Random Musings of a Curious Mind

(Matt Bellamy MUSE on the cover of OOR, September-October, 2009)

8^th of September 2009

Muse is coming!

Last month OOR paid an exclusive visit to Matthew Bellamy’s home studio in Italy (all about that in the next OOR). As could have been expected of Muse, the word ‘home studio’ appeared a great understatement: we talked to Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dom Howard at the shore of the mundane Lake Como, where they were finishing their fifth album The Resistance in their futuristic studio, carved in a mountainside. Everything about the visit was secret: the select group of press was strategically placed on a nearby mountainside, driven to the studio by silent drivers in blinded vans. On the way we received a contract with the binding request not to give away the exact location. Once arrived, the guys appeared to have spread over the bunker to do their interviews. Through a long, clinically neon lighted corridor we were lead to a solid steel door, behind which was a small room with a futuristic mixing console – like the control room of an atom-free hiding place. The following hour of music proved that the building had to be at least nuclearproof; The Resistance is a rich mix of classical influences and megalomaniacal spacerock, conspiracy theories and personal reflections, rocking guitars and robust orchestration. The tracklisting, printed in mysterious dots, was the following:

Uprising

Resistance

Undisclosed Desires

United States Of Eurasia

Guiding Light

Unnatural Selection

MK Ultra

I Belong To You

Exogenesis: Symphony part I (Overture)

Exogenesis: Symphony part II (Cross Pollination)

Exogenesis: Symphony part III (Redemption)

OOR has survived the first impact and was impressed. On September 14th the rest of the world is on.

9th October 2009

MUSE

Classical futurism

Como Lake, an hour north of Milan. This is where the rich of the world find a quiet place and think themselves lucky. But just a nice house on a top location wasn’t enough for Matthew Bellamy; he decided to build headquarters there, for him and his companions Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard, or Muse. Far away from hometown Teignmouth, the three-piece put together their third studio album The Resistance, a robust collection of spacerock, that fuses futuristic ideas and classical vibes into an all-including ‘sonic boom’. OOR stayed in and around Muse HQ for two days and came back with singing ears, sunburned and nuclear-proof.

Don’t strain yourself to find it. Even if you would walk around Muse’s studio building for two days, the entrance to this modern musical sanctuary is camouflaged so well that only Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard can find it again. In fact, a door or some other entrance doesn’t exist. One moment you stroll beside the quietly sloshing water of Como Lake, the other you end up, via some car parks, a room filled with boxes, a criss-cross of staircases, ramps, fences and hallways, in an empty concrete passage ending in an elevator. The door opens twice: on the first floor you’re wondering if you just went up or down. A sterile system of corridors with white neon light and heavy doors on the sides makes you suspect a nuclear-proof bunker. We hang here for a bit; ten seconds at the most, but it seems like fifteen minutes. Here and there bleeps and ominous sounds seep through slits into the corridor. We are waiting for James Bond, undoubtedly on a secret mission in this mysterious building. Or some atom scientist, busy with the newest devices in rocket technology. Is that the sound of someone counting down? Whose footsteps do we hear in the distance? And why is it so pleasantly cool in here, compared to the searing heat outside, not two minutes ago? Then the lift doors close again.

One – exciting – floor further we stand all of a sudden in a colourful garden. In the corners pieces of roof and other buildings are sticking out of the grass, connected by narrow paths of tiles that seem to vanish behind the bushes. For the first time our orientation is back, and with that an incredible understanding: we’re standing on top of a hollow mountainside, with below us the nerve centre of the most overwhelming rock band England has produced in the past ten years. In the lee of the Alps the view is dominated by the impressive, flamboyant and, above all, dazzling Lake Como. While speedboats sail by and by in the shimmering of the water and a giant thunderstorm is coming our way from behind the mountains across the lake, our group halts.

All the puzzle pieces of the past hours fall into place: nobody but Matthew Bellamy, the enigmatic, genius-crazy professor of contemporary progrock, can realise a home base. Dramatic and colourful at the same time, mysterious and still very practical. The cave of Ali Baba meets Blofeld’s headquarters. This is where the trio from Teignmouth, England worked the past couple of months on The Resistance, their fifth album in ten years time. Bellamy himself stays clear from the burning sun for now. OOR firstly follows Chris Wolstenholme, the cheery bassist, to his favourite spot in the building. We enter the elevator again, brave the concrete labyrinth downstairs (or was it upstairs?), are all of a sudden standing in the middle of a street and eventually sit down in an outdoor café on the waterfront.

‘If you’re lucky, you can see George Clooney sail by. He lives nearby’, laughs Wolstenholme, tanned, dressed in ordinary shorts and t-shirt. Apparently he didn’t spend all of the past months in the bunker-like rooms. ‘Also apart from the scenery, this is a great spot’, he begins about Muse’s new home base. ‘Really pleasant to work in. Matt moved here with his girlfriend a couple of years ago and immediately got the idea to built a studio. If it would have been finished three years ago, we would have already recorded our last album here. I remember that as an alternative we booked a studio in Miraval, France, where we would work quietly for nine weeks. Well, only since we’re here I’ve realised what quiet means… If you have a couple of weeks time, you’re always looking at a deadline. You want to do so many things at once that you’re forcing it; when we were in Miraval we ended up having not a whole album, but only two or three songs, which we later re-recorded all over in New York. There’s no stress here. Sometimes there are days when the creativity is at a low. It’s nice to be able to say: not today, we take a break, tomorrow is another day. In London or New York you’ll quickly loose two thousand pounds doing that, because that’s what the better studios cost per day there. On purely financial grounds you can’t afford sitting still, you’re actually forcing yourself to record music. We’ll never have that problem again. And we don’t have to be afraid of atomic weapons, haha!’

A week here, a week away, that’s how Wolstenholme describes his working schedule in Italy. Sounds relaxing, but with a weekly return flight London-Milan it’s a hell of a commute at the very least. ‘It takes me about eight hours per single journey. Sometimes ten, because it takes quite some time to get to London. I still live in Teignmouth and I find it very important to spent my free time with my family. Furthermore, it’s nice to be far away from everything when you’re not working. If you could fly here directly from Exeter it would be a bit easier, it takes quite a lot to make my work and my private life work together. But hey, I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t all worth it, right?’

‘Moving to Como is not an option’, clarifies Wolstenholme immediately. ‘I love it here, but my kids probably think otherwise. I’m certain they would rather stay in England. Besides, I want them to go to school there. Otherwise they’d have to learn Italian, or go to one of those international institutes, whilst right now they’re living a normal life. They start to realise what I do now, that I’m not a mailman or accountant. They went along a couple of times during our last tour and that’s when they realised the scale we work on. Before that they were really confused when one of our songs would be played on the radio, while I was in the car with them. They thought our job existed of going to a radio station everyday to play a song. It wasn’t until their first concert that they understood, and they love it. Daddy’s gonna be on the telly, daddy’s going on tour, not a problem in the world. That makes it a lot easier for me to do this. I only changed one thing: when daddy comes home from touring he will not be confronted with the Tweenies anymore. I moved my satellite TV to a personal room and build the kids their own TV room. There’s a limit to watching the Teletubbies!’

Wolstenholme remains seated and orders a Pellegrino, while we leave the lake and the still approaching dark clouds behind us and disappear in the secret underground base once more. The door opens again at the level of the garden, where drummer Dominic Howard sits on the side in the open sun. His mobile phone nearly melts on the table in front of him. ‘I’ve been here for over an hour, maybe I should have fixed a parasol. You can fry an egg on this table.’ Striking, because his eye for details is seen as one of his big earnings in Muse. ‘I could let myself go considerably, all thanks to this studio. I’ve been able to overdub cymbals, to dissect all possible grooves and I’ve even recorded some beats in several parts. Just listen to Guiding Light, that consists of multiple loose bricks. And there’s an nice additional stream over the snare drums. Incredible.’

For Howard, too, the luxury of a personal studio is bound to a journey from London. The weekly trips to the north of Italy started in the spring of 2008, for him and his colleague Wolstenholme, after the usual phone call from Bellamy: the studio is ready, there are lots of ideas, chapter five can commence. ‘The origin of most of the songs lays with Matt, it only becomes Muse after all three of us have worked on it. Our starting point was not to repeat ourselves and we amply exceeded that with the symphony: by far the biggest challenge we ever went for.’ A true symphony… Ah, it’s Muse, so why not? The track list of The Resistance ends in the triptych Exogenesis, in which Muse lifts the connection between rock and classical, in the past pleasantly done by, among others, Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, to the twenty-first century. Bellamy already talked about the idea years ago and was doubting then if it, because of its complexity, would suite the band. ‘It took Chris and me some time to get what was going on exactly. Not that we thought Matt had lost his mind, but in the beginning it seemed a bit out of our reach.’

The image of Queen during the recordings of A Night At The Opera comes to mind. Freddie Mercury presented the idea of Bohemian Rhapsody and interrupted blandly with: ‘And this is where the opera part will start.’ At which producer and band members answered: ‘But of coarse, Freddie.’ Howard bursts out laughing, a laugh of recognition. ‘Haha, so it’s something of all times! But Queen succeeded, and we did as well now! Matt came to us with a couple of piano parts and to us it sounded like a lot of loose ends. Where is this headed, we thought. Matt, however, had it all planned out in his head and showed us all these string arrangements on his laptop. Impressive, he appeared to have thought it over better than we had suspected. Still, there were doubts: is this something for the band, this complex? But Matt stayed on it; this was a band song and we had to accomplish it with the three of us. He was so convinced that we agreed and started recording small bits and pieces of it. Completely different from what we’re used to. The piano as the leading thread, rise, fall back, speed up, etcetera. Put on a click track and go from there wasn’t possible, this was the better musical puzzle. We followed Matt’s piano in all its changes, going against all principles of rock. In rock everything is about timing and staying on beat, this was the complete opposite.’

More than ever Muse had to count on the musical connection existing between the three of them to let the experiment succeed. With Bellamy as metronome and mental motive the symphony started to take shape. ‘Only Chris and I could have done this with Matt, in this shape. That magic between us has lived up to its reputation, it was the hardest thing we have ever done. At first I was afraid it would become too cheesy. Imposing and bombastic is fine with me, but it mustn’t become a parody.’

Big, bigger, biggest. Muse hasn’t saved on musical bombast on The Resistance agrees Howard. ‘We’re familiar with the term ‘over the top’. On musical grounds we certainly aren’t shy, I’m the last to deny that sometimes we lay it on really thick. But not too thick. We do not shun the grant, explosive. It’s a really powerful weapon, that we control like no other. Our greatest fear is that something becomes too complex and you cannot listen to it pleasantly anymore. I think that’s where the limit is, and, with it, the challenge. To create something difficult gives a great kick, but who are you doing a favour? Don’t forget the humour part, sometimes we do things on purpose. Humour in Muse? Yes sir. When I listen to the new songs I’m really chuckling at certain moments. The beginning of United States of Eurasia for instance. That song was created really quickly and has been build out to what it is now. Too Muse for words, we said to ourselves. And with that, too much fun to hold back. If you pay close attention, you’ll hear more of these sort of jokes.’

Album title The Resistance has a sound in western Europe that is associated with really serious as well as with really comical things. Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once… ‘Haha, I know Allo Allo from TV of coarse, but the term hasn’t got anything to do with the second World War. A French journalist made that association too though. I’m really bad in history, it was one of my worst subjects in school. I don’t know anything about the war, I don’t have any grandfathers in the RAF or something. I wouldn’t dare trying to make an historical concept album. We mean a current development by it, not so much directed against a movement or ideology, but against power abuse in general. There’s an uprising resistance in the world around us, you don’t even have to look for it to come across it anymore. We thought that was an interesting idea to get into.’

It’s a small miracle that within this whirlwind of sound there’s room for a serious message. Both play an important role, says Howard. ‘They’re not getting in one another’s way, I can tell you that. We only add the lyrics at the very last moment, when the music and melodies are finished for 100%. We will talk about the subject and message of the song, but we only see the finished lyrics in the end. Luckily we’ve been working together for so long that there’s barely ever any misunderstanding about that message. First, every detail, every bleep, every bass part or drumbeat, every string arrangement or riff have to fit together so well that the music on itself is already justified. The heart of the song is completed there. Matt’s lyrics and singing give the whole thing a face, and if we like the face, the song’s finished.’

Out of the blue, Matthew Bellamy is at our table in the open sun. He gives a quick hand, gives Howard a few pieces of paper and then disappears again over a path behind the bushes. Instead of the earlier imagined egg, there now lay, frying on the table, the stage sketches for the upcoming tour. ‘We’re thinking of an ‘in the round’ sort of thing. U2 is doing that at the moment and we’re going to open for them a couple of times in America in September. That’s purely coincidental, but who knows, maybe we can get a few ideas from it. We want to try something with people around us. Last year we did a one-off show in the Royal Albert Hall and a part of the crowd was sitting behind us. We liked playing like that, it felt good. You turn around and.. hey hello, there’s everybody! At the moment we’re also talking to a lady who normally designs big opera sets. That it will be very theatrical is certain. We might give in a bit on spontaneous ground, but everyone’s going to get a lot in return. It’s not going to be less interesting.’

And how is Muse going to bring their increasingly complex music to the stage? That’s the only obstacle for the band at the moment, states Howard. ‘In the studio we are limitless, under ourselves we stay as free as technology allows us. What we have in our head will be there. When we were testing all the finished work live, we met de limits of our possibilities. We can’t exactly copy what we’ve recorded to our live shows. We saw it coming though; in the beginning we noticed, while jamming, that we had to break through the tree-piece to create an album of our ideas. We weren’t put off by it during recording. It’s a problem for later; which is NOW. We’ve always been able to work it out in the past and we know that this step is part of the process. This is simply how Muse works. We’re ambitious, we know that eventually we’ll have to make it happen live as well. How? No idea. But it’s going to work.’

The dark clouds are now above us and ominous rumbling drives away the busy water traffic on the lake. Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening, we’ll say. It’s only just dry when Howard steps into the elevator to another dimension and OOR walks to the biggest of the half buried buildings in the garden. A cool room is dominated by a pool table, a red couch, shaped like two lips, and a display of all possible equipment of Guitar Hero in front of an enormous entertainment centre. It’s not Dr. Evil who turns around in his leather armchair at our entrance, but Matthew Bellamy, the small man behind the big band. Here in Italy he lives a life just as secluded as his studio. ‘A couple of people know what I do’, he smirks, ‘the village and the area are very peaceful and on their own. From time to time there’s a lost fan walking around, but it doesn’t give much trouble. The local inhabitants are very friendly, they don’t really care what other people are doing. That’s why this place holds so many celebrities. I have some friends in Milan and Como Town, if I want to go out for a night. For the rest it’s mainly nice and quiet.’

Apart from writing, fine tuning and recording the album of coarse. Bellamy names his surroundings as one of the big influences on his recent musical activity. ‘The enormous mountains and the lake have something dramatic, something timeless. You feel secluded from the rest of the world and that leaves its traces. My songs are exactly like that: big objects, secluded from the rest of the world.’

You can see it before your eyes: assisted by his muse, formed by all the good that this area has to offer, the young, fled British artist looks out over the lake and the mountains. The inspiration speeds through the valleys, over the water, to the by candlelight lit windowsill, to nest then deeply and passionately into his musical conscience. ‘Err.. no. My house looks out over the lake, just as every other house here. For composing, however, I choose a dark room downstairs, without daylight, a sort of basement. I’m not the romantic who sits down, looks out the window and is instantly moved by the sight of the lake. That’s more something for Bellini, the opera writer from the nineteenth century, who spend a few periods in this village. I even lived in one of his old villas for a while. In the past I would instantly have tried to make contact with his ghost, but I don’t believe in that sort of thing anymore. Much too long ago since I’ve seen any ghosts, you know?’

Even so, the ghost of Bellini, or at least the Italian opera tradition, floats evidently through The Resistance. Bellamy ascribes this to his own resolution to give the piano a more central place within the group process. ‘I’ve been working on that for a while, it just has to be done in the right way. I write much on the piano anyway. You can say: come, let’s make a piano album, but that way you’ll force it and that’s against our nature. This time what I had in my head fitted seamless within Dom and Chris’ contributions in the jam phase. That was the same for the strings and orchestrations. How many times have I not knocked at arrangers’ doors in the past, without any usable result. The taste and style of the other person will take a part and I just want to do it myself. I could unfold that side completely now; some things are entirely piano, whilst on a song as Undisclosed I don’t play anything, not even guitar.’

On predecessor Black Holes And Revelations (2006) examples like Joe Meek and Ennio Morricone played a big role in Bellamy’s sound world. The Resistance contains a tribute to French opera composer Saint-Saëns. ‘It’s funny that people thought Muse sounded like opera in the past, whilst I had barely gotten into it. I more liked Wagner and Rachmaninoff, only recently Bellini and especially Saint-Saëns made it on that list. The middle part of Delilah – I Belong To You is an exact cover of his Samson & Delilah, in rock form. And in the first part of the symphony I try to sing in the style of the French soprano.’ Also on modern musical grounds Bellamy hasn’t been sitting still; opera and experimental hip-hop go hand in hand on The Resistance. ‘For the electronic ideas we’ve been listening to Anti-Pop Consortium, an unconventional hip-hop group of about ten years ago with a really original, experimental view on the use of electronics. I’m not even a fan of that music, but because they do really interesting things producing, they attract me nonetheless. Same for Timbaland; I wouldn’t listen to a record of him on a free night, but from a musical perspective it’s really good and informative. Muse doesn’t need a producer for rock music anymore. We pretty much master the classical area. But when it comes to electronics we get lost easily. That way there’s something left for us in the future.’

Muse’s past has a somewhat unspecified place in Bellamy’s daily life. He doesn’t, like so many other artists, listen to old records again. ‘Maybe it would be interesting to look at a few of our old songs from our current perspective, with the technology and knowledge we have now. But I don’t think that, especially our old work, would be very fertile. From our debut Unintended is the only song I still have something with, maybe there’s something there for a new arrangement. The rest of that really old stuff has slipped my mind a bit. Origin Of Symmetry [from 2001] is a step ahead. The Resistance reminds me of that record sometimes; pig-headed, the musical development of the band is the central idea, quite extreme. Unrestrained is what they call it, I think. Muse is a band with a mind of their own, both albums show that. From Origin Of Symmetry I’d like to work on New Born again. I think our live version at the moment is a lot better than the studio version. Who knows, maybe we’ll do something like that instead of a Greatest Hits. Our best songs, upgraded by ourselves.’

While the rain ticks on the skylight, Bellamy pours himself a cup of tea. A typical English scenery, something the young emigrant also has to admit, almost with an apologising expression. ‘When you emigrate, two things can happen: you either lose all that’s part of your first country and you start in your new surroundings just like that, or you turn super British. To my surprise I belong to that last category. In England I never drank tea, here I drink lots. I barely read the newspaper there, here I follow multiple ones. And I watch BBC news every night. It’s probably a natural reaction, because I’ve never had to miss England for such a long time. I compensate that with an urge for British news, too much even. All of a sudden I have a very objective view on British society and feel frustration over the powerless feeling that I get from it. I can get really worked up about it.’

Chance wants it that Bellamy slowly moved his perspective a few years ago: lyrics became less abstract and much more personal. From his safe base in Italy (the land of Berlusconi, yes) he put the facts in line and came up with the theme of the new album: the resistance, in the year 2009. ‘English society is sick and that shows on multiple points. First of all the two fronts we’ve been sent to. We blindly follow America. We have a government that is hated by everyone I know. A leader whom nobody’s chosen. A financial problem for which London is to blame and can do nothing about. While the parliamentarians cheat on their payment of expenses one by one, there are CCTV cameras on every street corner to keep a watch on us, the innocent citizens. That’s a horrible thought. No, worse: it’s a horrible truth. There’s a hate against politicians, bankers, everyone that has power but not the abilities to use it well. Instead of feeling powerless as a nation, the resistance grows stronger and stronger. We start an uprising, we’re not just letting them walk all over us. Uprising and Resistance translate that observation very exact. It feels like a peak now, but I think we’re only at the beginning of a turn.’

Pretty clear talk from Mister Conspiracy Theory himself. Of coarse his favourite activity, reading up on all sorts of conspiracies, also gets its place on The Resistance. ‘Again, it’s about that resistance thought. I read the book The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was advisor for foreign affairs in the American government for a long time: he had to do with all the presidents from the late seventies onwards. He writes in a very academic style, but it’s really fascinating once you read through all that. The book explains how, from his point of view, the United States keep the world piece by thwarting the unification of Europe and Asia. They support wars and conflicts at fixed points to assure their power over the world. Mind, it’s not my theory and I’m not the person to give new insights in it, but the concept fascinates me. Say that Europe and Asia will unify. According to Brzezinski a third world war will break out immediately. America’s biggest fear is that Russia and China will join together, and that Europe will then join in. The result is a unity of states at least as big as America itself. The Middle-East cools down, the oil will be in safe hands and America looses its grip on the things that make it so powerful. The United States will not allow this to happen, because their entire existence is based on it. A shocking, yet fascinating idea.’

And really something to worry about while having tea in your underground studio by Como Lake. ‘Well, I do feel safe here. And yet it concerns me. Again, they’re not my words, I came across them by accident and it stayed with me. But when you read something like that, your entire view on the world changes, no matter how far away from it you are. Why wars break out and continue to last, why certain countries act the way they do. Simply, why things happen. That’s important to me. If I see something on the news tonight that I don’t understand, I’m annoyed about that straight away. I want to know the deeper story, the background, understand everything. Even if it doesn’t concern me directly, you mustn’t stick your head in the sand. Even if you’re on top of a mountain in Como.’