“Pretty good analogy of us trying to start a band,” concedes Muse drummer Dominic Howard, conducting press duties from the band’s native Devon just before the release of their sprawling and hugely impressive fifth album The Resistance.
“I think once we got together and realised all three of us had this driving ambition to make music, we were probably quite overwhelmed by the possibilities,” he continues, “but at the same time very restricted by technical skill. When we started writing our own songs, the music was always a bit weird; it was never straight down-the-line singalong stuff. It was very kind of disjointed, and lots of time changes, and in some ways it got quite technical in our early days because we were learning how to play and listening to bands like bloody Primus and Rush and The Police and things like that. They didn’t particularly influence the band, but they kind of made you think about how you can play your instrument in a different kind of way, so we sounded very, very weird in the early days. But we got that out of our system and became better at putting actual songs together, but with a little bit more skill.”
Back then Muse were majestic and Queenly, with a touch of OK Computer’s Ballardian alienation. Even those of us who couldn’t love the band on first hearing had to respect their audacity, their BIGness. But despite an ability to pen a damn good tune (‘Plug In Baby’, halfway between Deep Purple and David Cronenberg), or reinterpret an old one (they had the balls to cover Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ and get away with it), the band could never comfortably fit alongside strumalong tunesters like Travis. Intergalactic space operas garnished with hammer-ons and polyrhythms were not exactly hip at the turn of the millennium.
“No, I guess not,” Dominic admits. “What was big back in those days? Oasis, maybe. I seem to remember at that time that particularly the American and British music scenes were very far apart from each other, ‘cos you had lots of nu-metal and quite heavy stuff that was very mainstream in America, and over here it was bit more get-the-acoustic-guitars-out and a bit more singer-songwritery. Looking back it was pretty rough! You had a big divide, it was a weird transitional time in music. Shame. And then we surfaced amongst all that. The mainstream stuff wasn’t that challenging for us, and that’s why we felt we were making music that was quite different.”
And they’ve evolved with considerable ease. 2006’s Black Holes And Revelations was a pivotal record. Yes, it contained quite batty numbers like the near-instrumental six-minute epic ‘Knights of Cydonia’ alongside Spielbergian spectacles of melody like ‘Starlight’. But the real revelation was the lead-off single ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, which exhibited vivid new colours on the palette. Suddenly Muse were kind of slinky and sexy.
They’ve explored this strain even further on The Resistance. The opening tune ‘Uprising’ is a big, brash, clumpy Goldfrappian glam-disco thang. ‘Undisclosed Desires’ bears an acknowledged debt to Timbaland. This is hotter, funkier, looser music, although Dominic soon skewers your correspondent’s theory that it may have something to do with the album being recorded in Northern Italy.
“Well it was winter when we did most of it,” he says, “and Northern Italy gets a bit cold, it snows near the mountains. Your surroundings always have some kind of influence on you, but it’s not particularly some kind of Italian influence, I think just the isolation of where the studio actually is, and the fact that it’s our own studio, and we could go and work at whatever time we wanted, that obviously had an influence on us. It made us loosen up and feel very free, like we had enough time to experiment. You have to be willing to not just do what you’re comfortable with, you always have to step outside your comfort zone.”
So where is the band actually based?
“All over the place really! Italy, London. Devon, we just move around, but our studio is in Italy.”
Do they speak the language, or is it total isolation?
“I know a few pleases and thank yous and that’s probably about it. But I definitely think we need to make more of an effort. We went to the same restaurant, which is right by our studio, for dinner every night for about six months, and it was nice, we got to know the locals. They’re fully aware of the band and know what we’re doing and enjoy it. Sometimes we get random fans hanging around in towns close to where the studio is, they enjoy all that and think it’s cool and tell us about it.”
So, Muse got rhythm. It’s not so much that the drums and bass are any more prominent than before, Dominic reckons, it’s just that they’ve taken a different approach. More space, the same combination of sparseness and technoflash employed by Prince at his peak.
“Being a three-piece band has always made us really concentrate on each individual instrument and make it stand out in its own way,” he says. “We learned that from a very early stage I think. We quickly realised if we wanted to stay a three-piece we had to kind of change the way we play in order to make it sound as big as possible, and you end up finding some sort of formula where the bass and drums are always locked in as much as possible. But you often find that out of those three instruments, they’re all doing different things, and you end up creating this much bigger kind of soundscape. It makes you take each individual instrument very seriously and make it as musical as possible, but obviously still work together.”
To that end, Dominic immersed himself in some serious beat science on the new album. Get a load of this:
“I did lots of layering up of drums this time, working on the part on a drumkit, and then kind of splitting up the part into all its individual bits, and recording some of those bits separately and then putting it all back together again to create that one part.”
Sounds like a lot of work. Why?
“You have a completely different dimension, different sounds and ambience and reverbs to certain elements of that one part and it gives you a lot of depth and brings it out to the front and makes it quite (laughs) prominent I suppose.”
Holy crap. Never let a drummer near the mixing desk. Such a vast sound makes total sense before a full house at Wembley Stadium, although maybe not so much down the Dog & Duck in Devon.
“Probably not. I’m sure we were probably quite rubbish back in our early days. In fact I know we were! But even from an early stage all three of us had a huge amount of musical ambition, which is why we gravitated towards each other when we got together back in the early 90s. We could all see in each other a love and interest in music that was way beyond our actual skills.”
They’ve come a long way. Consider the three-act 13-minute monster ‘Exogenesis: Symphony’ – the piece-de-Resistance if you like – which features a 40-piece orchestra.
“It was a really challenging track for the band to work on,” Dominic admits. “It was born out of Matt’s very free classically-influenced piano playing that he naturally plays when he sits at the piano. He’s very influenced by Rachmaninov and Chopin and Beethoven and Liszt and stuff like that, and he plays his own material in a similar style, and all that kind of music has always been in the band over the years.
“But the music that’s actually in the symphony has been hanging around for the last couple of years, and sometimes we’ve jammed a little bit on the stage at a soundcheck or whatever, but it’s never really come to anything. So that song is trying to make a conscious effort to bring that kind of music into the band, an attempt to make a symphony. You’re kind of working with this fine line and trying to not make it sound like a rock band with an orchestra stuck on the side.”
Indeed. I remember seeing Metallica play with the Berlin Philharmonic ten years ago and it looked like someone trying to squeeze a tuxedo on over a leather jacket.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. We really wanted to integrate them, intertwine them tightly and make it feel as one. So it was a big old task taking that on. We were never really sure that it was actually going to make it during the album-writing process.”
Which is quite a risk, when you consider the piece takes up about 20% of the total running time on The Resistance.
“Yeah, but the music of our band has always been influenced by a lot of classical composers, it definitely had an influence on the songwriting and chordal structures. You’ve gotta really be careful, it is a fine line between sounding really cheesy, just a token string section add-on, or it really feeling like it’s all one. I mean, Part One (‘Overture’) is so orchestral, it’s very, very filmic, but we needed to make sure that when the band came in playing with all these strings, it really needed to fit in with the vibe. We worked with some string players from Milan who actually worked on the last album as well, and they’re all great players, really enthusiastic, and very emotional and passionate, they loved it and really did a great job.”
But it’s not all orchestral action. Muse diehards will be pleased to hear that Matt Bellamy is still twisting his brain-stem around new world order crankology, conspiracy theories and alien abduction fetishism. This time the subjects under review include the writings of former US presidential advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Orwell (‘United States of Eurasia’) and also Cold War-era CIA mind-control programmes (‘MK Ultra’). One wonders: does Matt pass the lyrics around for vetting?
“No, not so much really. Lyrically me and Chris only really hear the sung lyrics right at the end. Matt likes to do the recording of the vocals on his own. Whenever we rehearse, even years ago, Matt would never sing, he’d only ever sing in gigs. It’s kind of a strange way to do things, but we’ve become used to not hearing lyrics until we record or play a show. But the positive of that is it’s made us become really, really focused on the instrumental sound of the song. Because we work so deeply on the music, just getting the band sounding exciting and vibey and happening, when the lyrics go down it makes it twice as good.
“But at the same time, everything that he’s singing about, it’s normally things we’re discussing right throughout the entire album-making process, so we kind of know where it’s going, but we don’t actually get the lyrics out and go, ‘Right - what’s this about here?’ When we’re listening back we can start to understand the kind of themes and recognise discussions and debates and talks that we’ve had throughout the last six to eight months of recording. We’re all on the same page and we always have been. I imagine listening to this album and imagining us discussing what’s on it around the dinner table seems quite a strange scene, but it actually did happen.”
Indeed. Have you heard the one about the general who tried to kill the goat with mind control – and pass the salt...