By the time it arrives in the live setting on Australian shores, Muse’s typically bombastic sixth studio LP, The 2nd Law, will have reached its first birthday. For now, I speak with a chilled-out Dominic Howard as he enjoys some respite in the south of France.
“We’ve been touring; just really busy since the album came out in September,” says the Muse drummer. “We did a few special shows in smaller venues, then we hit the road in October with the bigger production. We’ve been all over Europe, the States, all over Asia, now we’re just coming towards the end of the European stadium tour, which is amazing. This summer’s been awesome, we’ve been outdoors in these football stadiums playing these huge shows – 60 to 70 thousand people, that type of vibe.”
Muse’s stadium-sized Australian tour is a far cry from their first visit to our land over a decade ago, where they plugged away at the entry level in relatively quaint pubs. As Howard explains, the band still manages to fit in the occasional small-capacity performance these days. “Just recently, we did one in Shepherd’s Bush as a charity gig for War Child. We haven’t really played a venue like that in a while, and it was great to get in there and play a theatre without any massive production and floating pyramids. It was so great to be close to the fans. We came out of that gig thinking it would be great to do a whole lot more of that in the future, somehow. We might go for a few little special gigs next year. The band is actually going to be 20 [years old] next year, so we plan to do something special.”
Over those two decades, Muse have built a most impressive canon of modern rock classics. Despite the lavish and involved production values of their live performance, they still manage to include surprises in the setlist. “Each album you do, the harder and harder it gets to do the setlist – you have more songs to choose from,” Howard says. “There are times when you think, ‘Really, we can’t play that tonight?’ We’ve been keeping it quite varied. We have a list of ten to 12 songs we are constantly rotating that go in and out, but there are moments in the set that are very fixed – especially with the new songs. There are songs we have to play every night because certain things are happening in the show. But that’s cool; that’s the way we structure the show. It does involve a certain choreography with the production … but that’s something we love doing, putting on a big show that incorporates all that choreography.” He pauses. “Not dance moves, obviously.”
“We started doing ‘Dead Star’, an old one that’s very heavy. It wasn’t actually on an album, it was an in-between single to promote a DVD we released in 2001 … When you bring a song back after years and years it feels so different to how you remember playing it back in those days. ‘Butterflies And Hurricanes’had a rest for a few years, now that’s back and it’s great. At Reading Festival in 2011 we did our whole second album [Origin Of Symmetry] from start to finish. It was interesting trying to learn all those songs again – I think there was one song we had never played live before.”
By now, Muse have worked out how to craft a touring schedule which affords that elusive balance between work and life. According to Howard, that sort of thing becomes a necessity eventually. “We’ve changed the way we tour. The guys have families; Chris [Wolstenholme] has six kids, Matt [Bellamy] has just had one, and that changes the way you feel about being away. We tend to tour for a few weeks, have a gap, then continue touring. That way of doing things takes the edge off a little bit and lets you stay on the road longer. A lot of bands die out because they go away from friends and family and loved ones for months at a time, then they come back and their life’s gone to shit,” Howard laughs. “Then you’ve got to split up – either with the girlfriend or the band.”
Now they’re about to clock up that 20-year milestone, how is it that Muse have managed to maintain the same lineup from inception through to their current heights? “Shit, I dunno,” Howard answers. “It’s partly to do with the fact we’re schoolmates and we’ve known each other for so long. It’s partly to do with where we’ve come from as well. Teignmouth [in] Devon is a very small town and detached from the music scene, so we were left to our own devices. It’s not a place where anything can happen particularly quickly.
“I think we’ve just had this feeling like we’re a gang, we stick together, and we believe in the music. We want to take it as far as possible. That, and we are like, ‘What the bloody hell else are we going to do?’ [Laughs] I can’t see us being in any other bands. We’ve become institutionalised within ourselves. We’ve definitely had ups and downs as a band, but we all know that it’s this or nothing … Our life is to keep Muse going. And we’re doing a pretty good job of it so far.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
Muse plays Allphones Arena on Friday December 13 with support from Birds of Tokyo. The 2nd Law out now through Warner Music.
