Where is Muse headed? Sometimes the band itself isn’t too sure, as frontman Matt Bellamy explains to NEALA JOHNSON

Muse toured the United States recently with the Cure, Interpol and the Cooper Temple Clause. Was it a dream come true to hang out with Robert Smith?
I don’t really know the Cure that much, to be honest. My older brother was a big, big fan of the Cure. He used to go out with these goth girls and bring them around to the house. When I was about 10 or 11, I used to fall in love with these goth-looking women. So that’s probably the influence he’s had on me – he has helped shape my taste in ladies. (Laughs).

Who would give you the butterflies if you were about to meet them?
Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. He’s like the greatest guitarist around, so I think I’d be nervous if I met him.

Do any kids look up to you as their guitar god?
(Laughs). There’s probably a few confused people out there who do that! I don’t think I’ve met any of them. I don’t think I deserve that kind of adoration yet, maybe in 10 years if I get any better.

How important is image to Muse?
We don’t really look any way, do we? We just look like a bunch of normal people. I don’t think we’ve ever committed… OK, there’s one gig. The first gig we did, we dressed up a little bit like the Cure actually, we tried to look very gothic, we had all black make-up on. The band was called Rocketbabydolls, it wasn’t called Muse. We did this one-off gig, and I think it’s the only time we ever did it. After that we just got bored with back-combing our hair.

How do you feel about people using such words as “preposterous” or “deranged” when they describe your music?
I dunno, deranged… I couldn’t see deranged. I’d associate that with Slipknot maybe (laughs). I dunno, people see this classical thing coming in now and I think that makes some people think its some kind of pretentious kind of thing. But if you’re asking what we think of reviews, even if they’re trying to insult us, it’s nice to see people using weird words like that to describe something. We inspire more intelligent insults than all the rest!

Since you played the Big Day Out in January, talk has been about Muse conquering America… So is it conquered already?
(Laughs). I think we’re in the midst of making a small dent. Maybe not even a dent. I think we’re the beginning of a spot on Bono’s bum! I wouldn’t call it conquering so much. But we’re actually having a bit of success there for the first time; people are starting to turn up to our gigs. When I spend a bit of time there, I feel like we’re just starting off, and that’s actually a really nice feeling, because I don’t feel old and jaded, I feel all new and looking to the future.

The other big talking point was your Glastonbury performance – people were using phrases like “career defining”. What did it feel like for you?
It was the best feeling we’ve ever had on stage, and when we came off stage as well. We felt like that was it… I’ve never had that before, that feeling where you come off and you think, “That was definitely the best moment we’ve had so far.” I think it’s because Glastonbury in England is a very well-respected gig, and a gig I used to go to a lot when I was young, as a punter. So, to get there was a nice link back to when I was a kid watching other bands playing and wanting to be up there. So it was definitely a highlight.

That must have been an insane day all round, to go from those highs to the lows of (drummer) Dom’s father dying not long after the band came off stage.
Yeah, that was an unbelievable shock. It was a completely surreal experience. Obviously Dom was deeply shocked by it all. So we ended up taking time off and Chris (Wolstenholme, bassist) and I went down to Devon and spent time with Dom, helping out with organizing things, that kind of stuff. The only, if you can get a good thing out of it, is his dad got to see him in probably what was the finest moment so far on stage, and that’s probably a rare thing for parent’s to see. That’s something Dom held on to, which helped him through, I think.

How has the live show changed since you were here in January?
I still don’t feel we’ve played a full headline gig, our own gig, in Australia yet. I mean we did a couple of those small clubs, but we were playing similar sets to what we did at the Big Day Out. When we come back we’ll be playing much more a mixture of songs from the past albums, and hopefully we’re gonna bring along the video screen we’ve been using over here, I mean over in England, or in Europe. F… it. Where am I?

Haven’t you got the city you’re in written on the back of your guitar?
(Laughs). No, but we should get it written on the setlist actually, ‘cos Dom keeps making mistakes. We were I Santiago in Spain, and he same on stage and goes “Hey, San Diego!” He thought we were in San Diego in California, which was pretty embarrassing for everyone.

There’s a few interesting theories floating around linking the fear and panic in some of your lyrics to present world events, such as George W Bush’s war in Iraq. Where does it come from?
The lyrics in general just come from… bits and bobs. They come from all the bits that have an impact on you as a person but don’t necessarily register in your upfront memory. They get buried in your subconscious or forgotten for some reason. That might be a moment of extreme fear when you watch the news, or it might be a nightmare or some weird dream you had, or it might be a living dream where you’ve had some fantasy about something. These passing moments where something has had a much more lasting impact on you than you’ve actually realized. From my point of view, it seems like it comes out of thin air, you know, but words don’t float around in clouds, that’s just ridiculous. I must be pulling them from somewhere inside myself, as opposed to people in bands saying “Oh man, it comes from out of space, it floats from the past…” Obviously, that’s all bollocks ‘cos its all just inside us, isn’t it?

Herald Sun, Thursday, August 26, 2004

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