IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT… - Matt Bellamy interview - Muse [NME (September 13th, 2003)]
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT…
…and Matt Bellamy feels fine, as Muse prepare to go supernova with their galaxy-sized new record. If the secret 12th planet doesn’t cause armageddon first, that is
Text: Mark Beaumont
Photography: Perouinc.com
“WITHIN 400 YEARS WE COULD BE APPROACHING ANOTHER ICE AGE. SO JUST FUCKING HAVE A LAUGH!”
Listen carefully, we don’t have much time. NME and Muse, alongside a dozen random schoolchildren and confused-looking Japanese tourists, have been hand-picked to save Earth from an oncoming meteorite the size of Brazil. Our top scientists say there’s a 50/50 chance it’ll be dragged into Jupiter’s orbit and destroyed before it hits us, but if they’re wrong we’re talking about an 80 per cent extinction event, the end of days, nobody left but the eskimos. There’s a nuclear warhead on its way to blast the motherf—er to pebbles, but we’re the back-up crew, trailing this rock through the galaxy packing more Scuds than a US ‘liberation’ force. We’re on a full-throttle collision course with armageddon, baby, and we don’t even have Bruce Willis’ mobile.
THUDA THUDA-THUDA-THUD! We burst into the meteor’s vapour trail, our craft jolting like a bus over speed bumps. WHOOOSH! We bypass Jupiter, the comet now heading straight for Birmingham. KABOOM! We blast the rock into pieces, the impact rocking our ship like a knackered bumper car. HURRAH! We’ve saved Earth from certain annihilation!
Matt Bellamy is disappointed.
“It would’ve been better if you’d actually witnessed the world blowing up,” he says, trudging off the simulator ride in Kensington’s Science Museum feeling slightly bruised and extremely cheated. “That must be a weird feeling. Imagine being in a spaceship trying to save the Earth and then it all goes wrong and you see the mistake you’ve made.”
See, Matt Bellamy knows The Truth. He knows that global warming, international terrorism, religious fundamentalism, minute shifts in the Earth’s axis, swingers’ parties, Pop Idol and all other Biblical-scale disasters known to man are caused by the 12th planet nearing Earth again for the first time since 1200BC.
“It’s on an elliptical orbit but it’s massive,” he says, “so we only see it for a few hundred years. It takes 3,200 years to go around the sun and it travels at the speed of a comet. It’s actually a geothermal planet with these beings living on it which came down to Earth and genetically mixed their DNA with the DNA of apes to create us. That’s why we have this conflict between higher thought and animal instinct, because we’re a mixture of them. That’s why evolution has suddenly gone so fast so quickly, way above and beyond our physical capabilities.”
Amazing. Where did you find out about it?
“There’s a book called The Twelfth Planet by Zecharia Sitchin. It’s a very boring book though. I only read a couple of chapters and made up the rest. HURGH-HURGH-HURGH-HURGH! I’m a bit like that. I get books that suggest an amazing idea and I make up the rest and believe it. This guy Sitchin was the main advisor to Colin Powell for about 20 years. Basically all of the main sites where all the tablets are with these writings on by these beings is Iraq. That’s where it starts getting complicated.”
Maybe that was what they were after, not the oil.
“Probably both. But whoever’s got those tablets has basically got the truth of our existence. It’s a bit Indiana Jones but I prefer enjoying things that are a bit more exciting than maybe the truth. It’s a bit dull, isn’t it, the truth?”
The Truth? Man, Matt Bellamy’s truth is out there.
“It’s time we saw a miracle / It’s time for something Biblical… 'Cos this is the end of the world!” – ‘Apocalypse Please’
“YOU MUST GO EITHER NORTH OR EAST!” barks the policeman by the emergency tape, clearing coachloads of tourists and family outings away from a suspect package in a car on Exhibition Road.
“OK,” says Matt Bellamy, skirting around the police tape and wandering casually into the blast zone. For beyond the deserted no-man’s-land of near-certain death lies The Pub.
“You’ve got to have a bit of danger in your life,” he giggles, “haven’t you?”
If Matt Bellamy wasn’t in the greatest British rock band of this generation he’d be down Oxford Street with a megaphone, warning the world that The End Is Nigh. Instead, he’s written an album about it. From the cover shot of a forsaken soul watching the chosen ones flying off to heaven, to songs called ‘Apocalypse Please’, ‘Sing For Absolution’ and ‘Time Is Running Out’, Muse’s new album ‘Absolution’ (“It’s absolution from the human experience and everything it entails”) is one big death knell for humanity. Come in third planet, your time is up.
“Human nature,” Matt shrugs, “what can you do? Our evolution has brought us to this point where we’re absorbing and destroying all the natural resources. It seems like the only thing we can do is get away from the planet and destroy another one. Within the next hundred years we’ll make the extremities between rich and poor even more and civil unrest will increase and within 400 years we could be approaching another ice age. So just fucking have a laugh! Go berserk while you’ve got the chance! HURGH-HURGH-HURGH!”
And ‘go berserk’ is certainly Muse’s response to onrushing doom. Even after recording sessions for their platinum-selling second album ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ involved necking a ton of magic mushrooms, getting naked in a hot tub and eating maggots, the accompanying year-long tour (complete with a tour manager dressed as a circus ringmaster and enormous inflatable testicles) made the last days of Sodom look like a night out with Good Charlotte.
“There was a lot of nakedness on the bus,” Matt remembers. “I remember seeing Dom’s (Howard, drummer) bum running down the corridor and our tour manager with a couple of women on his face. But when you’re doing that kind of thing it never feels like what you thought it would.”
He considers for a second.
“No, it did actually. It was brilliant. HURGH-HURGH-HUUUUURGH! I think we realised we are normal people and normal people go for it when they’re on tour because that’s what it’s all about. I had a relationship for six years from the age of 16 to 22, so I always had that stability. But when that stability stopped and I split up right in the middle of the ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ tour, I thought to myself, ‘Actually, being unstable is much better!’ Before, touring was a bit of a jading experience, but when I was free it was the opposite because I’d never really experienced anything outside of the life that we had in Devon. Then I found myself in a really good relationship with someone who’s way more exciting than anyone I’d ever met before. So in some ways I’ve almost got it all now. I’m with someone that’s cool, not restrictive.”
After a drenched but triumphant finale at Reading 2002, the last massive inflatable testicle was burst, the ringmaster was sold off to The Thrills for half a banana and Muse retired back to Devon for their first real break in three years and some Big Thinking. Bassist Chris Wolstenholme began frantic work on his third child – being induced this very afternoon – presumably hoping to save the human race by becoming the new Adam and Eve. Dom repented of his arse-baring days and found himself a ladyfriend to go supermarket shopping with “to ground myself”. And Matt, you imagine, covered his windows in silver foil, learned to speak Zarthagian and watched the world going to hell in a handbucket on the news.
“There were moments when the war kicked in when everyone was watching TV for those first few days,” he remembers, “and it was a pretty dark atmosphere in the world. It was a bit of a weird vibe. I think that inspired a bit of doubt in the album as well, but it’s also one of the things that forced the album to need to be more, y’knowworrimean. Some songs became more important than others, like ‘Apocalypse Please’. That song sets the stage for the whole album. Religious fanaticism and religious stupidity is gonna cause everything to fuck up and the whole album is about what goes through your mind at the last moment. Are you pissed off and jaded or are you happy you’ve done everything you could’ve done?”
In fact, having heard ‘Apocalypse Please’ and believing Matt Bellamy to be the new Nostradamus, NME is off to live in a cave in Tibet. Who’s coming?
“HURGH-HURGH-HURRRRGHHH!” Matt guffaws. “Actually, the message of that song is that religious inaccuracies lead to the re-enactment of ancient prophesies. That’s what’s going on now. That knobhead in America and Islam. Between them all they’re believing in some ancient prophesy and all that was was a couple of people in robes improvising. The fact that the modern day is still influenced by these ideas is outrageous. I’m singing from the point of view of a religious fanatic saying, ‘C’mon God, come down to Earth and sort it all out’.”
And you might want to stop reading now, Evanescence. Matt doesn’t hold to traditional readings of the scriptures.
“Jesus wasn’t a Jew or anything,” he motormouths emphatically. “I saw this programme the other night and I read a bit about it, it’s a recent discovery. People have known about it for years but the Spanish Inquisition kept it down. Basically, Jesus didn’t die on the cross. He got taken down. He was taken down and he was resuscitated, not resurrected. It comes from the same Hebrew word, resuscitation and resurrection.”
You realise you’ve just rubbished 2,000 years of Christianity? We’ll get letters…
“It’s important these guys know this stuff,” Matt continues, “because Judaism says that the Messiah will come down to Earth and sort it all out. But he didn’t sort it all out, did he? He came down and multiplied some fish and did this, that and the other and died. He hadn’t sorted it all out, so he was obviously not the Messiah. My point is he was a great bloke and the real story is much more interesting than some weird fantasy. Because the real story is that the most important religion in the western world is influenced by Eastern ways of thinking. The things that I'm saying now, in the years 900, 1600, people who said that, they got quartered and they got burned at the stake. Now we live in a time when you can say stuff and I think people need to say it. If I was saying what I’m saying now in America then I think I would get quartered in a way.”
You didn’t just watch ten minutes of that programme and make the rest up, did you?
“No, no. I’m not against religion. I’m a little bit anti-Christian but I’m not anti-Judaism, I’m not anti-religious thought at all. As far as I can see the people that are causing problems are the people who think he’s already been and gone. I think he hasn’t come yet.”
He pauses for a second. A fleeting concern that he might be offending someone.
“THERE’S A BOOK CALLED THE TWELFTH PLANET BY ZECHARIA SITCHIN. IT’S A VERY BORING BOOK THOUGH. I ONLY READ A COUPLE OF CHAPTERS AND MADE UP THE REST”
Visionary, dreamer or madman, Matt Bellamy is certainly that rare beast in rock, the Thinker. Often dismissed as a Stephen Hawking-meets-Screaming Lord Sutch crackpot – the wild philosophies on aliens, religion and astronomy; the hallucinations of razor spikes in his head; the claims that he can’t remember anything about his life before the age of 20 and ‘downloads’ his personality from people he meets; the desire to own a jetpack and live under the sea; the voice like Maria Callas on crack – he’s actually something of a cosmic intellectual, with a sponge for a brain and an imagination the size of the 12th planet. So it’s no wonder that the album he started writing about mundane home matters took a sharp turn for the apocalyptic in the band’s London rehearsal room once world events went mushroom cloud-shaped.
“There’s a few ways of looking at it,” he says. “It could be about my relationship ending, it could be about the fact that war was breaking out, it could be about the fact that we were finishing a tour, it could be about the fact that in 400 years there’s gonna be an ice age. I think within our lifetime we’re gonna see some dark stuff. But the reaction isn’t all negative. There’s a few tracks that are trying to find that strength, the raw energy that keeps you going through that jadedness as opposed to just resigning.”
Indeed, every pore of ‘Absolution’ screams defiance in the face of destruction, sends humanity out on an almighty bang, not a whimper. Reining in ‘Origin Of Symmetry’s Flaming Soprano histrionics while playing their instruments like they’re Earth-obliterating asteroids and wailing tunes that could bend universes, Muse have here achieved a whole new stratosphere of rock: Lunar Opera or Thunder Metal. Album of the year by 100 light years, it turns up the rock to warp 11 on the likes of ‘Time Is Running Out’ and ‘TSP’, yearns like a poisoned Romeo on ‘Sing For Absolution’ and makes steel cry on the sumptuous, breathy ‘Blackout’. It also reads like a collection of Grimm fairy tales rewritten by Bret Easton Ellis for the technological age: ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ concerns a medical complaint whereby someone falls in love with the person that has kidnapped them while ‘Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist’ sounds like it’s the story of being the only gay guy in Jet.
“It’s actually the idea of a guy who’s come back from the office and he’s killed everybody in the office,” says Matt, feverishly. “He’s ripped them all apart with his bare hands. The mindset of the song is that someone has done that and gone home to their wife with blood on their hands. It’s not the ending of his life, it’s the ending of his sanity.”
With such dark thoughts plaguing his every waking moment and such catastrophic world events informing his worldview the cracks began to widen. Matt started having regular nightmares about being hung upside down and beaten on the feet (“I’d wake up with my feet clenched”) and he started experiencing violent moodswings in the studio.
“I was moving between the extremes of doubt and absolute ridiculous confidence. There are moments when you, the rest of the band, the producer and the assistant producer all look at each other and think, “What the fuck are we doing? We’ve completely lost the plot. But then you contrast that with the moments you really feel like you’re doing something important. Those doubting moments are really quite stark, it’s a really hollow feeling, but they’re usually followed by the opposite.”
‘Absolution’ is a momentous record because it has so little to do with 2003. Epic when the zeitgeist reads “tinny”, enormous when Toe Rag is fully booked until 2005, forward-thinking when the AC/DC rack of HMV is empty, serious when The Darkness are up for the Mercury Music Prize, it’s unique for its very grandiosity and huge but fully-achieved ambition. But by sounding so gigantic so young, does that make Muse dinosaurs before their time?
“No,” Matt argues, “we’re the opposite. We have the possibility of changing everything. It’s not just making music, it’s showing people what music is all about.”
No, the future. Will robots rise up and destroy their human creators?
Matt ponders for a moment like a challenged professor. “There’s been enough films to suggest this sort of thing might happen. Have you heard of the latest form of the internet? You don’t just swap data, you swap power. You can connect yourself to a computer in Australia and take power from there. It’ll just be one big brain.”
Stop the world, Muse are getting off.
The things that make the Muse frontman happy
Futurama-style jetpacks
Matt has a nippy £6,000 rocketpack. “It’s basically one of the best things I’ve ever experienced. It spins around, you take off, you fly and you feel like you’re the next step up on the evolutionary ladder. I’ve been up to 3,000ft in it, after that, things begin to go a bit blurry.”
Classical music
No Jet or Razorlight at Castle Bellamy. “I love Renaissance music. Bach, Palestrina, amazing choral music… all those harmonies moving within each other. It’s really sacred music. Godlike music.”
Zecharia Sitchin
Ufologist who believes aliens wrote the bible. Also posits the theory that an undiscovered planet in our solar system causes armageddon every 3,670 years. The mad old bastard.
Translator's Note: I get the feeling that half of the stuff that Matt says is what he genuinely believed in back then, and the other half was him saying outrageous things just to see what he could get away with.
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