Manchester Evening News article!

Sylvie · Manchester Evening News article!

Very interesting read from Manchester Evening New!

City dates for Bellamy and the boys
Sarah Walters

WAS that a siren noise that Matt Bellamy – Dark Lord Sauron of the music world and frontman with maestros of misery rock Muse – just made at me? It was! He just did it again. I only asked him about his jet pack and we’ve ended up in a game of QI.

“Woowoowoo!” Matt howls before exploding in laughter. “No, what I do own is something called a power motor – I told someone at the NME once and they misinterpreted it as a jet pack. It’s like a big parachute with a motor on the back – it’s kinda like paragliding and I’ve only used it a couple of times.

“I think when we play a big stadium somewhere, like Wembley or something, we’ll have to get Michael Jackson’s jet pack. I had a look on the internet and there’s this guy who owns it and he’ll come to your party and do a big jet pack display.
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"We might get him in for a gig, dress him up as me and pretend that I’ve landed like Michael Jackson.”

Frankly, Matt’s curious verbal gesture is the smallest surprise in store during our one-to-one. Take for instance the roll call of music currently spinning on his stereo – Gnarls Barkley, Kanye West and a selection of artists touched by ace producer Timbaland.

Matt’s always been known for his diverse tastes, ranging from Mozart to Hendrix, but it’s a challenge to imagine Matt shaking his wiry, ghetto booty to Beyonce.

Up to now, Muse have hardly earned their good name for their ass-shaking rhythms – it’s been bookish songwriting, operatic vocals, a musical tristesse de vivre and monolithic live shows that have grabbed the band column inches. Sandwiched between a plethora of stars from the pop and r'n'b world talking about who they were “wearing” at MTV’s recent Europe Music Awards, Muse looked like three lost Luke Skywalkers at a Star Trek convention.

And yet it’s oddly in line with the new merry Muse that cropped up on their last album Black Holes & Revelations, an LP that made a banquet of the musical archives and tucked right in with a hunger not equalled since the heydays of Captain Beefheart.

“Our appreciation of music as listeners has always been quite diverse. A lot of the time we listen to music other than rock,” Matt explains. “If you listen to Kanye West it’s totally alien – the way they write their music and put the parts together, it’s easier to get inspiration from that. Black Holes was certainly our first adventure into something more dancy and even into r'n'b.”

It’s a move that’s attracted a hareem of famous fans. “Justin Timberlake came up to me [at the MTV awards] and said, “Great performance, man, I love your band, I love track five (the forlorn lullaby Soldier’s Poem) on your album’, which turned out to be the most dark and moody song on the whole album.

Lordi

“Lordi, the band who won the Eurovision Song Contest, are big fans of ours. They were dressed up as monsters and there was one girl dressed as a zombie who kept chasing me around, which was really surreal.

"Then you had P.Diddy walking round on roses petals and Kanye West causing a scene. It’s funny that whole pop world – I thought the rock and roll world was crazy but that’s a different league up there.”

Matt and his band mates Dom Howard (drums) and Chris Wolstenholme (bass) make their live return to Manchester this weekend, taking up a two-night residency at the MEN Arena on Friday and Saturday, as part of their global stadium tour.

They’ll play to packed out houses both nights – to a combined crowd of more than 30,000.

It’s all a million miles away from the band’s humble beginnings in Teignmouth, Devon, and from the boys’ first visit to Manchester back in 1998 for the In The City festival.

“That was one of the first gigs we did outside Devon and when we really started to break out. I remember the crowd was mostly industry types and it was a dark, dingy venue.”

It was to kick-start a recording career that resulted in two top three albums and a prestigious headlining slot at Glastonbury within six years. Matt has become one of the most identifiable frontmen in the business for his ostentatious vocals alone, but it was a role he never chose and a vocal style he fell on.

“Muse formed with just the three of us,” Matt recalls, “but at that point we were mainly instrumental – we didn’t really have any songs and we were looking for a singer.

“In the town where we come from, no one really wanted to be in the band so in the end I started singing. When I started, we didn’t have a PA system or any microphones then so I’d often be singing over the band playing, and that’s why I started naturally going for these high notes because it was the only way I could cut through.

“When I first started it wasn’t necessarily the coolest of voices – everyone wanted a gruff voice like Kurt Cobain. I had this really high voice and was doing a lot of falsetto stuff.

Jeff Buckley

"But I suppose it was when Jeff Buckley died, who had a very high voice, that people started to get interested in what we were doing.”

It’s fair to say Muse are crowned kings of the live circuit these days – does Matt ever wonder how the hell he got from there to here? “Yeah, absolutely,” he laughs.

“Last time we were playing venues that were quite big, but it’s really crazy to spend every night playing for 16,000 people. This is the longest tour we’ve ever done where every night is a huge venue and every night feels like the big one.

“At the moment everyone’s a little bit tea-total and attempting to get fit down the gym to get themselves in shape to do big sets every night, but I’m sure that’ll all fade away after a month on the road.”

In all honesty, the growth of Muse’s sound into a crowd flattening uproar capable of causing seismic movements has forced the band into vast venues. Matt admits it’s a shame – the main reason he got into a band was to play live music and while he says the band still gets their greatest thrill from playing live gigs, Matt is the first to acknowledge the challenges of reaching your audience when they’re too far away to even make out limbs.

“Sometimes when you play big gigs you can get a bit paranoid that the sound isn’t good enough for the whole venue or it’s not reaching out to people at the back,” Matt explains. “I think this time we have a good enough show to do that.

“It’s quite a different stage set with a lot of video screens and Dom’s got a weird satellite that he sits on that moves up and down. Every now and again Dom puts on a Spiderman costume and it all gets a bit silly. But it’s a good laugh – it’s nice to put on a grander production.

“We’ve got a fourth person in now who plays on a few songs and we might get a trumpet player in for a couple of songs in Manchester. When you’ve been working together for four albums it’s good to try new arrangements. I’m pretty sure at one of the nights at the M.E.N. you’ll see Dom in a Spiderman costume.”

That’s news that Muse’s avid fans will no doubt be delighted to hear. Matt chuckles as he recalls tales of the Muse faithful – now legendary for cracking secret coded messages in the band’s song titles and setlists and, apparently, quite a keen bunch of artists.

“We get a lot of paintings and Bibles. Someone painted me naked with a crow on my shoulder once,” says Matt, who insists he didn’t pose for the portrait.

“It was a bit gothic looking and I looked like some sort of old thin grey man, like that old business tycoon off the Simpsons,” I tell him I think he means Mr Burns.

“Yeah, it was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.”