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дальшеAs the dust settles on London 2012, the actual Olympic medal-winnders have long since departed, but the worldwide victors from Team Pop are yet to be decided. This was the biggest global jukebox since Live Aid. Who were the Freddie Mercurys and the Bonos, vaulting to a new, super-elite level of stardom? Muse, of course, have been touted as the new Queen for a decade or more. The Sturm and Drang of their official Olympic song Survival prominently overtured both the track athletes' arrival into the Stratford stadium and the ensuing medal ceremonies with appropriate relish. Here was no worldwide group hug vibe in the style of Arctic Monkeys first-night cover of Come Together. It was a bare-faced ode to going for gold. "Race, life's a race," it urged, as if from within an athlete's adrenaline-ravaged mind, "and I'm gonna win!" Such naked ambition has always been part of Muse's own raison d'etre. Formed in Teignmouth, they reached their late teens during Britpop's expansionist phase. Their success was founded upon an unapologetic desire to scale to rock's uppermost tiers—even if it meant making their act so borderline-ludicrous that even the late Mr Mercury might arch a quizzical eyebrow from beyond the grave. And Survival, with its Bohemian Rhapsody-style mega-rock explosions and apocalyptic Dies Irae choral daftness marks a new outer limit in Muse's career of extremes. "That song…you won't believe I'm about to use the word 'subtle'," says Muse's garrulous fret-mangling singer Matt Bellamy, who is lounging, jet-lagged and caffeine-wired, on a sofa in East London. "Of course we're aware how crazy, even silly, that is. But when they first approached us about doing something for the Olympics, it was actually for a quite subtle usage. Maybe a bit more mysterious than it turned out." The offer to get involved in the Olympics arrived at a fortuitous juncture last November, a couple of weeks after the three members of Muse had reconvened in George Martin's famed Air Studios in Hampstead to start work on their sixth album. "When they asked us, we instantly thought of a particular piano piece that Matt had been playing," recalls Dominic Howard, their urbane drummer, ever a vocal advocate for rock excess. "Instantly, it just seemed to connect with the Olympics. We knew it was going to be big in nature because of the way it builds, this epic journey of a song. Them asking us sowed a seed in our minds, that it needed to go further, to have this hugeness"—he inflates his chest, as if triumphant upon the victory podium—"to represent the scale of what the Olympics is. The fucking biggest competition in the world." Mixing "weird opera and straight-up metal", Survival has served as an unconventional and subversive trailer for Muse's latest outreach mission. Though they first entered rock's superleague by playing Wembley Stadium in 2007, there remains a suspicion that Muse are an arty/gothy cult act that has outgrown itself. Bizarrely, even after 15 million album sales and countless arena tours, Muse still have convincing to do. And so, in possibly their best internal state of health they've emerged with all guns blazing with Album Six. Entitled The 2nd Law, it's a high watermark in their creative ambition. Bassist Chris Wolstenholme puts it concissely: "This time, we've really gone the whole hog." ON the roof at London's private members club, Shoreditch House, a smattering of bikini-clad bathers and business execs in budgie-smugglers are making the most of 20-minute sunny intervals on poolside loungers. Though all avidly people-watching, few even bat an eyelid as Matt Bellamy saunters through to meet Q. Admittedly, he's sporting some kind of disguise—a modest, temporary goatee—but the recognition factor is remarkably low for such a rock titan, who not only shifted 160,000 plus tickets on his band's last London outing but who has become a paparazzi target where he began dating actress Kate Hudson. Their romance appears to have been a whirlwind Hollywood affair. They hooked up in spring 2010, Hudson fell pregnant later that year, they announced their engagement in April 2011, and Bingham Hawn Bellamy—aka Bing—dropped in July. "Oh yeah, I was there at the birth," Bellamy recollects. "I was watching the whole thing. I was holding her leg up when she pushed him out. She didn't want me to watch but I was in there, getting my hands dirty, so to speak." It's a long way from chugging cider on Teignmouth seafront, indeed. As a result of Bellamy's new responsibilities as father and husband-to-be, Muse now divide their time between London and Los Angeles, where Dom Howard also resides (an inveterate rocker, he lives just up hill off Sunset Strip). So when we meet the band for the second time, it's on the patio at LA's Chateau Marmont Hotel, the infamous hive of rock and roll misadventure, where, most famously, John Belushi fatally overdosed. The members of Muse prove to be remarkably open and down-to-earth, even discussing the highs and lows of elite-class globe-trotting rockage. For example: Bellamy remarks casually that they didn't do anything in their year off before making The 2nd Law, apart from "a couple of bits and pieces here and there". He is referring to the trifling distraction of headling Reading and Leeds festivals. "We're not afraid of our eccentricities," he says of Muse's baroque tendencies—the Blake's 7 outfits, the outlandish stage acts, the symphonic rock indulgences. "We're not frightened of going into almost Monty Python rock. But it's like opera. If you put a piece of opera on, it's ridiculous unless you've listened to the whole thing and really tried to go there with it. Sometimes you just hear [emits a realistic blast of "Go Compare"-style operatic nonsense], that crazy stuff. For us, being able to perform those things was a lot of fun because it's a chance to allow your own craziness out, and not be afraid." He himself can rarely listen to Survival without laughing at the end, he admits. The climax, where Bellamy hits an eye-watering falsetto peak, is almost a comedy moment even to the man who san it. "We don't care if people don't necessary take songs like that 100 percent seriously," he says cheerfully. "I'm just as happy when people in the crowd go, [covers face and hoots with laughter] and say, I can't believe they just did that! I find that just as rewarding as when they go, [shower reverence] Wow, man, that was brilliant." Though pretty much every Muse album has tested the comic-epic extremes of their sound to destruction, The 2nd Law really does go the extra mile. The first single proper, Madness, for instance, takes Muse's slant on electro-funk-R&B (see previous pop hits like Supermassive Black HOle) to its logical conclusion. The first two minutes are entirely electronically generated, but for Bellamy's voice. It's almost dubstep but opens up into a bridging section more reminiscent of U2 circa The Unforgettable Fire. In terms of the Queen narrative, it's their I Want To Break Free—one even naysayers and cabbies will struggle not to whistle along to. Elsewhere, Panic Station is Prince-ly '80s funk, complete with slap bass, horns, but a riff akin to INXS's Suicide Blonde. Parts of the title track resemble soundtrack extracts from a Matrix-style sci-fi movie blockbuster. And as we've already heard, Survival had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at it. They hired a choir for the recording of that song, and the moment it started singing, Bellamy started crying with laughter again. "It was so operatic," he recalls, "so completely different to how I heard it in my head. But that's what it's all been about: writing stuff that challenged us to sound different from what we think we sound like. Survival is what it is, so why not just go the full nine yards? I don't really have much understanding of subtlety." He pauses and considers. "One day I'm going to get a huge zeppelin shaped like a UFO to come and land in a stadium. I've been trying for years, but no one will let us do it." Bellamy wolfs down a plate of spgetti bolognese. Though he's just returned from parenting duties up in the Hollywood Hills, he seems the very last to moan about any aspect of rock star life. He is, in the vernacular of Oasis circa 1994, but in his own quiet way, forever "mad for it". Bellamy had a reputation as something of a shag-monster in Muse's early days, and lived in Milan for most of the noughties with an Italian girlfriend, clinical psychologist Gaia Polloni. "I'd never want a straightforward relationship," he said back then. Now he's more tight-lipped about his domestic affairs. This is wise given that Bellamy is now tied for life to Hollywood royalty. Kate Hudson is the daughter of Goldie Hawn. She has an eight-year-old son, Ryder, by her first husband, Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes. It adds up to a personal life that's pretty far from what most of us would deem "straightforward". Throw in the sleep-deprivation associated with early fatherhood, plus the jet-lag from shuttling between London and LA, and you have a mindstate that even a hardened rock traveller would find difficult to describe as sanity. Bellamy fights the fatigue with multiple espressos. When Q poses a vague introductory question about The 2nd Law's themes, he responds with a motormouth monologue about the global economic collapse, climate change, and the laws of thermodynamics—specifically the second law, as per album title. "It's the one that says no system can grow without energy coming into it," he says. "Look at the news these days. There's this constant talk of growth, and it seems like everybody's in denial of the obvious fact that we're actually hitting the ceiling now. Certain songs, such as Survival, are almost celebrating this strength that we have, to evolve to this point after hundreds of thousands of years of harsh conditions. But right now you can really see that we're facing the collapse of it all—even though our story, as beings, is that we seem always to go contrary to the laws of science." But aren't Muse themselves symptomatic of man's expansionist logic? Bigger, broader, more insane? "Oh yes!" Bellamy says, and laughs. "You can hear we have our own problems with inflating. I'm not hiding from the contradictions in our own music, or in my own self. In act that's kind of what I'm expression with the whole album." IF you'd floated the idea to any of his mid-'90s peers back in Teignmouth that Matt Bellamy, fledgling frontman of local indi-rock combo Gothic Plague, would one day have any platform for self-expression in the wider world, they would've laughed you out of town. And probably given you a kicking into the bargain. Muse have often talked of how their isolated upbringing in South Devon gave them the impetus to excel and escape. They were each born elsewhere in the country, and after their respective families moved to the South West each felt an outsider in their hometown—not least because of the ever-present threat of violence on its deserted streets. Bellamy's father had "rock previous" as rhythm guitarist in The Tornados, protégés of doomed producer Joe Meek, and famed for 1962 Number 1 Telstar. Bellamy Sr quickly crashed back to reality as a cab-driver, and eventually settled his family in Cambridge. Soon after the move to Teignmouth, he and Bellamy's mother divorced. Matt, aged 10, was heading towards a wayward adolescence. The first time the teenaged Dom Howard met Matt Bellamy, his future bandmate was wearing a pink florescent Umbro shellsuit and had a flat-top haircut, army-style. Bellamy's gang was called The Sports and Howard's were the Indie Kids, all long hair, DM boots and baggy, colourful trousers—the '90s look. "Matt was in a band at the time, playing mainstream pop, like fucking Dire Straits," Howard recalls. "Really uncool. He'd not even been exposed to the indie-rock stuff that we were into like Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Senseless Things." The next time they met, at Bellamy's house, Howard started playing albums for Matt and asking him to play on guitar. The kid with the horrible shellsuit proved to be a talented musician. Howard drafted him into his band Gothic Plague. "It was like, I know you look weird, but you're a good guitarist, so I'm sure we can get along." This was about 1993, when Chris Wolstenholme was playing drums in Mega City Four soundalikes Fixed Penalty.The future members of Muse were effectively driven together by circumstance. They were the only kids in town serious about making a go of music. Cue, as Howard summarises, "five years of farting around in crap clubs in Devon". If you ask them today how they've held it together so long, they all point to those five years as bonding them more tightly than your average fly-by-night London group. Muse had to develop a colossal collective self-belief just to get noticed. Bellamy had to grow into the frontman role. "He never wanted to be a singer," says Howard. "He felt like he had to sing because no one else wanted to." And Bellamy himself admits he was close to straying from the path of destiny. "My teenage years were pretty chaotic," he says. "By 17, 18, I was living with a close friend, who became a drug dealer and went to prison. Looking back, I was very close to slipping down that road. Being in the band was very cathartic for me." A crunch time came circa 1997, when many of their friends went off to university. Bellamy, Wolstenholme and Howard stayed put. They'd talked about it, even thought of trying to get into the same place. "But by that time we'd already been together for three or four years," says Wolstenholme, "And we all had it in our minds that music was something that we were gonna do." Times were liean, until a series of lucky breaks—a free session at the local Sawmills studio, a gig at Manchester A&R-fest In The City, a showcase in a breathing space and accumulated confidence, that Muse stepped up a gear. "I'd been quite an introverted person in those early years of the band," Bellamy reflects. "I was actually having a lot of trouble coming out of myself. Over the course of the first three albums, I gradually opened up, and something came out of me—a strange level of confidence that I didn't even know was there. In live performances, there was just a desire to smash this shy person." Howard remembers his friend as carrying the whole world on his shoulders, and asking difficult questions of himself. In the mid-noughties Muse considered splitting up. DOMINIC Howard is probably his generations paragon of guilt-free stardon. He is sometimes completely Spinal Tap without even realising it. "Roger Taylor [Queen's drummer] once said to us, Have a good time, all the time," he says, "and we really took that on board". Wen Q tells him that this is the self-same advice offered by Tap's keyboard player Viv Savage during the movie's end credits, he nods as if to say: exactly. At the Chateau Moarmont, Howard sprawls amiable on the banquette—blue eyes, blond hair, lightly suntanned, shades on, sporting a designer goth crucifix T-shirt. He is a man unequivocally home with the LA lifestyle, apparently immune to jet-lag. Doesn't it get draining flying back and forth between London and Los Angeles? "Nothing a couple of Moscow Mules won't sort out," he replies. Howard loves LA: the rock and roll spirit, the Strip and Hollywood, the rock clubs that will never be shut down. "They're not gonna knock down the Rainbow like they did to the Astroai [in London], just to build a Tube station, are they?" he enthuses. "And, small and crap as The Viper Room is, it's still historic. That feeling and ideal still really exists in this town, and that's why I love it. [Bellamy interjects that Howard has become friends with Axl Rose's "fixer", the guy who fixes Axl up with women and other essentials on the tour. "I think Dom's prone to becoming Axl," Bellamy smiles. "He definitely lives Axl's lifestyle."] Howard is the one who staunchly pushed for Muse to expand its musical vision and its horizons in terms of venues. But his character and drive were sorely tested in an unimaginable few hours when the band headlined a night at Glastonbury 2004. "It was just one of those nights where all three of us were bang up for showing everybody how fucking good we were," remembers Chris Wolstenholme. "It turned out to be one of the best gigs we'd ever done. We came offstage, we had our families there and were literally doing cartwheels, even though it was muddy. Then the next minute, we heard that Dom's Dad had collapsed." Within an hour Howard's 62-year-old father, Bill, who'd been suffering from a heart condition, was pronounced dead. "It was an extreme high to an extreme low, very hard to deal with," says Howard, adding with a sad smile, "at least he saw a good one." The band cancelled their immediate engagements and Howard went back to his family in Teignmouth to grieve. A couple of weeks later he was back on the road. "You can't do anything about it," he explains today. "The only thing that'll help matters is time. Family and friends were all saying to me, You're going to feel better if you move on with your life. Get back to work—which for me is playing music. It didn't feel I was being disrespectful in any way." After 10 years' active service, they were still only in their mid-20s but carrying their fair share of war wounds. So Muse soldiered on. From the beginning the very key to their success was their willingness to tackle the lunacy of post-millenial tour scheduling head on. After all they'd been through, Howard for one had no qualms about acclimatizing to the stadium milieu. Bellamy notes that when Muse were preparing for their virgin appointment at Wembley in summer 2007, Howard had fully embraced the concept, and was already dreaming of the day he could employ his own "sweat towel tech" to mop his brow through the show. "The first night was just mindblowing" Howard states proudly, "We got out of there, I went back to my flat and by one in the morning, I was in bed staring at the ceiling going, "What the hell just happened?" Pause. "The party was on the second night, obviously..." Obviously. SIZE has always mattered to Muse, but in their headlong rush for success, there has been one counter-intuitive "real" force at work. At times, it has brought chronic pressure into their mix, but it has also possibly rescued the band from disappearing up their own supermassive black hole. Chris Wolstenholme, their comparatively towering bassist—he's a good four or five inches clear of Bellamy and Howard—was already in a stable relationship before their career had ventured beyond the Devon border. "It was good meeting my soulmate that early," Wolstenholme explains, "Kelly knew me well before the and was big, and I'd never be able to have that again with anybody else." This tested his relationship with the band early on, when Kelly fell pregnant in 1999. "What are you doing?" said the band, "We've just signed a record deal!" But there was no choice: tour, or give up your ambitions. Wolstenholme decided to balance band and family. By the end of the Absolution tour in 2004, he had two boys and a girl, all still resident in Teignmouth with mum, now Mrs Wolstenholme, while Dad bestrode the Earth like a rock colossus. "I was never at home," he admits, "I didn't want to leave the band, but I got ot a point where I was struggling." His way of coping, chiefly, was booze. "It wasn't a glamourous lifestyle thing," he says, "It was pure dependency, I never want onstage 100 per cent sober. I always drank five or six beers beforehand. I never felt like, Yeah, I'm a fucking rock star. If anything it was something that pulled me away from rock and roll." Wolstenholme would go missing a lot, or just sit in his flat drinking rather than go to the studio. "I don't think I realised how much it affected Matt and Dom, my wife, my kids." One of his therapists told him that his addictive personality is a genetic problem. Wolstenholme agrees. His father was a pub landlord and an alcoholic who drank himself to death, aged just 40. "The stuff I saw him go through," says Wolstenholme, "it wasn't the pleasant, sleepy death that people think it is. It's an incredibly painful death. It wasn't something I ever wanted to go through, or put my family through." The benefits of drying out, though, were not immediately apparent. Wolstenholme felt like a big part of his personality had vanished. But he noticed physical improvement when performing live. When he was drinking, he used to come offstage drenched in sweat. At his first sober gig—in Teignmouth, where else?—he was seized with nerves for the first time in many years. But onstage, he felt on top of the world. "And then when we came off, I'm like, I've not even got pit stains! Dry as a bone…" On the ensuing, grueling Resistance world tour, Muse decided to take a week off for every three on the road, so Wolstenholme could be with his family. But meanwhile Bellamy was splitting up with Gaia Polloni, and the band had committed themselves to a high-budget stage set, which made each night's performance into a trouser-soiling ordeal. Onstage, there stood three towers not dissimilar to the World Trade Centre. Come showtime, amid much fanfare, a gauzy covering would fall away to reveal each member of Muse performing on their own mini-podium halfway up the towers. It was a jaw-dropping spectacle, but, in true Spinal Tap fashion, prone to amusing mishaps. Bellamy, for instance, got his tower's "sock" snagged on his head. Less well publiscised was the vertiginous aspect of actually playing up there. They didn't actually get up on the towers at full height until the first gig in Helsinki—for the pre-tour production rehearsals they couldn't find anywhere big enough to set the whole thing up. "So we get up there, at the full three metres," says Wolstenholme. "And it was like, fucking hell, how are we gonna do this? You just couldn't move. The slightest trip and you'd pitch off headfirst." The band had to communicate by radio mic, 50 yards apart and clinging on for dear life. Then, when they played in Morocco City, the crowd starting jumping in time to Uprising. The towers began to vibrate. "I actually had to go down on the knees to stop from falling off." says Bellamy. But for Dom Howard, ever the carefree stadium titan, it was all worth it. "It looked good man," he says laconically, "Anything for the show." In early July Muse relayed the Olympic torch over the River Teign into their hometown of Teignmouth—the pasty faced outsiders now local heroes as well as international stars. The three has trained intensively for the event, says Wolstenholme, imagining themselves panting for miles to the sounds of Chariots of Fire, even though they actually on ended up running 400 yards each. The pavements, nonetheless, were lined with family, friends and, to Bellamy's embarrassment, the odd ex-girlfriend. Wolstenholme has now fully vanquished the drink. "It was more than possible," he says eagerly, "to live a very happy life without any form of drug." The Family Wolstenholme has just moved to Oxshott in Surrey, which combines the peace and quiet of Teignmouth with access to London, where Bellamy and Howard also have their pieds-à-terre. This most extravagant of bands is attempting the most mundane of things: a work/life balance. "It's the first time we've all effectively lived in the same town for 12 years," the bassist says, "Doing the album was almost like a nine-to-five job, where you'd have breakfast with the kids, go and work in the studio for six or seven hours, and be home for dinner." Now that Wolstenholme is puling his weight, Bellamy no longer feels he has to run things the whole time. The bassist even contributed two songs to The 2nd Law, pointedly entitled Save Me and Liquid State, both of which Bellamy encouraged Wolsteholme to sing himself. And they're not worrying about the album's reception either. "I get more arduous about the practical thing of getting a massive tour together," says Bellamy, "All the gear, the screens, the videos, the crew, the politics of trying to manage 55 people's schedules…that's the stuff that keeps me awake at night." Dom Howard described the moment before a tour as "such a big amount of tension, like a balloon about to explode." But in the next breath, he's back to rabbiting about how a stadium gig is better than headlining a festival—"we couldn't even get our flying spaceship into Reading," etc—and how he dreams of "having juyst one laminate that says "Muse World Stadium Tour 2012-14" on it. "When we did Wembley," he continues, "some people were like, Where do you go from here? It's gotta be downhill. But it's nice, it's just the starting point. What we can do now is, more of it. There are still so many places we haven't played—still a few countries even, like India, mainland China and most of Africa," Pause. "That's pretty tough to achieve, but we've always been in it for the long haul" There are, apparently, natural breaks in an operation as huge as Muse's. They'll finish a European tour and then it takes a month just for the gear to get to America—it has to go by ship. Chris Wolstenholme will need his own bus, they joke, for his burgeoning family. Maybe Bellamy too. "I'm still on the party bus, though," says Dom Howard, "I'm flying the flag for singles.com." And so, off Muse go into the sunset to overreach themselves once more. Are there any limits to their ambtion? "I don't think there'll ever be a band that appeals to the whole human race," says Wolstenholme—but here at least is a band willing to die trying. We live in grim times and it's odds on that the future will be even worse. Maybe Muse's spectacle, madness and ambition aren't distractions but necessities, ways to recharge ourselves, promises of something better. A chance to feel for a few demented minutes that we are winners too.
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дальшеAs the dust settles on London 2012, the actual Olympic medal-winnders have long since departed, but the worldwide victors from Team Pop are yet to be decided. This was the biggest global jukebox since Live Aid. Who were the Freddie Mercurys and the Bonos, vaulting to a new, super-elite level of stardom? Muse, of course, have been touted as the new Queen for a decade or more. The Sturm and Drang of their official Olympic song Survival prominently overtured both the track athletes' arrival into the Stratford stadium and the ensuing medal ceremonies with appropriate relish. Here was no worldwide group hug vibe in the style of Arctic Monkeys first-night cover of Come Together. It was a bare-faced ode to going for gold. "Race, life's a race," it urged, as if from within an athlete's adrenaline-ravaged mind, "and I'm gonna win!" Such naked ambition has always been part of Muse's own raison d'etre. Formed in Teignmouth, they reached their late teens during Britpop's expansionist phase. Their success was founded upon an unapologetic desire to scale to rock's uppermost tiers—even if it meant making their act so borderline-ludicrous that even the late Mr Mercury might arch a quizzical eyebrow from beyond the grave. And Survival, with its Bohemian Rhapsody-style mega-rock explosions and apocalyptic Dies Irae choral daftness marks a new outer limit in Muse's career of extremes. "That song…you won't believe I'm about to use the word 'subtle'," says Muse's garrulous fret-mangling singer Matt Bellamy, who is lounging, jet-lagged and caffeine-wired, on a sofa in East London. "Of course we're aware how crazy, even silly, that is. But when they first approached us about doing something for the Olympics, it was actually for a quite subtle usage. Maybe a bit more mysterious than it turned out." The offer to get involved in the Olympics arrived at a fortuitous juncture last November, a couple of weeks after the three members of Muse had reconvened in George Martin's famed Air Studios in Hampstead to start work on their sixth album. "When they asked us, we instantly thought of a particular piano piece that Matt had been playing," recalls Dominic Howard, their urbane drummer, ever a vocal advocate for rock excess. "Instantly, it just seemed to connect with the Olympics. We knew it was going to be big in nature because of the way it builds, this epic journey of a song. Them asking us sowed a seed in our minds, that it needed to go further, to have this hugeness"—he inflates his chest, as if triumphant upon the victory podium—"to represent the scale of what the Olympics is. The fucking biggest competition in the world." Mixing "weird opera and straight-up metal", Survival has served as an unconventional and subversive trailer for Muse's latest outreach mission. Though they first entered rock's superleague by playing Wembley Stadium in 2007, there remains a suspicion that Muse are an arty/gothy cult act that has outgrown itself. Bizarrely, even after 15 million album sales and countless arena tours, Muse still have convincing to do. And so, in possibly their best internal state of health they've emerged with all guns blazing with Album Six. Entitled The 2nd Law, it's a high watermark in their creative ambition. Bassist Chris Wolstenholme puts it concissely: "This time, we've really gone the whole hog." ON the roof at London's private members club, Shoreditch House, a smattering of bikini-clad bathers and business execs in budgie-smugglers are making the most of 20-minute sunny intervals on poolside loungers. Though all avidly people-watching, few even bat an eyelid as Matt Bellamy saunters through to meet Q. Admittedly, he's sporting some kind of disguise—a modest, temporary goatee—but the recognition factor is remarkably low for such a rock titan, who not only shifted 160,000 plus tickets on his band's last London outing but who has become a paparazzi target where he began dating actress Kate Hudson. Their romance appears to have been a whirlwind Hollywood affair. They hooked up in spring 2010, Hudson fell pregnant later that year, they announced their engagement in April 2011, and Bingham Hawn Bellamy—aka Bing—dropped in July. "Oh yeah, I was there at the birth," Bellamy recollects. "I was watching the whole thing. I was holding her leg up when she pushed him out. She didn't want me to watch but I was in there, getting my hands dirty, so to speak." It's a long way from chugging cider on Teignmouth seafront, indeed. As a result of Bellamy's new responsibilities as father and husband-to-be, Muse now divide their time between London and Los Angeles, where Dom Howard also resides (an inveterate rocker, he lives just up hill off Sunset Strip). So when we meet the band for the second time, it's on the patio at LA's Chateau Marmont Hotel, the infamous hive of rock and roll misadventure, where, most famously, John Belushi fatally overdosed. The members of Muse prove to be remarkably open and down-to-earth, even discussing the highs and lows of elite-class globe-trotting rockage. For example: Bellamy remarks casually that they didn't do anything in their year off before making The 2nd Law, apart from "a couple of bits and pieces here and there". He is referring to the trifling distraction of headling Reading and Leeds festivals. "We're not afraid of our eccentricities," he says of Muse's baroque tendencies—the Blake's 7 outfits, the outlandish stage acts, the symphonic rock indulgences. "We're not frightened of going into almost Monty Python rock. But it's like opera. If you put a piece of opera on, it's ridiculous unless you've listened to the whole thing and really tried to go there with it. Sometimes you just hear [emits a realistic blast of "Go Compare"-style operatic nonsense], that crazy stuff. For us, being able to perform those things was a lot of fun because it's a chance to allow your own craziness out, and not be afraid." He himself can rarely listen to Survival without laughing at the end, he admits. The climax, where Bellamy hits an eye-watering falsetto peak, is almost a comedy moment even to the man who san it. "We don't care if people don't necessary take songs like that 100 percent seriously," he says cheerfully. "I'm just as happy when people in the crowd go, [covers face and hoots with laughter] and say, I can't believe they just did that! I find that just as rewarding as when they go, [shower reverence] Wow, man, that was brilliant." Though pretty much every Muse album has tested the comic-epic extremes of their sound to destruction, The 2nd Law really does go the extra mile. The first single proper, Madness, for instance, takes Muse's slant on electro-funk-R&B (see previous pop hits like Supermassive Black HOle) to its logical conclusion. The first two minutes are entirely electronically generated, but for Bellamy's voice. It's almost dubstep but opens up into a bridging section more reminiscent of U2 circa The Unforgettable Fire. In terms of the Queen narrative, it's their I Want To Break Free—one even naysayers and cabbies will struggle not to whistle along to. Elsewhere, Panic Station is Prince-ly '80s funk, complete with slap bass, horns, but a riff akin to INXS's Suicide Blonde. Parts of the title track resemble soundtrack extracts from a Matrix-style sci-fi movie blockbuster. And as we've already heard, Survival had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at it. They hired a choir for the recording of that song, and the moment it started singing, Bellamy started crying with laughter again. "It was so operatic," he recalls, "so completely different to how I heard it in my head. But that's what it's all been about: writing stuff that challenged us to sound different from what we think we sound like. Survival is what it is, so why not just go the full nine yards? I don't really have much understanding of subtlety." He pauses and considers. "One day I'm going to get a huge zeppelin shaped like a UFO to come and land in a stadium. I've been trying for years, but no one will let us do it." Bellamy wolfs down a plate of spgetti bolognese. Though he's just returned from parenting duties up in the Hollywood Hills, he seems the very last to moan about any aspect of rock star life. He is, in the vernacular of Oasis circa 1994, but in his own quiet way, forever "mad for it". Bellamy had a reputation as something of a shag-monster in Muse's early days, and lived in Milan for most of the noughties with an Italian girlfriend, clinical psychologist Gaia Polloni. "I'd never want a straightforward relationship," he said back then. Now he's more tight-lipped about his domestic affairs. This is wise given that Bellamy is now tied for life to Hollywood royalty. Kate Hudson is the daughter of Goldie Hawn. She has an eight-year-old son, Ryder, by her first husband, Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes. It adds up to a personal life that's pretty far from what most of us would deem "straightforward". Throw in the sleep-deprivation associated with early fatherhood, plus the jet-lag from shuttling between London and LA, and you have a mindstate that even a hardened rock traveller would find difficult to describe as sanity. Bellamy fights the fatigue with multiple espressos. When Q poses a vague introductory question about The 2nd Law's themes, he responds with a motormouth monologue about the global economic collapse, climate change, and the laws of thermodynamics—specifically the second law, as per album title. "It's the one that says no system can grow without energy coming into it," he says. "Look at the news these days. There's this constant talk of growth, and it seems like everybody's in denial of the obvious fact that we're actually hitting the ceiling now. Certain songs, such as Survival, are almost celebrating this strength that we have, to evolve to this point after hundreds of thousands of years of harsh conditions. But right now you can really see that we're facing the collapse of it all—even though our story, as beings, is that we seem always to go contrary to the laws of science." But aren't Muse themselves symptomatic of man's expansionist logic? Bigger, broader, more insane? "Oh yes!" Bellamy says, and laughs. "You can hear we have our own problems with inflating. I'm not hiding from the contradictions in our own music, or in my own self. In act that's kind of what I'm expression with the whole album." IF you'd floated the idea to any of his mid-'90s peers back in Teignmouth that Matt Bellamy, fledgling frontman of local indi-rock combo Gothic Plague, would one day have any platform for self-expression in the wider world, they would've laughed you out of town. And probably given you a kicking into the bargain. Muse have often talked of how their isolated upbringing in South Devon gave them the impetus to excel and escape. They were each born elsewhere in the country, and after their respective families moved to the South West each felt an outsider in their hometown—not least because of the ever-present threat of violence on its deserted streets. Bellamy's father had "rock previous" as rhythm guitarist in The Tornados, protégés of doomed producer Joe Meek, and famed for 1962 Number 1 Telstar. Bellamy Sr quickly crashed back to reality as a cab-driver, and eventually settled his family in Cambridge. Soon after the move to Teignmouth, he and Bellamy's mother divorced. Matt, aged 10, was heading towards a wayward adolescence. The first time the teenaged Dom Howard met Matt Bellamy, his future bandmate was wearing a pink florescent Umbro shellsuit and had a flat-top haircut, army-style. Bellamy's gang was called The Sports and Howard's were the Indie Kids, all long hair, DM boots and baggy, colourful trousers—the '90s look. "Matt was in a band at the time, playing mainstream pop, like fucking Dire Straits," Howard recalls. "Really uncool. He'd not even been exposed to the indie-rock stuff that we were into like Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Senseless Things." The next time they met, at Bellamy's house, Howard started playing albums for Matt and asking him to play on guitar. The kid with the horrible shellsuit proved to be a talented musician. Howard drafted him into his band Gothic Plague. "It was like, I know you look weird, but you're a good guitarist, so I'm sure we can get along." This was about 1993, when Chris Wolstenholme was playing drums in Mega City Four soundalikes Fixed Penalty.The future members of Muse were effectively driven together by circumstance. They were the only kids in town serious about making a go of music. Cue, as Howard summarises, "five years of farting around in crap clubs in Devon". If you ask them today how they've held it together so long, they all point to those five years as bonding them more tightly than your average fly-by-night London group. Muse had to develop a colossal collective self-belief just to get noticed. Bellamy had to grow into the frontman role. "He never wanted to be a singer," says Howard. "He felt like he had to sing because no one else wanted to." And Bellamy himself admits he was close to straying from the path of destiny. "My teenage years were pretty chaotic," he says. "By 17, 18, I was living with a close friend, who became a drug dealer and went to prison. Looking back, I was very close to slipping down that road. Being in the band was very cathartic for me." A crunch time came circa 1997, when many of their friends went off to university. Bellamy, Wolstenholme and Howard stayed put. They'd talked about it, even thought of trying to get into the same place. "But by that time we'd already been together for three or four years," says Wolstenholme, "And we all had it in our minds that music was something that we were gonna do." Times were liean, until a series of lucky breaks—a free session at the local Sawmills studio, a gig at Manchester A&R-fest In The City, a showcase in a breathing space and accumulated confidence, that Muse stepped up a gear. "I'd been quite an introverted person in those early years of the band," Bellamy reflects. "I was actually having a lot of trouble coming out of myself. Over the course of the first three albums, I gradually opened up, and something came out of me—a strange level of confidence that I didn't even know was there. In live performances, there was just a desire to smash this shy person." Howard remembers his friend as carrying the whole world on his shoulders, and asking difficult questions of himself. In the mid-noughties Muse considered splitting up. DOMINIC Howard is probably his generations paragon of guilt-free stardon. He is sometimes completely Spinal Tap without even realising it. "Roger Taylor [Queen's drummer] once said to us, Have a good time, all the time," he says, "and we really took that on board". Wen Q tells him that this is the self-same advice offered by Tap's keyboard player Viv Savage during the movie's end credits, he nods as if to say: exactly. At the Chateau Moarmont, Howard sprawls amiable on the banquette—blue eyes, blond hair, lightly suntanned, shades on, sporting a designer goth crucifix T-shirt. He is a man unequivocally home with the LA lifestyle, apparently immune to jet-lag. Doesn't it get draining flying back and forth between London and Los Angeles? "Nothing a couple of Moscow Mules won't sort out," he replies. Howard loves LA: the rock and roll spirit, the Strip and Hollywood, the rock clubs that will never be shut down. "They're not gonna knock down the Rainbow like they did to the Astroai [in London], just to build a Tube station, are they?" he enthuses. "And, small and crap as The Viper Room is, it's still historic. That feeling and ideal still really exists in this town, and that's why I love it. [Bellamy interjects that Howard has become friends with Axl Rose's "fixer", the guy who fixes Axl up with women and other essentials on the tour. "I think Dom's prone to becoming Axl," Bellamy smiles. "He definitely lives Axl's lifestyle."] Howard is the one who staunchly pushed for Muse to expand its musical vision and its horizons in terms of venues. But his character and drive were sorely tested in an unimaginable few hours when the band headlined a night at Glastonbury 2004. "It was just one of those nights where all three of us were bang up for showing everybody how fucking good we were," remembers Chris Wolstenholme. "It turned out to be one of the best gigs we'd ever done. We came offstage, we had our families there and were literally doing cartwheels, even though it was muddy. Then the next minute, we heard that Dom's Dad had collapsed." Within an hour Howard's 62-year-old father, Bill, who'd been suffering from a heart condition, was pronounced dead. "It was an extreme high to an extreme low, very hard to deal with," says Howard, adding with a sad smile, "at least he saw a good one." The band cancelled their immediate engagements and Howard went back to his family in Teignmouth to grieve. A couple of weeks later he was back on the road. "You can't do anything about it," he explains today. "The only thing that'll help matters is time. Family and friends were all saying to me, You're going to feel better if you move on with your life. Get back to work—which for me is playing music. It didn't feel I was being disrespectful in any way." After 10 years' active service, they were still only in their mid-20s but carrying their fair share of war wounds. So Muse soldiered on. From the beginning the very key to their success was their willingness to tackle the lunacy of post-millenial tour scheduling head on. After all they'd been through, Howard for one had no qualms about acclimatizing to the stadium milieu. Bellamy notes that when Muse were preparing for their virgin appointment at Wembley in summer 2007, Howard had fully embraced the concept, and was already dreaming of the day he could employ his own "sweat towel tech" to mop his brow through the show. "The first night was just mindblowing" Howard states proudly, "We got out of there, I went back to my flat and by one in the morning, I was in bed staring at the ceiling going, "What the hell just happened?" Pause. "The party was on the second night, obviously..." Obviously. SIZE has always mattered to Muse, but in their headlong rush for success, there has been one counter-intuitive "real" force at work. At times, it has brought chronic pressure into their mix, but it has also possibly rescued the band from disappearing up their own supermassive black hole. Chris Wolstenholme, their comparatively towering bassist—he's a good four or five inches clear of Bellamy and Howard—was already in a stable relationship before their career had ventured beyond the Devon border. "It was good meeting my soulmate that early," Wolstenholme explains, "Kelly knew me well before the and was big, and I'd never be able to have that again with anybody else." This tested his relationship with the band early on, when Kelly fell pregnant in 1999. "What are you doing?" said the band, "We've just signed a record deal!" But there was no choice: tour, or give up your ambitions. Wolstenholme decided to balance band and family. By the end of the Absolution tour in 2004, he had two boys and a girl, all still resident in Teignmouth with mum, now Mrs Wolstenholme, while Dad bestrode the Earth like a rock colossus. "I was never at home," he admits, "I didn't want to leave the band, but I got ot a point where I was struggling." His way of coping, chiefly, was booze. "It wasn't a glamourous lifestyle thing," he says, "It was pure dependency, I never want onstage 100 per cent sober. I always drank five or six beers beforehand. I never felt like, Yeah, I'm a fucking rock star. If anything it was something that pulled me away from rock and roll." Wolstenholme would go missing a lot, or just sit in his flat drinking rather than go to the studio. "I don't think I realised how much it affected Matt and Dom, my wife, my kids." One of his therapists told him that his addictive personality is a genetic problem. Wolstenholme agrees. His father was a pub landlord and an alcoholic who drank himself to death, aged just 40. "The stuff I saw him go through," says Wolstenholme, "it wasn't the pleasant, sleepy death that people think it is. It's an incredibly painful death. It wasn't something I ever wanted to go through, or put my family through." The benefits of drying out, though, were not immediately apparent. Wolstenholme felt like a big part of his personality had vanished. But he noticed physical improvement when performing live. When he was drinking, he used to come offstage drenched in sweat. At his first sober gig—in Teignmouth, where else?—he was seized with nerves for the first time in many years. But onstage, he felt on top of the world. "And then when we came off, I'm like, I've not even got pit stains! Dry as a bone…" On the ensuing, grueling Resistance world tour, Muse decided to take a week off for every three on the road, so Wolstenholme could be with his family. But meanwhile Bellamy was splitting up with Gaia Polloni, and the band had committed themselves to a high-budget stage set, which made each night's performance into a trouser-soiling ordeal. Onstage, there stood three towers not dissimilar to the World Trade Centre. Come showtime, amid much fanfare, a gauzy covering would fall away to reveal each member of Muse performing on their own mini-podium halfway up the towers. It was a jaw-dropping spectacle, but, in true Spinal Tap fashion, prone to amusing mishaps. Bellamy, for instance, got his tower's "sock" snagged on his head. Less well publiscised was the vertiginous aspect of actually playing up there. They didn't actually get up on the towers at full height until the first gig in Helsinki—for the pre-tour production rehearsals they couldn't find anywhere big enough to set the whole thing up. "So we get up there, at the full three metres," says Wolstenholme. "And it was like, fucking hell, how are we gonna do this? You just couldn't move. The slightest trip and you'd pitch off headfirst." The band had to communicate by radio mic, 50 yards apart and clinging on for dear life. Then, when they played in Morocco City, the crowd starting jumping in time to Uprising. The towers began to vibrate. "I actually had to go down on the knees to stop from falling off." says Bellamy. But for Dom Howard, ever the carefree stadium titan, it was all worth it. "It looked good man," he says laconically, "Anything for the show." In early July Muse relayed the Olympic torch over the River Teign into their hometown of Teignmouth—the pasty faced outsiders now local heroes as well as international stars. The three has trained intensively for the event, says Wolstenholme, imagining themselves panting for miles to the sounds of Chariots of Fire, even though they actually on ended up running 400 yards each. The pavements, nonetheless, were lined with family, friends and, to Bellamy's embarrassment, the odd ex-girlfriend. Wolstenholme has now fully vanquished the drink. "It was more than possible," he says eagerly, "to live a very happy life without any form of drug." The Family Wolstenholme has just moved to Oxshott in Surrey, which combines the peace and quiet of Teignmouth with access to London, where Bellamy and Howard also have their pieds-à-terre. This most extravagant of bands is attempting the most mundane of things: a work/life balance. "It's the first time we've all effectively lived in the same town for 12 years," the bassist says, "Doing the album was almost like a nine-to-five job, where you'd have breakfast with the kids, go and work in the studio for six or seven hours, and be home for dinner." Now that Wolstenholme is puling his weight, Bellamy no longer feels he has to run things the whole time. The bassist even contributed two songs to The 2nd Law, pointedly entitled Save Me and Liquid State, both of which Bellamy encouraged Wolsteholme to sing himself. And they're not worrying about the album's reception either. "I get more arduous about the practical thing of getting a massive tour together," says Bellamy, "All the gear, the screens, the videos, the crew, the politics of trying to manage 55 people's schedules…that's the stuff that keeps me awake at night." Dom Howard described the moment before a tour as "such a big amount of tension, like a balloon about to explode." But in the next breath, he's back to rabbiting about how a stadium gig is better than headlining a festival—"we couldn't even get our flying spaceship into Reading," etc—and how he dreams of "having juyst one laminate that says "Muse World Stadium Tour 2012-14" on it. "When we did Wembley," he continues, "some people were like, Where do you go from here? It's gotta be downhill. But it's nice, it's just the starting point. What we can do now is, more of it. There are still so many places we haven't played—still a few countries even, like India, mainland China and most of Africa," Pause. "That's pretty tough to achieve, but we've always been in it for the long haul" There are, apparently, natural breaks in an operation as huge as Muse's. They'll finish a European tour and then it takes a month just for the gear to get to America—it has to go by ship. Chris Wolstenholme will need his own bus, they joke, for his burgeoning family. Maybe Bellamy too. "I'm still on the party bus, though," says Dom Howard, "I'm flying the flag for singles.com." And so, off Muse go into the sunset to overreach themselves once more. Are there any limits to their ambtion? "I don't think there'll ever be a band that appeals to the whole human race," says Wolstenholme—but here at least is a band willing to die trying. We live in grim times and it's odds on that the future will be even worse. Maybe Muse's spectacle, madness and ambition aren't distractions but necessities, ways to recharge ourselves, promises of something better. A chance to feel for a few demented minutes that we are winners too.
@темы: books, press
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23.08.2012 в 18:16-
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23.08.2012 в 18:19-
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23.08.2012 в 18:22-
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23.08.2012 в 18:22-
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23.08.2012 в 18:26party son.,
вот кто нас будет журналами импортными снабжать)))))
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23.08.2012 в 18:29-
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23.08.2012 в 18:36в цЫтатнеГ!!!!!
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23.08.2012 в 18:40-
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23.08.2012 в 18:59-
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23.08.2012 в 19:54-
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23.08.2012 в 21:37-
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23.08.2012 в 22:14-
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23.08.2012 в 22:52И всё же вот я смотрю на обложку..и ностальгирую по абсу и бхару-ими пахнет...
Кстати,о глянцевых изданиях с мьюз на обложке и не только
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23.08.2012 в 23:15а Бомон сколько стоит?
АААААА
СПАСИБОООО
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24.08.2012 в 00:17стоит 220 грн -новейшее издание в упаковке,правда мягкая обложка,но самое новейшее издание-включает в себя резистанс эру.я поэтому сразу почти отказалась от покупки( тут на 65днейрадиопомех с их 180 за концерт не иду,на Молыча не попадаю,буду копить..а цена-вообще выбила из колеи.на выходных пока что было 3 экземпляра книги.
С журналами-проще.НМИ-около 20 грн .В зависимости от новости\старости могут быть дороже\дешевле.Кьюшки-по 50 грн штука примерно,НО можно попробовать спросить скидочку. Есть ещё множество классических журналов по музыке заграничных-наших и не очень.цены примерно в том же пределе,что кью и нми)плакаты-10грн,но они ж все просто с фотографий больших напечатаны кустарно)
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24.08.2012 в 00:23черт, как-то даже... я лучше за эти деньги футболку куплю.
.Кьюшки-по 50 грн штука примерно
срань господня!
)плакаты-10грн,но они ж все просто с фотографий больших напечатаны кустарно)
угу, у меня один такой есть. зато там качество печати относительно нормальное (по крайней мере, мне привезли А1 на фотобумаге) в отличие от чертового Сериала.
спс за инфу, пну все-таки на пару журналов... или, черт. надо мне самой к вам ехать. арррр, еще соблазн такой
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24.08.2012 в 00:56у нас с изданиями на англицком такие проблемы всегда(
поэтому я махаю ручкой этой книге и с нетерпением жду,когда мне из инетмагазина пришлют Sound bites Капраноса за 180 грн))) *надеюсь,меня не разведут и я получу книгу кпрнса,а не "вкусно с борисомбурдой:голд едишн")))*
но кью-ж и в оригинале стоит не как нми или газетёнка..))его приятно держать в руках))
у меня такой не один,Но увы только с мьюз...(и часть из них регулярно падают мне на голову ночью)))
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24.08.2012 в 00:59та не разведут))))
толстенный? а, ну тада все гуд))
и часть из них регулярно падают мне на голову ночью)))
как в том анекдоте "проснулась в постели рядом с Томом Хиддлстоном. плакат ночью упал."
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24.08.2012 в 01:13-
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24.08.2012 в 01:14-
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24.08.2012 в 01:23-
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24.08.2012 в 01:27-
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24.08.2012 в 01:43party son., полагаю,теперь тебе легче будет найти)и вообще лучше всего-заказать на нормальном сайте.на крайняк-на озоне.
но если что- www.setbook.com.ua/ ...хотя,кнчн,результат-есть ли там на самом деле книги Лексо или нет...узнаем в течении недели)И лучше на озоне или ещё где-потому что эти товарищи сами заказывают со складов в москве...
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24.08.2012 в 01:53-
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25.08.2012 в 17:28