Muse's master plan

You're one of the biggest bands on the planet, with a penchant for intergalactic- themed albums and stage set-ups that would make Pink Floyd blush. So how do you stop yourself from imploding in a puff of concept albums, overblown egos and monster-sized tours? Muse's mad professor Matt Bellamy reveals all to Kevin Courtney

IT'S A law of rock'n'roll physics - when a band reaches maximum stardom, they will inevitably lose the plot and turn into a parody of themselves. Their megastar status will form a black hole that will suck in all their hard-won cred and completely distort their judgment. Due to drugs, hubris or simply becoming disconnected from reality, the band will suddenly think it's a good idea to release a concept album about hobbits, emerge from a giant lemon onstage, build a big, styrofoam wall between themselves and the audience, or stage a musical version of King Arthur - on ice. When a band reaches this point of no return, there's nothing else to do but totally implode - or star in their own reality TV show.

Teignmouth trio Muse will never have to worry about sinking into self-parody because, from their very first outing, they've existed in a state beyond parody. For much of their 10-year career, Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dom Howard have been on a mission to become more OTT than ELO, more flamboyant than Queen, more spectacular than Floyd and more unbelievable than Spinal Tap. Their debut album, Showbiz, signalled a band in thrall to the theatrics of rock, and subsequent albums, such as Origin of Symmetry, Absolution and their most recent, Black Holes and Revelations, reveal a band with a keenly developed sense of the absurdly grandiose.

It's a smart strategy - no one can accuse you of going prog when your band have been doing the progressive rock thing right from their, er, genesis. Muse have been accused of everything from aping Radiohead to scraping the bottom of the goth-electronica barrel, but it hasn't stopped them from selling mothership-loads of records and pulling planet-sized crowds to their supermassive stage shows.

No matter how big you've become, however, at some stage in your career you're gonna have to take a step back and reassess. You need to take a little time out from the rock'n'roll madness and take stock of your progress so far. For the band's singer, guitarist and all-round mad professor Matt Bellamy, that time came while the band were in the middle of their most recent box-office blasting world tour.

"I noticed something quite strange," recalls Bellamy. "We all noticed it, and it's happened on quite a few occasions. During the last tour, it was about 18 months altogether, the shows were quite large. Even in America they were like arenas. So straight from the off, I noticed that the first gig we did, in Bilbao in Spain - that was the first proper production gig that kicked things off - my first reaction was that the crowd seemed quieter than normal. And I think that when you create a massive visual show, then the audience tends to watch more than jump around. That kind of rubbed off on the way we performed. I think we played slightly more polished than we normally would.

"In Zagreb and Belgrade, for some reason we couldn't get our production in there. We had to play with just very simple lights and amps. I noticed two things: one was that the crowd went mental; the second was that we went mental too - there seemed to be just much more physical energy. The same thing happened in Christchurch and Auckland, because we couldn't get all the stuff to New Zealand, so we had to do a stripped-down show there as well. And again - mental.

"So in the future, I think we definitely want to mix up more. This last album was written for a large show all the way through; if you stay like that forever, you do lose something. This year, we may not go over-the-top spectacular. I think we might keep it a bit more raw."

Fans of Muse's overdone, titanium-plated live delivery needn't be alarmed, however. When the band play Marlay Park, Dublin on August 13th, they won't be abandoning the musical artillery and retina-searing visuals and replacing them with a couple of acoustic guitars, a kazoo and a campfire. But they will be keeping the pyrotechnics in check and not letting them overshadow the potential for rock'n'roll sparks to fly.

"Obviously, when we come back with our new album and go on tour again, I'm pretty sure that if the band are still well-known, thenwe're going to do something even more outrageous. But in the meantime, I think any gigs we do, we want to sort of keep it quite toned down. But, having said that, it'll probably end up going over the top anyway."

Bellamy is hoping that the live energy generated by the band's handful of summer gigs (they're also playing the V Festival in Chelmsford and Staffordshire) will feed into their fifth studio album, currently being concocted in their own recording studio by the banks of Lake Como in Italy. Building your own studio is enough of a rock cliché, but building one bang in the middle of the most desirable lakeside location in Europe - now that's going the whole rock'n'roll hog.

The trio are in Dublin to announce the Irish shows and to promote Haarp - not the laager, but the title of their new CD/DVD which documents the band's record-breaking weekend at Wembley Stadium in summer 2007, when 150,000 fans watched Muse christen the new stadium in suitably bombastic style. The band members have flown in separately from their respective homes - Wolstenholme from Teignmouth, Howard from his Highbury pad, and Bellamy from Milan, Italy, where he lives with his girlfriend. On the plane over, he was mobbed by a group of Irish schoolkids on their way back from a skiing trip. "A fair percentage of them seemed to know who I was, so I was sat with them at the back, just me and a whole bunch of schoolkids talking about skiing."

Bands often live in a musical bubble, floating between the stadium and the studio, with little outside influence penetrating through the plexiglass outer membrane. When you're holed up in your lakeside idyll, far away from the UK music press and with the chianti on tap, it's easy to get cosy in your own cocoon, and not realise that you've drifted so far from reality, you're practically floating in space.

To record Black Holes and Revelations, the band hired - another rock cliché coming up - a chateau in the south of France, but it wasn't until they regrouped in New York that the album really came together. Bellamy reckons that the shift from splendid isolation in the south of France to the musical bustle of New York saved the album from turning into Tales from Topographic Oceans.

"It was just getting back around people again, getting around that sort of activity and hearing other people's music, not just your own. I think that's important. I think it's just a case of keeping it completely fresh. Instead of having two years off and completely doing nothing with our lives apart from being in the studio - I think with that kind of approach, you can make a lot of work for yourself."

Perhaps if Radiohead could learn a lesson or two from their one-time acolytes, they might avoid having to give away their albums. When 15-year-old drummer Dominic Howard was auditioning guitarists to play in a band he was forming, he must have wondered what to make of the gangly, spiky haired 14-year-old who came on like a mutant hybrid of Thom Yorke and Edward Scissorhands.

After playing every dingy pub and basement in the southwest of England, Muse got their break at the In The City conference in 1998, and were whisked off to the US to try out for Madonna's label, Maverick. The label wanted Bellamy to tone down his histrionic falsetto and write more radio-friendly tunes, but the band refused to compromise, so cracking the US had to be deferred until another day.

Instead, the band released two limited-edition EPs on the Dangerous label - both of those collectors' items would probably fetch you 30 quid today. With the debut album, Showbiz, Muse found a willing fanbase among the younger brothers and sisters of those students who had bought OK Computer. The album was produced by John Leckie, who also produced The Bends; it wasn't until they plugged into their proggy side on the second album, Origin of Symmetry, that Muse began to shake off the Radiohead-lite comparisons.

Now, they get compared to everyone from Queen and Ultravox to Depeche Mode and Wendy Carlos, she of the arpeggio-heavy synth-rock magnum opus, Switched-On Bach. But even though such epics as Knights of Cydonia conjure up the diminutive ghosts of Spinal Tap's Stonehenge, tunes such as Starlight and Supermassive Black Hole suck you in with an irresistible gravitational pull, and fill your head with apocalyptic dreams and celestial visions.

Muse are going to have to turn it up way beyond 11 to top Black Holes and Revelations, but since the new album is only at the, er, conceptual stage, Bellamy isn't giving anything away about Muse's next musical move. You can count on one thing, though: Matt, Chris and Dom will boldly go where most bands dare not go for fear of turning into Yes.

"In a way, digital music has kind of changed the way we look at albums. I don't think albums necessarily have to be as cohesive as they used to be. Occasionally, you'll make an album that has certain themes going through it, and maybe a concept album or something, but I think because people tend to download the tracks they like now, you can really make an album of quite different stuff.

"I kind of see us as a pluralistic style band. I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but I'm aiming for the sort of thing where you can be perceived as a real hard rock band and you can be perceived as a dancey band, or you can be perceived as an earnest songwriter. So when people ask me about our direction on the new album, all I can say is that we'll continue with enhancing those different areas we've got, and adding to them, and maybe even pushing them further."

Muse play Marlay Park, Dublin, on August 13th with special guests Kasabian and Glasvegas. The Haarp live CD and DVD is out now on Warner Music. For clips from their acclaimed 2007 Wembley shows, see www.muse.mu or www.myspace.com/muse