We Have Come For Your Children - Muse interview [Kerrang! (March 3rd, 2001)]
We Have Come For Your Children
Think MUSE are a pretentious indie band? You haven’t heard ‘Plug-In Baby’. Meet the men behind the most berzerk single of the year…
Words: Dave Everley
Photos: Dave Willis
WHEN MATT Bellamy was a teenager, his father passed on a piece of advice. Matt had just told his dad, George, that he had formed a band called Muse with two schoolfriends, Dom Howard and Chris Wolstenholme, and that making music was the career path he wanted to follow.
George Bellamy knew exactly what to say to his son. In the early ’60s, he played rhythm guitar with The Tornados, a largely instrumental group whose seminal hit ‘Telstar’ was the first song to top both the UK and US singles charts. He’d seen how the dreams of musicians could turn into nightmares literally overnight: The Tornados never replicated the success of ‘Telstar’, and they eventually dissolved amid much bitterness and acrimony. It was the weight of his experience, he reasoned, that would help Matt survive as he plunged head-first into the shark-infested pool that is the music business.
A decade or so later, Muse’s supernaturally slender frontman sits on a comfortable sofa in an upmarket King’s Cross hotel, gazing out of the window onto the traffic clogging up Euston Road and pondering the information Bellamy Sr had to impart. His father’s advice has stuck with him over the years, through the lean times at the beginning of his band’s career to the more recent success of their debut album, ‘Showbiz’, and arena-straddling US tours with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters. It stood him in good stead when Muse came under fire from critics who dismissed them as nothing more than a rock Radiohead; more importantly, it helped him survive a prolonged bout of touring that could easily send him over the edge.
Matt Bellamy – vocal acrobat, bona fide guitar hero and frontman of the band set to become one of British music’s brightest stars over the next six months – smiles as he recalls his dad’s words of wisdom.
“He said, ‘Enjoy it while you’re young and get laid’.”
“We’ve been talking about losing the plot this year…”
Dom Howard
THERE ARE roughly three popular misconceptions surrounding Muse. One: They are an ‘indie’ band. Two: They want to be Radiohead. Three: They are, at best, aloof and, at worst, downright pretentious.
Wrong on all counts. Muse are unequivocally, unashamedly, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a rock band. Matt Bellamy and his bandmates Chris Wolstenholme (bass) and Dom Howard (drums) might admit to a love of early ’90s Midlands crusties Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, but there’s nothing fey or wistful or willingly understated here. Witness their sheer musical scope (jagged guitars to piano-led balladry, frequently in the same song), their skillfully controlled histrionics (visual and sonic), the sheer sense of devotion that’s practically tangible at their gigs.
Love it or hate it, 1999’s debut album ‘Showbiz’ was nothing if not assured. Yes, it nodded towards Radiohead (and, vocally at least, the glorious transcendence of the late Jeff Buckley), but there was more to it than that: listen to the glorious bombast of ‘Sunburn’ and ‘Muscle Museum’, or the sweeping tones of ‘Unintended’, and then go and stick the studied middle-class tedium of ‘OK Computer’ and ‘Kid A’ up your arse. The 180,000 people who own ‘Showbiz’ already have.
This week, Muse release their new single, ‘Plug-In Baby’. Recorded at the end of last year, after completing a worldwide tour that saw them go from the backroom of the Camden Falcon to the enormodromes of America, it’s a song that will hold a gun to the head of the band’s detractors until they change their mind. A swaggering hybrid of serrated guitar noise, fluttering melody, classical flourishes and that unearthly wail, it is, quite frankly, barking. It’s also just about the greatest single released so far this year.
MATT BELLAMY, Dominic Howard and Chris Wolstenholme formed Muse some seven years ago. All three had played in bands around the Teignmouth area: Bellamy and Howard in the unfortunately-named Gothic Plague, Wolstenholme in the marginally more acceptable Fixed Penalty (“They kicked me out,” moans the latter, “because I liked Status Quo.”).
The trio’s first gig together was at a local Battle Of The Bands, where they adopted the monicker Rocket Baby Doll. It was a triumph: despite yet another truly diabolical name, they came first.
“That was about the time we thought, ‘Hmm, maybe we could make something of this’,” recalls Chris Wolstenholme with a grin.
Of the three members of Muse, Wolstensholme is the most amiable. The towering four-stringer – imagine a taller, slimmer version of Alan ‘Jonathan Creek’ Davis – is also the only member in a full-time relationship. He’s been with his girlfriend, Kelly, for three-and-a-half years, and they have an 18-month-old son, Alfie.
Dominic Howard describes Chris as “really quiet, but with the capacity to surprise everyone – you’ll turn around and he’ll be acting out this little play in front of people”. Chris, in turn describes Dom as “the most laid-back person I know”.
It’s an apt description. The drummer seems to spend all his time in a permanent state of bliss, a constant half-smile on his face. Like his bandmates, he speaks with no trace of an accent, and his answers are short and to the point without seeming curt. He stresses that the band are, first and foremost, friends.
“There’s never really any big personal arguments around us,” he says. “If we do argue, it’s always about something else that goes on around us.”
Compared to Dom Howard and Chris Wolstensholme, Matt Bellamy is a ball of nervous energy. Waif-skinny and sharp-featured, Muse isn’t ‘Matt’s band’ – far from it – but he is both its focal point and its most vocal component. Whereas the other two speak in mates-down-the-pub tones, Bellamy gives any subject his utmost attention, before shooting off at a completely different tangent. He talks at a ridiculously fast speed in a startlingly deep voice, sometimes finishing his sentences off with a giggle, sometimes leaving them hanging in the air completely. He’s prone to on-the-spot philosophising, some of it impromptu, most of it well thought out. He seems a little shy and insecure, muttering something about existentialism, before stressing that he doesn’t really know that much on the subject. He rarely makes eye-contact.
There is also a hint of eccentricity about him. He describes how he was recently plagued by recurring waking dreams of being lost in a bone-dry desert, while a metal blade circled him and ultimately plunged into the side of his head (it was, he explains, related to dehydration). He also talks about a bizarre period of last year, where he dyed his hair blue and began tracing lines of ink over the veins in his arms.
“I actually enquired about getting them tattooed,” he concludes, “but they refused to do them. I think it was a case of me wanting to be someone else.”
“It bothers me when people think I’m pretentious. I don’t think I’m cooler or better than anyone…”
Matt Bellamy
MATTHEW JAMES Bellamy was born in Cambridge on June 9, 1978, and moved to Dawlish, on the south coast of Devon, seven years later. At the age of 13, his steady family life was shaken when his parents split up.
“The thing that shocked me the most about it was that I didn’t feel anything,” he recalls. “I couldn’t feel gutted. I tried, but I couldn’t. I found it a little disturbing about myself.”
Matt moved with his mother to nearby Teignmouth, visiting his father once every few weeks. Around the same time, inspired by Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, he began singing and playing the guitar.
“Maybe that’s one of the reasons I coped with my parents’ split so well,” he ponders aloud. “Up until then I’d never played guitar. Maybe that was my way of dealing with it. It sounds like a very American, psycho-analytical thing to say, but looking back on it, it could have been. Our music has always been intense, and maybe it’s reflected stuff I couldn’t really express in everyday life.”
One of the biggest influences on the young Matt was Teignmouth and its career opportunities. Or rather the lack of them.
“If you grow up in London, you’ve got all these possibilities,” he says, gesturing towards the window. “You can become a rock star, you can become a journalist, you can become whatever. In Teignmouth, you can become the owner of a sweet shop. At best. You learn that from an early age, and it gives you this attitude – like, ‘I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to make something outside of this place’. Being from a place like that was a major influence on the music. But it’s also helped us develop something that’s completely unique.”
It’s not just the small-town claustrophobia of Teignmouth that helped shaped Matt Bellamy. As a teenager, the singer immersed himself in “books on science-factual stuff – breakthroughs in science, that sort of thing”. It is, as ‘Plug-In Baby’ testifies, a subject that still interests him.
“It’s always intrigued me as to where mankind is going to go from here,” he says, gazing out of the window once more. “When I was 16 or 17, I read a book that was all about the future of the evolution of man. We’re all going to be wired into some sort of heaven situation, but we’ll make our own heaven because we’ll have abandoned religion. Being an atheist means that you have to realise that when you die, that really is it. Which means you’ve got to make the most of what you’ve got here and spread as much influence as you can. I believe you only really live through the influence you spread, whether that means having a kid and giving all your knowledge to your kid or not having kids and trying to make music.”
Muse is your legacy, that’s what you’re trying to say?
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I suppose we’re trying to leave something behind.”
MUSE MIGHT have sold almost 200,000 copies of ‘Showbiz’ and circumnavigated the globe, but Matt Bellamy still occasionally has to stop and pinch himself on his arm to make sure he’s not dreaming all of this.
“Now more than ever,” he nods. “When you’re on tour, your mind-set changes. You’re just trying to have a good time as much as you can; you don’t have time to stop and think. We came off tour last year to record ‘Plug-In Baby’, and that was really amazing. It was the first time we’d had a break in months, and we finally realised that we were about to record a new album and that it was all about to go again, only this time it would be more the way we wanted it to be. The thing that topped it off was that we woke up one morning, and the field next to the studio was covered in magic mushrooms. So we picked them all and spent the next four days naked in a jacuzzi.”
Hearing Matt Bellamy talk about drugs is like hearing the Pope holding a seminar on anal sex. Whereas some – actually, make that most – musicians brandish their pharmaceutical excesses like an Olympic medal, Bellamy has been coy to the point of avoidance about the subject in the past. Okay, drugs. Do you use them as a creative tool?
“Mushrooms, whenever I do them, I find quite inspirational,” he shrugs. “I only really do them once, maybe twice, a year, but when I do them, I really do them: two or three days at a time. I have difficulty with anything that’s man-made. I used to live in a house where drugs were around – this was above a sex shop in Exeter, just after I first moved out when I was 19 or 20 – and I’d see that stuff around me all the time. All sorts of people used to come around, and after a while it turned into a scene from ‘Trainspotting’, but I never really took part in it. I saw people going from one drug to the next, to the harder ones. I’ve always just been into hallucinogenics and hash, really.”
What about sex? Do Muse get groupies? Again, it’s something you’ve been pretty tight-lipped about in the past.
“I find it very difficult to talk about that sort of thing,” he begins, staring uncomfortably at the table between us, “firstly because I’m trying to hold a relationship…”
He trails off, then starts again. “To be honest, it’s difficult to talk about that sort of thing without sounding like an arsehole or a wanker, but, yeah, you get that sort of stuff going on the road, but you’ve got to be careful. If I do do something like that, I prefer to spend my time with people who aren’t necessarily fans of the band. I think it’s a dangerous thing to do with people who are fanatical about the band, about any band. There’s a couple of experiences that Dom has had where people have ended up following him around, going to every single gig. It’s something I’m a bit wary of, because I don’t want to give out the wrong impression.”
Have you had serious problems with stalkers?
“I wouldn’t say serious problems,” he replies. “I had to change my e-mail address, cos I was getting serious amounts of stuff. We’ve had a couple of letters where people talked about how the music stopped them from killing themselves.”
That sounds pretty heavy.
“I believe we all influence each other,” he states. “It’s like chaos theory – an action you take here may cause something else to happen somewhere else. It’s just that when you’re in a band, you see the results of your actions.”
DOM HOWARD describes Matt Bellamy as “very cool, very focussed – he’s got very clear ideas of what he wants to do and what he wants to be seen as”. Onstage, the introversion that shrouded the singer when ‘Showbiz’ first emerged in 1999 has vanished, replaced by a florid, fluid sense of showmanship that can, on frequent occasions, be nothing short of awe-inspiring. Watch Bellamy shaking noises out of his guitar that Jimi Hendrix would be proud of while simultaneously sending his voice soaring up to the heavens and back down again and it becomes clear just why Muse inspire such devotion. But ask the frontman whether he’s comfortable with the idea of being a figurehead, and a pained look crosses his face.
“I never want to be seen as a spokesperson for things outside of music,” he says.
What about devotion on a personal level?
“I don’t think that’s something you should strive for. It’s something that gets given to you, and if that happens then you try and deal with it the best you can. If you’re the sort of person who aims for that, then you’re obviously looking for something corrupt.”
How do you think the public perceive Muse?
“On the first album, everyone just thought we were copyists,” he smiles. “If I was a cynical journalist, I could probably see why. It’ll take time to get people to see us the way we want them to see us. I want us to be seen as an alternative to what everyone else is doing at the moment.”
Do you realise that some people see you as being aloof?
“Maybe we are,” he quips, laughing nervously.
“That bothers me, because if people knew me, they’d realise that I’m not like that at all. I don’t regard what I do as being any more special than what anyone else does. I’ve got no big ego, I don’t spend hours in front of the mirror, I don’t really care what I look like. When I talk about things of, I dunno, a philosophical nature, I’m not trying to make out that I know about those things – I’ve studied them, it’s just, like, layman’s philosophy.”
He sighs and looks mildly dejected.
“I do care when people think that about me. Pretentious is when you think that you’re cooler or better than other people. And I don’t think I’m cooler or better than anyone.”
YESTERDAY, SOMETHING strange happened to Muse. Out exploring the upmarket shops and eateries of London’s Covent Garden, the three of them were stopped in the street and asked for their autographs.
“It was quite funny,” says Dom Howard. “Surprising. The best thing about people coming up to you is their reaction when they leave. They’re always pretty cool – ‘Yeah, nice one, see you later’ – and then they get back to their mates and you see them going (clenches fist in triumph) ‘YEAAHHHH!!!’. It doesn’t happen very often, though.”
It will. Over the next six months, Muse’s profile is set to skyrocket.
As we talk, news filters through that ‘Plug-In Baby’ has been added to Radio 1’s all-important A-list, guaranteeing them at least 30 plays a week on daytime radio. The band’s management are predicting a Top 10 hit; maybe even Top Five. And you can bet that when the follow-up to ‘Showbiz’ finally emerges – it’s currently scheduled for June – things will explode.
“Do you think so?” asks Matt, genuine surprise in his eyes. “I always assume that people are going to think the worst. I’ve never set out to write music that I thought would connect with millions of people at once. I’d much rather earn things slowly and gradually.”
Their singer’s nerves aside, Muse are girding their loins for the inevitable adrenaline rush of the next few months. Matt says he’s looking forward to “going to new places, seeing new things, meeting new people”, and Chris admits to a twinge of sadness at the thought of leaving his girlfriend and son behind when the promotional grind begins.
As for Dom Howard… Well, he’s just looking forward to losing the plot.
“We’ve been talking about it,” beams the drummer. “We started losing the plot towards the end of last year – having more parties, being a bit more excessive. Maybe this year we’ll completely lose it, just become full-on alcoholics and drug addicts and die at a young age.”
Booze, drugs, death… 2001 could feasibly hold all of them in store for Messrs Bellamy, Holland and Wolstenholme – although whether the band truly want to tumble off the twig at this stage of their careers is very much open to debate. The one thing that is absolutely certain is that the next few months will see Muse soar higher than ever.
“Yeah, I think so,” concludes Matt Bellamy with a grin. “It’s basically about having a bit of humour about life and not letting it get to you. That and trying to avoid getting a real job for as long as possible.” ●
MUSE’s new single, ‘Plug-In Baby’, is out now. The band kick off a UK tour on April 5.
Translator’s Note: There are SO MANY typos here and there in this Kerrang! interview, but I’m keeping some of the typos around because nothing is as funny as getting a typo on a surname and ending up with Dom Holland lmao
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