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

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

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

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

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

The bus parks, and two of the three get off. Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme look like they’ve slept in their clothes. Wolstenholme, who with his shaved head and unshaved whiskers looks borderline criminal, yawns.
" Matt is still sleeping," he says. "He may be a while."
When Bellamy finally emerges, he surveys the venue’s exterior and says, "You know, it all starts to look the same after a while."
Unsurprisingly, really, for this has been his day-to-day reality for half a decade now.


The country’s hardest-working act formed in their hometown of Teignmouth, Devon in the mid-90’s, when all three were still in their teens. Their debut album, Showbiz, arrived in 1999. An unusually torrid affair, it was built around the band’s love of Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. Critics found them pointedly second hand, from the way they aped their mentors to the Jimi Hendrix manner in which they routinely trashed their instruments onstage.
" But Nirvana did that," is Howard’s argument today. "They never got criticised for it, so why did we?"
Critical derision aside, Muse became popular with the kind of disaffected teens who display too much makeup around the eyes and self-imposed cigarette burns. they were huge in France and Italy, and during those early tours, Bellamy would disappear for days at a time, intent on enrolling new members into the fan club personally.
"Well, I’d never been to university," he explains, cheeks colouring, " so I was making up for lost time."
By 2001, under the tutelage of former Stone Roses andRadiohead producer John Leckie, they were being encouraged to follow their ambition, no matter how ridiculous it got. The result was the sci-fi flavoured Origin of Symmetry, in which the twin influences of Queen and Pink Floyd coalesced in a way that redefined the parameters of rock bombast. Across Europe, they soared. In America, they sunk like a stone.
" Our label [the Madonna-co-founded Maverick] didn’t like it and never released it," says Bellamy. "Which was unfortunate."
And then, two years later, came Absolution, an impressive feat of the imagination in which subtlety was substituted for sheer supersonic power. Bellamy had often proclaimed a love of Rachmaninov and Rage Against The Machine. In Absolution, he somewhow managed to combine both elements of both. "Bono once said that it’s difficult to write songs from positive feelings, and I’d go along with that," he says. " I’m not a particularly negative person, but I do think writing about the end of the world is good for me."
At the time his reading comprised of the works of Zecharia Sitchin, an author who believes, bless him, that aliens from the planet Nibiru created the human race 300,000 years ago. As a direct consequence, many considered the singer somewhere between enigmatic and plain crazy.
"Some things that I say get taken out of context," he counters.
"But they are real feelings. I think alot. I ponder stuff. I like to construct answers from unanswerable things."

AT CLUTCH CARGO’S, stage time is an unusually early 7.30pm. This is because the curfew is 9.15pm. Despite a stage so small it rules out the use of pyrotechnics, the band play with their typical big-eyed fervour, Bellamy screaming into the microphone like a man intent on exorcism. It’s clear he loves what he does, even when doing it in a place such as Pontiac. His logic effecively runs like this: if Radiohead managed to break America for the very reason that they were an unsual rock act, then so too can Muse.
Korda Marshall, the new head of Warners UK, to whom Muse are now signed, is similarly confident.
"You’ve got to remember that Absolution is effectively their debut album in America," he says. " So I think 300,000 for a ’new’ British act is pretty good going. In the next three to five years, Muse could really become huge."
Marshall has a theory: " Blur didn’t work [in the US] because their music makes your head jerk from side to side. Muse’s is proper Upper Body Rock, and Americans love Upper Body Rock."

In the dressing room afterwards, the mood is uncharacteristically calm. Dominic Howard sits alone on a collapsed sofa. On the heavily-graffitied wall behind his left ear is the legend ROAST BEEF CURTAINS, alongside an anatomically correct diagram.
Howard, 27, doesn’t like interviews. He doesn’t know what to say in them, greeting every question and prefacing each answer with a nervous laugh. When asked what he brings to Muse, he stutters for upwards of 60 seconds.
"Well, I suppose, I don’t know, maybe...cohesion? And organisation?"

He refuses to talk about his father’s death, saying only that Glastonbury was the best day of his life, and the worst. After the funeral, he spent time with his family, the band havign to cancel several shows across Europe. But within a week, he was back behind his drumkit.
"I spoke to friends who had also lost loved ones," he says, guardedly, "and they all encouraged me to get back to work. I had to try and find something positive after something so...so negative."
These days, he lives in London with his American student girlfriend. He says they are happy. After a nervous laugh, he says very little else.
Chris Wolstenholme is the youngest of the three, turning 26 at the start of December, but also the most settled. Back home in Devon, he has a wife and three children, which means that the band’s Herculean commitment to the road brings with it considerable conflict.
"But I’m lucky, because my wife is really understanding," the bassist says. "She knows what this means to me. But I miss my children terribly. I miss my wife, especially after a few weeks when I’m despeate to get laid..."

POOR MATT BELLAMY has never had a natural sense of style. After the show, he showers, then reboards the tourbus looking quite preposterous in a pair of burgundy cowboy boots, some shapeless jeans, a faux Russian army jacket, and a little khaki hat with earmuffs whose string secures under- and, yes, this feels appropriate in the circumstances-his chinny-chin-chin. When the jacket comes off, it is difficult not to burst into disbelieving applause at the sight of a striped, multicoloured V-neck jumper.
"This?" he says with pride. "I love this. I bought it in Canada. It’s really warm. Here, feel."
And you know what? it is warm.
Fashion calamity notwithstanding, Bellamy is Muse’s clear driving force. he grew up under the musical influence of his father, now a retired plumber but once the guitarist in ’60s instrumental act The Tornados ( the first UK Act to score a US Number 1, with ’Telstar’). He studied the Clarinet at nine, and flamenco guitar at 17. His parents’ divorce, during his mid-teens, turned him from a wilful child into an aggressive one, shaving his head and regularly playing truant from school. he started growing Marijuana in his loft, and thrived on being one of Teignmouth’s more visible misfits. His first groups were called Gothic Plague and Carnage Mayhem, and when Muse began to take off, he threw himself into the pursuit of pure rock Hedonism.
" I was more of a voyeur, actually," he says. " I’ve never done any hard drugs at all, just mushrooms and alot of alcohol. But I’m not against hard drugs at all. In fact, I’d actively encourage people around me to do them. I liked to see people off their faces. I’m hyperactive enough in my normal state."

This is true. In Conversation, Bellamy talks at a hundred miles an hour, words toppling on one another like falling dominoes. He fidgets constantly. He says he is fascinated by meeting fans, especially the "berserker" ones, and tells me about a recent one, a young Iraqi woman of 20, now living in the US, who grew up exposed to torture and imprisonment.
"She told me that our music had saved her life, and that she needed me to reply to her letter to know her story had been heard. So of course I replied, but then she started showing up every night on our Canadian tour, waiting for us outside in the freezing cold afterwards. What could we do? We had to take her in."

Was she looking for sex?

"No, I don’t think so, although I’m sure she would have been up for it."

For the past three years now, Bellamy has been in a relationship with an Italian woman. She now lives with him in London. He is, he says, madly in love. "But it’s a very volatile relationship. We split up everyday, or so it seems. I like it that way, though. I’d never want a straightforward relationship."

Is it easy to remain faithful?

"Yes, it is, I suppose. But the girlfriend I’ve got is...I shouldn’t get personal here, but it’s not necessarily-well, necessarily traditional."

So it’s an open relationship?
He blushes, drums his fingers on the table top, and pinches his nose repeatedly. "Let’s not go there, eh? But I mean, yes, being faithful - in terms of love - is very easy."

He gets up to stretch his legs. He is gone for some time.
TEN DAYS LATER, Muse are sequestered in an East London studio for the Q photo shoot.(there are no posters in the mag though) Howard and Wolstenholme, in particular, look exhausted. The campaign for Abslolution is, finally, almost at an end. Time off looms. but Bellamy, as is his wont, is buzzing.

He says four or five new songs are already completed, that he is currently obsessed with writing instrumental music like Dick Dale and his father’s own Tornados. He wants to be less commercial, and more so: " I’m also writing two and a half minute explosions of pure joy."

He wants to travel barren countries, do some whale watching. And then, in the spring, he might buy a house somewhere on this planet, convert it into a studio, and create Muse’s most sonically ambitious album to date. It could make them truly global.

Unless, of course, rock folklore intervenes.

"We could all be killed in a bus crash," he says, eyes the size of frying pans. "Hey, don’t laugh. It happens."