Random Musings of a Curious Mind

“Global Superstars Muse Explode in America”

Those fans run a bizarre gamut from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, who has cited the band as an inspiration for her bestselling quartet of vampire romances (the group also has songs on the soundtracks to both of the Twilight movies), to conservative demagogue Glenn Beck, who has played “Uprising” on his syndicated radio show. “I don’t know much about him,” Bellamy confesses, “apart from a few questionable views on some social things.”

The singer’s own politics may be best described as aggressive skepticism. “I am hungry for an unrest/Let’s push this beyond a peaceful protest,” he sings over the prog-rock turmoil of “Unnatural Selection,” which Bellamy wrote after the death of an innocent bystander, pushed by a policeman, during demonstrations against the G-20 summit meeting this past spring in London.

Bellamy loathes politicians on the left and the right — “I can’t believe we leave actual policymaking to a small network of people unaccountable to their voters” — and is a keen student of conspiracy theories, up to a point. “I’m a curious person,” he says, and, he insists, “a rational thinker. There is loads of stuff on the Internet suggesting 9/11 was an inside job. But that is not my belief.”

“He likes extremes,” Howard says of Bellamy’s songwriting. “Those things work better with our music anyway.” The biggest misconception about Muse, he says, is “we’re these serious dudes who think the world’s gonna end in the next 10 minutes.” (Wolstenholme claims the bandmates laughed a lot while working on “United States of Eurasia,” specifically at “the Queen bit. It’s so ridiculous.”)

In fact, the studio where Muse recorded The Resistance is a bunker — a man-made cave inside a mountain near Bellamy’s home at Como. He created the facility by converting dug-out spaces previously used as storage areas and wine cellars. “You get in a lift and go two floors underground,” he says. “Something rubbed off too. The usual paranoia on our records was accentuated by being cut off down there, watching BBC World News all day long.” When asked just how paranoid he is, Bellamy doesn’t flinch. His Italian girlfriend is, he says, “a fully qualified psychologist. She tells me I do have slight paranoid tendencies.”

Bellamy also has genuine rock history in his family tree. His father, George, was a guitarist in the Sixties British band the Tornados. Their 1962 instrumental space-pop classic, “Telstar,” a tribute to a communications satellite, produced by Joe Meek, was the first American Number One single by a British group. But George was working as a building contractor and plumber when Matt was born in Cambridge in 1978. “My dad got burned by the industry — he didn’t get paid anything,” Matt says. At home, there was “no glamour, no sense I was being brought up by anybody famous.” Matt didn’t pick up the guitar until his early teens, shortly after his parents divorced. “I’m sure it had something to do with him,” he says. “I missed him and turned to the guitar.” (Wolstenholme’s father worked in the coal industry; Howard’s dad was a tailor, specializing in academic gowns and church vestments.)

Matt says he can now see some of the Tornados’ influence in Muse songs such as “Knights of Cydonia,” the big galactic-Western finish of the 2006 album Black Holes and Revelations. “It still stands out as really unusual music, especially for its time,” Matt says of his father’s biggest hit. “I suppose I always thought that being innovative, out of the ordinary, was a good thing.”

“Weirdly, he thinks I’ve done way better, in terms of success,” Matt adds. “I control my own destiny. His main concern was that no one could push us around. Although until I get a Number One in America, I’ll always have a slight chip on my shoulder.” He laughs. “If I can get a Number One album there, we’re truly even.”