ON first encounter, Muse were the most forgettable band Id ever met.

Huddled awkwardly around a table in a dank under-arches caf a few yards

from the west London offices of their PR company sometime in the brittle
January of 1999, it was only their second interview with a professional music
journalist (their first was with my NME colleague James Oldham, for their
earliest publicity biog) and the first that would be printed nationally (in
NMEs new bands section, then titled On), and their lack of media training
trembled their teacups, stuttered their tongues. Three fidgety, flush-cheeked
posh kids from the West Country, they seemed utterly incompatible with the
music they were supposedly making: most notably the lead track from their
second EP, Muscle Museum, which had dive-bombed the NME stereo a few
weeks earlier and enthralled us all with its March Of The Diplodocus
bassline, its Moroccan snake-charming guitar, and a chorus so grandiose in
its falsetto massiveness that it seemed to explode from the speakers like a
volcano beneath a Notre Dame full of burning Queen albums.
This, surely, was music made by giants; 80-ft cast-iron rock giants in fact,
with the larynxes of screeching harpies, guitars of steaming brimstone and
testicles of pur granite. And yet, mumbling nervously into their Diet Cokes
were these three fidgety, flush-cheeked posh kids from the West Country. A
tiny, sharp-featured and restlessly angular 20-year-old called Matt Bellamy
was clearly the spokesperson, jabbering and stuttering his way through the
allotted half hour at breakneck pace, as though nerves and media
inexperience were prompting a severe attack of verbal gastroenteritis.
Bassist Chris Wolstenholme (Wolstenholme? I mean, how public school was
this band?) seemed friendly and charming enough, sitting ponderously aside
adding details and trivia where necessary, while boyishly shy but smiley
drummer Dominic Howard, judging from his total contribution to the
interview, might well have been born mute. * Could it really be that this
molten eruption of operatic rock, this Radiohead-to-the-powerof-Wagner, this
first burst of The New Music, could have emanated from these well
students?
The interview itself was painfully anodyne. Theyd met at school, won a
Battle Of The Bands, carried on playing pubs around Teignmouth for a
couple of years until they landed a deal with a minor indie label, blahblahblah. Were they shameless Radiohead copyists? The influence as there, but
they were a completely different band. How did they feel about being signed
by Madonnas label, Maverick? Theyve also got the Deftones and Matt liked
the Deftones. How did they respond to rumours of Matts tearaway
teenagedom back in Teignmouth? Well, um, hed been a bit of a bad boy but
they didnt want to go into that. We supped our soft drinks, we counted the
minutes, we plodded unstimulated through the On piece motions. And, all
questions duly (and dully) covered, all basic points of history divulged and
any hint of an interesting, controversial or inflammatory quote masterfully
avoided, I thumbed off the tape and informed Muse that they had just
delivered me quite possibly the most boring interview Id ever conducted.
My words, one suspects, may have been taken to heart.
Because, my oh my, how all that was about to change.
***

We downed vodka with roomfuls of groupies in Moscow. We got so drunk in

Austria that we didnt realise wed left Matt in Graz until we got to Vienna.
We ploughed the gin palaces of Pigalle and fought back crowds of grabbing
arms at the stage door of the Barcy. We started a photoshoot, unannounced
and unscheduled, in Red Square, only to be chased back to a speeding
people-carrier within 10 minutes by hordes of clamouring Russian girl-fans
whod unexpectedly spotted us there.*
We talked of naked, mushroom-fuelled hot-tub sessions in Richmond
recording studios. We did the sights of London together, from a virtual
meteor ride in the Science Museum to a playback of Absolution in the
Planetarium (complete with celestial star show) to admiring the waxy rear of
Kylie Minogue in Madam Tussauds.
Over the decade following that damp January disaster of an interview I
regularly rode the back bumper of Muses starship to success, interviewing
them at pivotal stages in their rise and watching them rapidly expand as a
live act, outgrowing the theatres like a toddler outgrows its cribwear,
bulging the roofs of arenas across Europe and finally bursting free into the
stadiums they were born to call their own.
At the earliest stage it was clear this was a band too big for their venues. On
those early Showbiz support tours and small headline shows they raged like
some gargantuan rock beast trapped in too small a cage; Matt would end
each show in a destructive frenzy, smashing guitars, frisbeeing cymbals
across the stage (coming close to beheading Dom at one memorable Paris
gig) and rolling around on the floor spewing feedback as if in musical
outrage at not having the stadium budget his music deserved. By the time
second album, Origin Of Symmetry , took them to the Academies, Apollos
and Zeniths, the orbs came out; dozens of inflatable white planets filled with
silver ticker tape launched into celestial flight during Bliss. Come
Absolutions arena invasion the orbs began to fall from the sky, strafed by
ticker tape cannons and holographic lasers. Come the festival headline
extravaganzas of Black Holes And Revelations theyd grown firework
waterfalls, future-flash enormoscreens, a guitar that seemed to change
colour depending on Matts mood and thirdcentury organs that lit up like the
spaceship from Close Encounters with each note. That Muse still felt
cramped by their surroundings was most evident in Doms drum riser a
neon rendition of a satellite that was so big that the arena stages were too
small to allow them to fit wings to it, leaving it resembling a massive dotmatrix blender. There were even plans to erect a huge aerial transmitter
mast in the centre of the auditorium on the Black Holes European tour in
order to extend the stage set (themed around the HAARP installation in
Alaska, which conspiracy theorists believe to have been built as part of a
governmental mind-control scheme) right out into the audience, but the 1
million price tag put them off. And so, inevitably, there was Wembley
Stadium their coming of age, their bursting from the arena cocoon, the full
unfurling of their stadium band cloaks. Here the three of them rose, back to
back in a plume of smoke from a platform in the centre of the pitch, before
strolling into a sensory blitzkrieg. Enormous antennae shot lasers into the
stratosphere. The giant orbs had evolved, pulsing spectrums of light from up
in the stands, overlooking the stage like a council of gigantic alien brains, or

floating around the arena dangling acrobats from their undersides. And the
stage itself assaulted the eyes; one huge video screen blazing out warped
and pixellated phantoms of the band or films of lap dancing she-droids or
devastated futuristic cities of delusion. It was the Muse spectacle as it was
always meant to be experienced, a show as monumental as their music had
always been. It was, you felt, Muse coming home; Muse exhaling. At
Wembley Stadium that balmy June evening in 2007, Muse were the least
forgettable band Id ever seen.
***
And the interviews? Such interviews! The secret lizard people running the
government!
The 11th planet on a collision course with ours, from whence life on our
planet had arrived on its last pass by Earth! The hallucinations of Martian
landscapes! The jet packs, the governmental mind control, the conspiracy
theories, the Cydonian knights, the blatant calls to revolution! Just as his
music grew bolder and more bombastic and his stage show became a
blinding space-age monolith of technology, Matt Bellamys interviews
became ever more wild and intriguing as he expounded on internet
conspiracy theories, corruptions political and religious, and ideas about the
make-up of the universe that hed pieced together from disparate scientific
facts linked with his own brilliantly skewed sense of logic.
Far from that dull, mumbling teenager in the west London caf of 1999, Matt
Bellamy had grown into a man intent on questioning everything, on peeling
away the lies and rumours that bombard us daily to expose his own
personal truths about the political, religious and scientific universe we
inhabit. And then on taking hallucinogens and diving in to truly experience
it. Part truth campaigner, part mad scientist, part sci-fi geek, part
psychedelic visionary, Matt was a whole new evolution of the rock star gene;
fiercely intelligent and Wagnerian of vision, mind-warping concepts and
worldview-challenging theorems would spew from his lips at a reakneck
rate, impossible for the listener to process and comprehend at once and
Always overflowing the interview time we were allotted and the word
lengths I was commissioned. Often it felt like trying to interview the entire
internet on random search.
In trying to capture this dizzying experience within these pages, the quotes
herein are largely previously unprinted segments of interviews Ive
conducted with Muse covering their entire career, charting Matts
development from media-shy mutterer to one of musics most fabulous and
fascinating personae and revealing perhaps an untold side of Muses rocket
ride to the opera-rock stratosphere. Its an epic story of tragedy, adventure,
mysticism and glory, so strap in tight, Muse go supermassive in T minus ten,
nine, eight

Indeed, Dominics early forgetability factor would be driven home to me a

few weeks later: having raced across the lawns of Reading University
chasing the opening riff of Muscle Museum when Muse were supporting

Gene on the 1999 university tour, I found myself, postshow, in Genes

dressing room, being asked by their drummer Matt if Id enjoyed the support
act. Theyre going to be massive, I replied, and thankfully so, since Id
failed to recognise Dominic standing a foot away from me in a woolly hat,
listening intently to my reply. *
This event was actually caught on camera by Muses long-time
documentary film-maker associate Tom Kirk and included on DVD 2 of the
Hullabaloo Live DVD release in 2002 you might just be able to catch a
snippet of my interview with the band as we speed off into the chilly Moscow
afternoon.

My own personal platinum disc for which I ferreted excitedly from a courier
box in late 2001, a nod of thanks for three years of stout support.