THE MEN WHO FELL TO EARTH

In the weird world of British rock's next megastars, aliens created mankind, girlfriends are "unconventional" and earmuffs standard issure. Muse have landed...

IT HAS BEEN A long time coming. Twelve months ago, few people would have bet on unassuming, unfashionable Muse becoming the next major British rock band. Yet over five years the trio's music has grown more audacious and baroque, edging out the increasingly awkward Radiohead as the most daring figures on the musical landscape. In june last year, Muse closed Glastonbury with dazzling pomp and circumstance; then after playing two nights at EArl's Court in December, it was clear that they had upped their game to the point where titans such as U2 and Coldplay were tantalisingly within reach. You'd imagine this band would welcome this change of fortune, but then Muse are strange fruit indeed.

"Look," says singer Matt Bellamy, a twitchy individual whose 26 years sit on the frame and build of a teenager still awaiting the onset of puberty, "I'm happy to get a widescale recognition on a musical level, but becoming properly famous? Not interested, really."
He may no longer have a choice in the matter. In the last 15 months, Muse have sold 900,000 records in the UK alone and played to more than 1.4 million people across the globe. When drummer Dominic Howard's father died tragically of a heart attack backstage at Glastonbury, just an hour after the band's set, they found themselves within the pages of The Sun, while elsewhere gadget-obsessed Bellamy is regularly written about as a great British eccentric.

Nevertheless, the frontman remains adamant that their outsider status will ultimately be maintained. He's like the kid in the playground convinced that nobody will ever truly accept him. "Let's face it, I'm hardly the next Gwen Stefani, am I?" He says.
True, Bellamy was never cut out to be celebrity material. He is far too enigmatic for thatn though more in the manner of a hyperactive physics schoolteacher than an emergent rock God.

ON A FREEZING Friday afternoon, Muse's tourbus pulls into the car park of Clutch Cargo's, a 1200-capacity music venue in a God-awful nowheresville suburb of Detroit called Pontiac. The overnight drive from Pittsburgh took almost 15 hours; later tonight, it's another six onto Chicago. This is their fourth tour of the US in the last year, ample evidence that this tireless band are intent on breaking America the hard way. They have a small but loyal US following, their fans varying between tattooed rock heads and teenager enjoying their first taste of textbook alienation.

The bus parks, and two of the three get off. Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme look like they've slept in their clothes. Wolstenholme, who with his shaved head and unshaved whiskers looks borderline criminal, yawns.
" Matt is still sleeping," he says. "He may be a while."

When Bellamy finally emerges, he surveys the venue's exterior and says, "You know, it all starts to look the same after a while."
Unsurprisingly, really, for this has been his day-to-day reality for half a decade now.
The country's hardest-working act formed in their hometown of Teignmouth, Devon in the mid-90's, when all three were still in their teens. Their debut album, Showbiz, arrived in 1999. An unusually torrid affair, it was built around the band's love of Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. Critics found them pointedly second hand, from the way they aped their mentors to the Jimi Hendrix manner in which they routinely trashed their instruments onstage.

" But Nirvana did that," is Howard's argument today. "They never got criticised for it, so why did we?"
Critical derision aside, Muse became popular with the kind of disaffected teens who display too much makeup around the eyes and self-imposed cigarette burns. they were huge in France and Italy, and during those early tours, Bellamy would disappear for days at a time, intent on enrolling new members into the fan club personally.

"Well, I'd never been to university," he explains, cheeks colouring, " so I was making up for lost time."
By 2001, under the tutelage of former Stone Roses andRadiohead producer John Leckie, they were being encouraged to follow their ambition, no matter how ridiculous it got. The result was the sci-fi flavoured Origin of Symmetry, in which the twin influences of Queen and Pink Floyd coalesced in a way that redefined the parameters of rock bombast. Across Europe, they soared. In America, they sunk like a stone.

" Our label [the Madonna-co-founded Maverick] didn't like it and never released it," says Bellamy. "Which was unfortunate."
And then, two years later, came Absolution, an impressive feat of the imagination in which subtlety was substituted for sheer supersonic power. Bellamy had often proclaimed a love of Rachmaninov and Rage Against The Machine. In Absolution, he somewhow managed to combine both elements of both. "Bono once said that it's difficult to write songs from positive feelings, and I'd go along with that," he says. " I'm not a particularly negative person, but I do think writing about the end of the world is good for me."

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