View source for "Let's Burn Down the Houses of Parliament!" (20061118 NME article)

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==“Let’s Burn Down the Houses of Parliament!”==

'''First Bono and friends saved the world, now Muse are ready to fire up the revolution.'''

Rock’s grand conspirator leans closer. “I see the only thing to do,” he mutters, in case any hidden microphones might catch them, “is to build some Molotov cocktails and start bunging them at fucking MPs. I’m not sure what else there is to do. It’s almost got to the point where it’s ‘Let’s just have a civil war.’”

Did I hear you right? You’re suggesting a full on revolution?

Scanning for governmental surveillance devices, The Grand Conspirator eyes the arena floor where a 100-strong crew, six hours later than planned, are racing to erect the band’s stage by door time.

“There’s not enough of that in music,” he continues. “We’re born into this bondage, this system. It’s pleasant, it’s a nice world, but put it this way: the vote we all get is useless. The concept of democracy is a fucking joke. Rock’s supposed to shake things up and say, ‘Fuck that, this is shit, man! Let’s burn down the Houses of Parliament!'”

For too long now the Powers That Be have dismissed Matt Bellamy as ‘That crackpot little fella from Muse’, his gabbings about the Apocalypse, alien visitations from tenth planets and other such David Icke-isms disguising the full extent of his threat to the world order. But as he plots his band’s forthcoming infiltration of the UK’s entertainment complexes – in which Muse perform galactic future-rock epics like ‘Starlight’, ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ and ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ on a stage with mind-control machines, spy satellites and the mysterious HAARP installation in Alaska – his proclamations have become more politically focused and theoretically sound: the 9/11 conspiracies; the governmental mind control; the corruption of democracy; the, er, lizard people walking among us. Surveillance has also traced, on recent genre-crushing fourth album ‘Black Holes and Revelations’, a lyrical shift away from the biblical soothsaying towards firm revolutionary action: the anti-war coup inciting on ‘Assassin’ and ‘Soldier’s Poem’, the cries of “Destroy this city of delusion!”, the ‘Exo-Politics’ theory that politicians are using the threat of alien attack as an excuse to put weapons in space aimed at far more Earthbound enemies.

Notebooks out, anarchists: Matt Bellamy has some truths to impart. The Truths They Didn’t Want You To Read…

=== The HAARP Mystery ===

Originally, Muse had intended to use the same stage show for the current European tour as they had for their triumphant Carling Weekend: Reading and Leeds Festival headline shows. Six weeks before the tour, however, set designers were presented with a new prototype: a series of pylons sending messages to a massive ‘fully loaded satellite’ which rises up to reveal drummer Dominic Howard playing inside. The design, Matt explains, is based on the American government’s High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme in Alaska – a $30 million experiment that an assortment of critics (environmentalists, Native Americans and Alaskan citizens), believe could be used by the military for everything from weather control to mind control.

Matt: “No-one really knows what it is but modern warfare and modern weapons have moved into this next stage. There’s a big battle going on as to who’ll control the weather.”

I see. And how much hard fact do you have to support this theory?

Matt: (Laughs) “Not much! Bt it’s out there if you want to find it. This HAARP thing, the government are saying it’s for communications with submarines and their own spacecraft, but scientists have said that they’re really trying to tap into the ionosphere, where a lot of weather stuff takes place. Interfere with that and you can manipulate the weather.”

===9/11===

Matt has recently claimed that he believes the September 11 attacks have been a set-up. In what way?

Matt: “It’s a tough one. There’s never been any hard evidence that ties any of the usual suspects with this. In fact, the evidence they did use [to incriminate the alleged terrorists] was laughable. The plane’s black box that keeps all the information, that melted. But apparently a passport with one of the hijacker’s names flew out of the window and landed on the ground. That’s laughable. I’m not saying that it wasn’t an attack on the United States – it was, there’s no question about that. The question is who was the attack done by and for what reason? I think there’s far more to suggest that a select amount of people who are reaping vast benefits from the war that’s taking place at the moment… they’ve got the means and the motive to try to pull something like that off. We’ve got to be careful we don’t let these people make mugs of us. There was never an independent investigation into what took place yet we’ve waged wars in its name.”

What about North Korea – why aren’t we invading them? They’ve definitely tested nukes!

Matt: “Have they? I don’t know if they have. That’s what the news tells us, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. To what extent should you believe what you’re told? It’s all a big fucking set-up. They’re just trying to lead us all to believe that that’s the right thing to do so when they do it we all go, 'Yeah!’. What’s behind it all is keeping a population feeling under threat, all that does is give an excuse to increase control and take away the freedoms of individuals. You know you’re living in dangerous times when simply having a different opinion is dangerous. For people to stand up and say things that maybe I’m saying and get pointed at and ridiculed, that’s a sign that we live in extremely limited, narrow-minded times, far, far to the right, and it’s just getting worse.”

===Knights of Cydonia===

‘Knights of Cydonia’, the song, is Muse’s stonking great epic of a horse-snorting, fret-frotting majesty and easily the most prog single released since 1972. Cydonia the place, meanwhile, is a region of Mars which hides, Matt believes, the hidden secrets of human/alien evolution.

Matt: “Cydonia is a region where there’s various remains of what looks like pyramids. It’s got evidence of old ancient structures or civilisations even. Where it gets interesting is that there are people out there now who are realising that the whole pyramid area in North Africa, not just the Giza area, is one enormous, very in-depth star map if you look at it from above. They’re trying to lay out some kind of message to someone who’s in the sky. The same layout has been found on Mars, on Cydonia, and someone has linked them all together. And if you look at Washington from above it’s exactly the same as the pyramids, the way they’re laid out. There’s a whole lot of secrecy out there about some of the monuments that are on Earth and also things that might be, which I hope will be, on Cydonia on Mars."

===The Lizard People===

Which brings us nicely to Matt’s recent revelations that he’s not entirely in disagreement with David Icke’s theory that we have already been invaded by alien lizard people disguised as human beings. Except Matt’s ideas are rather more scientifically grounded. Although still somewhat mental.

Matt: “I don’t think there are aliens with us now, but I certainly think part of our DNA at least is not from this Earth. There’s a massive void of fossil records – there should be billions of fossils and skeleton structures of all these different stages of Neanderthal, which there aren’t. There’s one or two. I think there was definitely Neanderthal man around but there was a cross pollination-type situation taking place.”

Could I be one of the lizard people? How would I know?

“There’s a rumour that there’s a certain bloodline that is susceptible to possession from this other entity which lives outside our realm of understanding of the three dimensions. It’s the royal bloodline obviously, which goes back a long, long way. Check out those bloodlines!”

So the Queen is a lizard person?

Matt: “She might be. Why are they all breeding with each other?”

To keep the money?

Matt: “To keep the money? Nah.”

Rumour, smokescreen, secrets and lies. If only our own eyes and ears are to be believed then we can be utterly certain that of only one thing: Muse live in 2006 is a sensory blitzkrieg of turbo-firing rock euphoria and synapse-dazzling electronic overload. Over a set of non-stop ultrahits – from the opening doomsday synth-metal crescendo of ‘Take A Bow’, through the pop opera of supernovas of ‘Hysteria’, ‘Starlight’ and ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ to the return of the bouncy weather balloons for a brain-mushing ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ – this is a show, beamed direct from the Saturn ShockWaves Enormodrome, so breathtaking it rips your lungs out through your eyeballs. Matt plays a guitar that looks like it’s got HAL, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, flashing different colours on it during ‘Invincible’; Dom plays a transparent drumkit in his 50-foot hydraulic satellite throughout; galaxies burst, suns explode; cities burn and evil warbot armies march on the screens above. Like some kind of thunder-speed Hitocalypse attraction at Alton Towers, their 90 minutes of space-punk brilliance leaves you dazed, dazzled and begging for one more ride. And thus, tonight in Madrid, another 9,000 Muse stormtroopers are readied for the final battle.

Post-show, we invade the dressing room celebrations and corner The Grand Conspirator again, ready for our orders. Which MPs shall we firebomb first, oh great leader?

Matt shakes his head. “The whole mind-manipulation thing, the whole control situation, it’s far more complex than people realise. A revolution of the mind needs to take place before there can be anything physical. You have to be at that point where you look at a newspaper and think, ‘It’s all just shit,’ before you can even begin to consider doing anything physical about it.”

He’s suddenly quiet, as if picking up a signal from a bugging antenna.

“I’m not going to lead a revolution,” he says, then whispers, “but I’m happy to join in on one.”

Wake up Britain: the revolution will be maxi-sized.

==See also==
*[http://board.muse.mu/showthread.php?t=37360 Transcription by Half Life on the muse.mu forum]
*Scans: [http://microcuts.net/gallery/details.php?image_id=7896 page one] and [http://microcuts.net/gallery/details.php?image_id=7897 page two].

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