Muse rock 3Arena with audio-visual spectacular

HP sharpshooter Kathrin Baumbach was on hand to capture the action at 3Arena; check out her gallery here.

Many moons ago, yours truly popped his rock’n’roll cherry at the Showgrounds in Cork. Ash were headliners that evening, but history will show that the first live band ever seen was the support – an up-and-coming English rock act named Muse.
A lot, of course, has changed since then – your humble correspondent hit puberty, for instance. For the Devon trio, even more dramatic growth lay ahead; sophomore album Origin Of Symmetry (released the following month, July 2001) launched them as an act of serious note, and the following decade saw them cement a place among the world’s premier exponents of stadium rock, as orchestral flourish and theatrical bombast merged with boundless, limitless ambition.
And last night, there was a roof over it, too.
The pre-show announcements were particularly focused on audience members turning off the flash on their cameras. It mightn’t have been amiss to ask that they also check their sense of irony at the door, as it clearly wasn’t needed much anyway. At one point, during a sequence of songs from last year’s Drones, a giant inflatable drone flew overhead. Because, y'know, drones. Subtle it weren’t.
But around the arena it went, and so did the band. Staged in the round, the show was nothing if not ambitious; the sporadically-rotating stage plonked dead centre, with a monstrous catwalk extending the breadth of 3Arena. The unorthodox approach did lead to a few odd moments – none better than when Matt Bellamy strode to the extremities of the set, only to find himself in danger of skipping the queue for the adjacent bar – but for the few flat-earthers left unconvinced by U2’s storming effort late last year, it was a definitive reminder that a well-produced arena show can match, and beat, stadium shows of far greater size.
Indeed, it was difficult not to think of our own rock royalty at times, especially when video clips poked their way into proceedings; not least during a religious refrain of the distrust of unmanned weaponry (still very much on message), a speech from JFK, and a puppet-on-string effect during ‘The Handler’ that brought the interactivity of the ‘Cedarwood Road’ sequence to mind. We’re not saying there was intentional shading going on, but Dublin’s own were given a genuine run for their money in the epic indoor performance stakes.
At times, the tunes struggled to match the quality of the show. Sure, there’s bangers in that back catalogue – ne’er a foot went unstomped during ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, ‘Time Is Running Out’ or ‘Uprising’, while ‘Starlight’ found a rabid crowd in rare voice – but the most recent material was occasionally found wanting. A blistering pace ensured energy levels remained high, and the powerful-yet-clear racket (kudos to the engineers, who’ve designed a patently brilliant 360° speaker system) combined with the relentless visual stimulation meant there was always something to focus the attention, but there's no disguising ‘The Globalist’ as anything other than a bloated album track. A blast of ‘Plug In Baby’ or ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ would have been most welcome, but much of the band’s early material has apparently been retired; only an excellent rendition of ‘Bliss’ and a relatively pedestrian ‘Citizen Erased’ truly brought this writer back to the good old days.
Looking to the past isn't really Muse's game, anyway. By the time the sweating, swaying masses pogoed through closer ‘Knights of Cydonia’, and gave the mother of all ovations as the band left the stage, nobody could question the success of the evening – even if it was more about fist-pumping fun that the earnest evangelism the band seem to hold so dear.
By early June, the trio will be hitting the Pyramid Stage of Glastonbury, puny arena shows but a memory. Best to cherish this one, then.