Q magazine Online - (May 2000)|
The first thing you notice about Muse singer-songwriter-guitarist Matt Bellamy is just how tiny he is. Hailing from Teignmouth in Devon he could be the definitive eight-stone weakling put on this Earth to get sand kicked in his face and promote Charles Atlas-licensed isometric courses on the inside covers of Marvel comics.
And then he starts to play guitar. And sing. And you see people spill their plastic pints of Carling Special and thinking to themselves: 'fuck me, it's a musical tardis crammed full of assorted rhythm and lead axemen, Freddy Mercury, Thom Yorke and half a celestial choir'. Because the point is that the three piece Muse create a big, big, sound. It's there on the John Leckie-produced debut album Showbiz - reissued this week - but it's also there, without the benefits of Memorex or keyboards, when they play live. Occasionally, the widescreen sonic vistas that they conjour up can seem overwrought, such as their showcase London debut at the tiny 100 Club last Summer, when Bellamy's windswept wailing seemed a trifle silly alongside scores of record execs and music hacks complaining amongst themselves about the lack of air conditioning. But here at the University of London Union, with its airy stage and a packed audience of students who are only too ready to uncynically embrace the unvarnished angst of the band's music and sentiments, Muse come into their own. At times the band do try and rein in their stratospheric ambitions (such as when Bellamy eases himself onto a stool for a pared-down Escape) but the spine of the set is the triumverate of singles Uno, Muscle Museum and their current hit Sunburn. The first shows the hitherto unsuspected athletic qualities of bass player Chris Wolstenholme - the day when leaping up and down on the spot, while hinging the body forward in some kind of demented vertical pike becomes an Olympic event, he'll be our prime medal contender. The audience though latched onto the 'fuck you' lyrics of the recently unrequited - perhaps because Valentine's Day was still a painful memory. It takes a magnificent lack of personal perspective to shout out "You could have ruled the whole world but you blew it away", but London students possess it in spades, and it's very hard not get swept up in their self absorbed tide. Muscle Museum, perhaps the most production heavy track on the LP, gains a new freshness stripped to its bones on stage, when you can hear even more clearly its inspired, if slightly bonkers, collision of musical influences. Part Tom Waits polka, part a John Barry-esque cold war spy movie theme and with a crescendo-ing windswept chorus that sounds like the cries of the love-child of Thom Yorke and Freddie Mercury. If on paper - or rather on screen - it seems far too ripe a concoction, in performance the sheer vaulting ambition and self belief of the song helps it fly. And that in its way is part of the reason why Muse, unlike last year's media darlings Gay Dad, will make it big. It's evident that Muse really do believe in what they are singing and playing, and that belief is shared by the audience if not the critics. NME readers voted them Best New Band despite the indifference of the 'sophisticated experts' in London, not because of them, and their recently-announced summer tour is currently one of the fastest-selling tickets around. Yes, they are 'bombastic' - and 'grandiose', and 'operatic' and 'ambitious' and 'musically accomplished' - and all those other things that will never find favour with people who prefer their icons to mumble incoherently, stare at their shoes and never - ever - display their hearts on their sleeves. But when you're 21, with your whole life in front of you, Muse's lyrical preoccupation with the sweeping statements - with the 'anythings' and 'everythings', the 'forevers' or 'nothings' - are sentiments to be admired not sneered at. Especially when washed down with lashings of subsidised lager and frothed up by one of the most inviting mosh pits in recent memory... Mat Toor |
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