Select (March 2000) - Tour of the month

Matt Bellamy, frontman and songwriter with sensitive West Country boys Muse, on growing out of baby venues and their new set of mellow showtunes...Huh? You kicked off your first major headlining tour yesterday in Amsterdam. How'd it go? It's cool to be headlining at last because now we can play a longer set of 16 songs. Yesterday we opened the show with a cover of Nina Simone's 'Feeling Good', wich we rocked up but kept quite slowtuney. We might play it in London. There was a really good reaction in Amsterdam, where half of the audiance were real fans, while the other half seemed just curious. We were going to play in a pokey 100-capicity venue but we got moved to a much larger venue at the last minute. Do you think this is the last time you'll playing such small venues in the UK too? London ULU sold out in the first week of January. That's brilliant. The same thing's happened in Paris - we're doing an extra date at a 3000-capicity venue. What do you think about being compared to Radiohead? If someone says it constructively rather than destructively, then I can understand the comparisons because there are similarities. Before we agreed to get John Leckie (the 'Bends' producer) to work with us, we worried that people would complain that we were just copying Radiohead. But we decided there's no point in worrying about it. What was the last piece of critism you heard? That when I'm on stage I don't speak. I don't want to have go, 'Come on clap your hands'. I'd much rather concentrate on the music. I'm so, so influenced by the atmosphere created by the crowd - sometimes I'll lose it, at other times I'm quite reserved. Your voice has an enviable range. But do you ever worry you might not hit those high notes? I hope my voice can stand up to this tour, but I try not to worry. Like, there have been a few times when I've missed the odd high note, but when you've got rock and energy, it doesn't really matter. What do you want the atmosphere to be like when you kick off your UK tour in Bristol? (pause)I hope people can get the diversity of what we're doing. We've got two new songs: one's really mellow, the other's a really dark Tom Waits-type song. I hope people aren't expecting pure rock. What's your favourite song to perform live? It changes from day to day, but last night it was a new song-'Plug in Baby'. It was the first time we'd played it and it went down really well. I think it's going to be on the next album. How's that coming along We've written half of it so far. We hope to record it after the summer festivals, but it all depends on how well 'Showbiz' does. Select

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