost it. Went red, started crying, said they’re unbelievably in love. All this out of nowhere. That’s happened twice and they’ve both said they’ve dumped their boyfriends or whatever. So that’s made me a bit more wary about what I say to people.”

Does this sort of behaviour worry you?

“It makes me feel a bit sick. On the one hand it’s uncomfortable, but on the other hand it makes me feel a bit dirty. But what about the old Gaffa tape on the nipples, eh Dom?”

Sorry?

“Oh,” Dom blushes, “someone had Gaffa tape on their nipples.”

So you put Gaffa tape on someone’s nipples?

Flushing redder. “No. I took it off. It was just some girl somewhere.”

Was the Gaffa tape your idea or hers?

“It was hers.”

Did alarm bells not start ringing at that point?

Almost purple by now. “She just had this thing about power tools. . .”

Matt nudges him, giggling.

“Dom represents the depravity of the band,” he says.

That is until the lights go down in Vienna’s Libro Music Hall, of course.

BASH! The guitar swings into the drumkit, sending a cymbal stand within inches of decapitating Dom. Smash! Strike two and the bass drum dissolves over the front row in a spray of splinters and sweat. Splat! Matt’s microphone stand arcs into the photo pit, coming dangerously close to making a hefty Austrian bouncer the first casualty of World War Muse.

An exhilarating close to a gut-throttling show, but security is disgruntled. Matt is advised to leave the venue for the airport that very second, while the road crew delay security by pretending to look up the German word for ‘litigation’. Dom and Chris crack open nervous lagers. Tension reigns.

“He’s got to be more careful,” Chris confides. “At the Astoria he attacked a mic stand that came apart. Bits of it slid all the way to the sound desk. Someone’s gonna get hurt.”

Tonight, though, all is settled with hand-shakes and the Muse army marches on, Austria effortlessly conquered. Within weeks, Muse return to tour Britain. You are advised to start digging the trenches immediately.

THE SINGLE ‘SUNBURN’ IS OUT NOW ON MUSHROOM RECORDS.

--

MUSE’S OTHER NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

CHRIS: “I was in France. They were putting lights up and there was this guy coming down on a crane and it f***ing clipped my hair. I only just got out of the way.” MATT: “I got a paper round when I was about 13 and in the first week I got knocked over by a car on my bike. I came back a couple of days later and got bitten really savagely by a dog on my arm, had to have loads of injections. I packed it in.” DOM: “I was riding a bike in Amsterdam once – I didn’t realise you had to pedal backwards to brake and there’s trams all over the place. I came stupidly close to getting run over by a tram.”