British power trio Muse are bringing their sci-fi sized show to Australian shores this December and with tickets going on sale yesterday – leading to the Melbourne show selling out in a mere matter of hours – anticipation is building for the latest arena spectacle the band have cooked up, with Muse saying that it may be their biggest and brashest yet and the last arena rock blowout before scaling back their live show.
Having toured through Europe in support of their sixth (and possibly barmiest) album yet, The 2nd Law, Muse’s latest stage incarnation requires 20 semi-trailers just to transport the contents of their visual extravaganza, featuring a huge bank of television screens, a transforming stage, a theatrical cast, a giant robot, and a huge array of pyrotechnics and arena-swamping lights.
Drummer Dominic Howard, speaking to Perth paper The West, says “we haven’t done anything like this before and it’s taken our performances to a whole new level… The new album has really helped steer this new direction.” For a band whose career is built on the scale of their live production, saying their current tour is their biggest yet is really saying something.
Howard is also particularly excited about showing off the band’s transforming set to Australian audiences. “Have you heard about the pyramid? It can swallow up the band during the set, it’s totally mental. It’s an upside-down floating pyramid that is totally out there.”
Speaking of the lavish stage set-up, frontman Matt Bellamy told The Standard in a recent interview, “this is going to be our Zoo TV;” comparing their current stage show to U2’s excessive 90s tour for their Zooropa album that featured a similar stage set-up of banked TVs, expensive sets, and big budget spectacle.
“This will be the tour when everyone goes, ‘You’ve gone too far, you shouldn’t have done that’. I’m pretty confident about that, and I’m glad. It’s a totally different show from the arena tour. I feel like we’ve scaled up and scaled up every time and I’m very confident that this is as far as you can go,” he says.
How far? “We’ve got a 20ft robot called Charles who’s going to go around the stadium barking at everyone… We’ve got an actor playing a banker who’s going to have a banking crisis on stage as we do our own version of quantitative easing, and spray the audience with millions of euros. We might have a businesswoman drinking petrol. The stage is basically a giant futuristic industrial power station polluting the world.” “This will be the tour when everyone goes, ‘You’ve gone too far, you shouldn’t have done that’.” – Matt Bellamy
Alternatively, speaking to The Sun, Bellamy says that their grand schemes have gotten them into trouble with “accountants and lawyers arguing with all sorts of local councils and police and promoters.” The helium-voiced singer/pianist/guitarist also revealed that they resorted to some underhanded tactics to clear their concert experience.
“In Rome, we had to bribe people with thousands of euros just to be allowed to blast our fire effects,” says Bellamy. “We had to phone the British Embassy in Rome and argue with some official. If you want to do things like this on the move, it’s quite a big deal. It’s pretty bloody expensive, though. It’s mind-boggling how much, actually.”
Further adding to the controversy, Bellamy has voiced concerns that they can’t get any bigger. “As a band I think we’re at the moment of collapse… We’re at the point of being forced to go back to the basics,” he says, hinting that the current tour for The 2nd Law may be their last hurrah in the arena stakes before returning to smaller shows.
Which raises the stakes even higher for Muse’s headline tour, which kickstarts in the much-neglected Perth on the last day of November before rolling through Adelaide, two shows in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney – the band’s first shows Down Under since headlining the Big Day Out in January 2010. But it seems that a festival could not contain their latest epic live show.
But even the bombast-loving Bellamy is beginning to concede that the band’s concert shows may be reaching their overblown peak. “We have work to do with intimacy, connection, stripped-down organic stuff and all those warm fuzzy words,” he told The Standard. “There’s definitely something in that department that we want to explore.”
Inspired by a recent, smaller performance (at least by their grand standards) for the War Child charity in the UK, Bellamy says that scaling back is probably next on the band’s agenda. “That was a totally different feeling, although we were still doing the big rock songs,” he said of the gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. “I loved it so much that I think on the next tour, every city we go to, I wouldn’t mind pulling a Prince. Do the arena gig and then show up in some little club late at night.”
