The agony and the ecstasy (20041009 Kerrang article)

An article focusing on Bill Howard's death and various band injuries. Kerrang magazine issue 1026, 2004-10-09.

the agony and the ecstasy

Words: Rod Yates Photos: James Sharrock

IN 2004 MUSE HAVE BECOME THE UK'S BIGGEST BAND, BUT ALSO SUFFERED PERSONAL TRAGEDY. WE JOIN THEM IN OZ TO REFLECT UPON DEATH, DREAMS AND THE FUTURE. BUT FIRST, THERE'S URGENT BUSINESS TO ATTEND TO...

"I'VE GOT a shit I need to do... I'm going to the toilet!"
  Matt Bellamy is a man in pain. The minor rumbling that started in his guts a few hours earlier has now reached seismic proportions, and should Muse's front-man fail to find a crapper within the next 15 seconds the explosive results could be particularly unpleasant for anyone within a two-mile radius.
  Dom Howard and Chris Wolstenholme simply look on and smile. The other 2000 people in the room, however, don't quite know what to make of it all. Matt Bellamy, you see, is onstage, smack bang in the middle of a gig. Or at least he was before he sprinted into the wings, leaving his drummer and bassist to concoct an impromptu jam to compensate for his hasty exit.
  "I ate a fuckin' goat's leg last night," he explains to the crowd upon his return. "It's fuckin' killing me!"
  An hour later, as the band recline in their tiny but well stocked dressing room - three boxes of pizza sit untouched on a table next to platters of fruit, biscuits and crisps; tubs of soft drink and beer sit on the ground; a huge portable wardrobe with built-in TV and Xbox stands in the corner - Matt Bellamy is still the subject of some particularly nasty internal squabbling.
  "I seriously had a full goat's leg in this Argentinean restaurant," he groans, extending his arms to demonstrate its size as a fisherman would the one that got away. "You had to hold it with two hands, and I think it's still playing games. As soon as we finish this I'll be running!"
  Despite this the mood in the room is vibrant and excited. The gig was a good one; according to Howard, most small theatre shows are.
  "Youo're more likely to go a bit mental when it's that kind of size," agrees Bellamy. "When it gets really big you start to control it a bit and keep it under wraps because you know you've got to get through it, whereas with the small ones you can kind of..."
  "Do a shit!" interrupts Wolstenholme, as the dressing room erupts with laughter.
  "Yeah," cackles the vocalist. "If that was an arena gig I would have had a nappy on!"

IT'S RAINING in Adelaide today. Dubbed the City of Churches due to its proliferation of - you guessed it - churches, Australia's fifth biggest city is also one of its most beautiful. Leafy parks infiltrate every square mile, lending the city an unusual air of calm despite the fact that it's home to more than a million people; its classic architecture gives it a touch of class.
  Muse arrived here last night, and have managed little in the way of sleep. As the clock ticks over to 1:30 in the afternoon and Chris Wolstenholme saunters through the Hyatt Regency's five star foyer - which, with its marble floors and gold fittings, is thick with the smell of money - he'll explain that jetlag kept him up until seven o'clock this morning, and that a 5am in-house screening of 'Starsky & Hutch' helped kill the boredom.
  Dom Howard and Matt Bellamy appear shortly after with similar stories, although admit that some excessively large nights in Perth when they arrived in the country a few days ago haven't helped matters.
  As they take a seat on a brown, velvet sofa in the corner of the hote's bar and order food and drinks - Bellamy has a blum sandwich and Howard a caesar salad, while Wolstenholme settles for an orange juice - you wouldn't know you were looking at a band that had been on the road for almost a year; a year that's been the most turbulent of their career.
  Jetlag aside, the trio seem in good spirits, and talk enthusiastically about their sold-out gig in Perth ("We were playing that same club three or four years ago and there were about 10 people there," smiles Dom Howard) and the fact that Wolstenholme managed to make it through the entire show, his first since breaking his wrist during a game of soccer while touring on the Cure-headlined Curiosa festival in the US in August.
  "It was a bit awkward, I just can't really bend my wrist," he says, pulling back the sleeve of his collared shirt to reveal a purple cast. "There's a few songs that are quite difficult so I have to hold the bass differently, but I can just about get away with it."
  What happens when you break your wrist in the middle of a major tour? That must have caused some pretty serious panic...
  "It was mayhem for a few days. I didn't realise at first. I went to bed that night and didn't really think that much of it. But I woke up in the middle of the night and it was all swollen up and I couldn't move it."
  "I remember that night," sighs Bellamy. "I just heard someone going, 'Eurgh, oooaah, bollocks', and I opened up the curtain in my bunk and saw Chris naked, walking up and down the corridor going, 'Ooh, my wrist', and I had a feeling there might be something up then. I just sat up all night going, 'Jesus, we've blown it, absolutely blown it'."
  "But we've all been there," shrugs Howard.
  "The gig before that was in Turin, and he chucked his guitar at me and smashed me in the arm," says the drummer. "A year before that I got a guitar in the face, got knocked off the drum riser; I opened my eyes and saw blood dripping off the riser. We've all had cuts and bruises, broken limbs. Maybe we should calm down a bit."
  What do you say to each other backstage when you've just been cracked in the head by a guitar?
  "We all took the piss out of him cos he had to pull his pants down and get an injection in his bum from some woman," cackles Bellamy, unsympathetically. "That was quite funny. We should have got a photo of that."

IF 2004 is remembered for anything, it should be Muse's promotion to the premier league. The trio's headlining stint at Glastonbury confirmed their status as bona fide megastars in the UK.
  "The gigs have been really surprising," nods Dom Howard. "And the size of the gigs.... everything we've done we've been nervous about doing. We didn't know if we were going to pull it off, but I think we did."
  Mention to the band that it must be quite odd to have Muse now considered in the same league as Glastonbury co-headliners Sir Paul McCartney and Oasis, and Matt Bellamy can't help but laugh.
  The professional triumphs haven't been limited to the UK, however. Every show on this Australian tour is sold out - the band will be awarded with platinum discs for 'Absolution' a few days after this interview, their first album to reach the milestone Down Under - and the band's assault on the US has, finally, started in earnest; first with a run of sold-out club shows last April and May, and then on the Curiosa tour three months later.
  There have also been plenty of stand-out moments offstage.
  Ask the band about the best memories they'll take from the past 12 months, and aside from the gigs - and with Muse, the gigs always come first - they'll tell you about the time they took a helicopter flight into the Grand Canyon one morning after stumbling out of a Las Vegas casino, only for Bellamy to be sick everywhere as Howard encouraged the pilot to "pull out loads of rollercoaster moves"; they'll tell you about some of the beautiful beaches they've visited around the world; they'll tell you about poker games with The Cure's Robert Smith in which Bellamy fleeced the Gothfather out of $400; and they'll tell you of the fun they had on the Curiosa tour because they didn't have to deal with the pressures of headlining, but could instead play a 30-minute set in the afternoon and then start partying again.
  But as anyone who's kept an eye on the Teignmouth trio will tell you, 2004 has been anything but smooth sailing. For every high, it seems there has been a low of equal magnitude; for every milestone, there has been heartbreak, or at the very least a broken bone. The most distressing example of this dichotomy occurred on the evening of June 27, the night Muse headlined Glastonbury. The show was, the band unanimously agree, one of the best of their career. Howard says it was "an amazing experience", that the gig "was really fucking great", and that "it felt like we just about pulled it off. We just waltzed in and rocked it up a bit".
  Hours after they walked offstage, however, the drummer's father, Bill Howard, collapsed and died of a heart attack while still on the festival site. With that, Muse's rollercoaster year just hit its lowest point.
  "I don't think any of us had experienced such and extreme like that in such a short space of time," sighs Wolstenholme. "It was quite a hard thing to go from such an extreme high to such an extreme low."
  How did you deal with it?
  "I think it's just about staying together, that's the key," offers Bellamy.
  "And moving forward as well," adds Howard. "If you suddenly stop what you're doing and stay in one place for a long period of time, that's when things can get hard, I think. When you're constantly moving and there's always a lot of change around you, it helps you deal with things."
  But, Dom, there must have been a part of you that just wanted to stop and crawl into a ball somewhere and hide.
  "Well, there was, and that happened, around the whole time. Just spending time with family and things like that, that happened."
  But not for very long...
  "It was about a week," says Bellamy, helping out his friend. "And the gigs we had around that time were kind of sporadic - there was one gig we cancelled, and then there was two gigs on the weekend that you [Howard] decided you wanted to do, and then there was about another week off after that anyway."
  What keeps you going when something like this happens?
  "Most basically, I think it's the idea that there are people out there that want to see you," considers Bellamy. "And there are people out there that have got tickets, and you'd feel bad just to fuck them off. It's the feeling that you get just from being onstage and the crowd, it's that feeling that keeps you going.
  "Because we all come from the same school together, the same town," he adds. "I think there's a closeness and understanding to us which helps us through those kinds of things."
  What effect did the death of Dom's father have on the band? Did it bring you closer?
  "Definitely, as a band and as friends," nods Howard.
  "Yeha, we all spent time with Dom, we went down to Devon to be with him," says Bellamy. "All these kinds of things, like the injuries and anything else, it can can [sic] make you realise how lucky you are to enjoy the moments you have enjoyed."
  "And that's the sort of thing that makes you think about what you've got and really appreciate it," adds Howard. "Just keeping fresh faced about it and enjoying what you've got and really appreciating life more, because it is only short."
  Did you father's death overshadow Glastonbury?
  "Even though it was the best day and the worst day of my life, it was still an amazing gig," replies Howard. "And I still remember it as that."

ONE HOUR later and Muse are on their way to soundcheck at tonight's venue, the Thebarton Theatre. Though it's only three in the afternoon, a sizeable queue already stretches from the theatre's doors along the footpath; many of those in line have been sitting there in the wet since 8:30 this morning.
  "There's something about the way their songs are put together," says 18-year-old Romy Graham, who, by the time the doors open, will have been waiting in line for over 10 hours. "It's just really beautiful, it fits together so beautifully. And Matthew Bellamy has an incredible voice."
  Inside the 2000 seat theatre - which is more a glorified community hall than the charming and grandiose room its name suggests - the band's road crew are in the middle of constructing the stage-set and routinely soundchecking the drums one by one, over, and over, and over.
  Even in the light of day, Muse's stage set-up is an impressive sight; an imposing collection of steel runways and grates sitting below a mind-bogglingly complex maze of computer operated lights. On the left of the stage is Matt Bellamy's pride and joy - a hulking contraption that looks like a tiny spaceship, but is in fact a keyboard built into a metal frame that contains a series of lights which flash whenever Bellamy tinkles its keys. It's just one of the indulgences the band's success has allowed him.
  "I've had the idea for a really long time, ever since I saw 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind'," he explains. "We had to get this computer programming genius in, and we explained to him what we needed, like, 'When I press this key I want this to light up here', and he just listened to it all and then went into a room and did yoga! This is true. He did yoga for three hours and then he just comes out and (makes a motion with his hand like someone assembling something at hyper speed) programmed this computer. So I've got this keyboard that's got a computer built in."
  Though you may not know it to look at them, Muse are on a health kick at the moment, with bodyguard Tony doubling as their fitness instructor. The first time he dragged them to a gym, says Christ Wolstenholme, the band's tour manager ended up spewing, and the bassist wasn't far off either.
  "You're on the bike for 20 minutes, and he makes you do 15 seconds every minute pushing as hard as you can," motions Bellamy. "Every time I get to the third one I feel like I'm going to throw!"
  And have you?
  "No, but I've had to sit down in a lift shaft!"

THAT NIGHT, as Muse sit in their dressing room minutes after walking offstage, laughing and chatting excitedly about the gig - which, by the way, had 2000 Adelaide residents practically jumping out of their skin - you can't help but notice that, at this moment, they look the happiest they've been all day. Though there are no wild scenes or excess or wanton downing of alcohol, the genuine warmth and enthusiasm of their conversation belongs more to a bunch of mates who haven't seen each other in years, not ones who've spent the past 12 months living in each others' pockets.
  And it's here you realise that, despite all the broken bones, the heartbreak and the tragedies of 2004, as long as the gigs are good, this group of friends can deal with anything. You know that when the year comes to and end, they'll not be focusing on the year's downsides, but on their accomplishments.
  "I think it will be a big feeling of achievement," says Matt Bellamy of what he expects when the calendar ticks over to 2005. "A feeling that we've pulled it off. At the end of the day we've enjoyed all the gigs - there's been a few moments where we've been down, but none of it's due to the music. It's not like we've not been enjoying the gigs, it's not as if we're sick of it."
  And here he takes a big swig of red wine, and pauses for a second.
  "That's much harder to take. If you're injured or anything, that just inspires you to fight back. And fight back harder."
  As 2004 darkens and wanes, the tough times look to be behind them. Muse's future starts now.

Muse's 'Butterflies & Hurricanes' single is out now.

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