Advertisement

Muse’s Matt Bellamy on conspiracy ‘rabbit-holes’ and the threat of US civil war

Man of the people: Matt Bellamy - Corbis Entertainment
Man of the people: Matt Bellamy - Corbis Entertainment

From the window of Red Room Studios in Santa Monica, Matt Bellamy’s view during the summer of 2020 was quite something. Inside, he and his Muse bandmates – bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dom Howard – were working on what would become their ninth album, Will Of The People. “Outside,” he says, “the city was turning into Robocop.”

It was a steady decline they were watching. First, as it had everywhere, the pandemic had brought an eerie silence to the streets of the usually energised beach city. Then, following the murder of George Floyd, the the city flared into violence after Black Lives Matter demonstrations were met with bullish tactics by the LAPD. “We saw everything get shut down, then loads of shops going out of business and everything getting boarded up,” he says, recounting how their vista changed as the months went on. “Then we saw militarised police vehicles going up and down the streets.”

In case this wasn’t quite enough, beyond their field of vision, California – Bellamy’s home for a decade now, where he lives with his wife and two children – was ablaze with increasingly common wildfires. And here Muse were, wilfully working away in the middle of it all, box-seated for the apocalypse. “Some people's mentality [when COVID started] was to get out of the city and be out in the countryside,” he says today with a small chuckle. “We went the other way. It was really quite visceral, making an album as you’re literally seeing those changes happening outside.”

Bellamy is talking about all this in the window booth of an upmarket Austrian restaurant in West London. Having apologetically texted to say he’s running late, he then arrives all of three minutes shy of punctual. Over a cup of Earl Grey with lemon, the friendly frontman speaks in great, broad trains of thought, occasionally stopping to wonder if he’s actually overshot what might constitute an answer.

At these close quarters, he’s far less flamboyant than the opera-voiced comic book guitar hero he is onstage – both in demeanour and outfit, today dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, without a sequin in sight – but nevertheless he oscillates with a magnetic energy that stops just short of intense.

Album art for Muse’s new album, Will Of The People - Nick Fancher/Jesse Lee Stout
Album art for Muse’s new album, Will Of The People - Nick Fancher/Jesse Lee Stout

Now aged just 44 he is a relatively young member of an old club: the great British rockstar. Having formed while the members were still at school in 1994, Muse released their debut album Showbiz five years later. Some shrugged them off as Radiohead copycats, but 2001 follow-up The Origin Of Symmetry follow-up – featuring the prog-metal riffing of Plug-In Baby, the spacey Bliss and New Born, a song whose switch from classical piano intro to fuzzy riff remains one of the greatest moments of expectation in rock history – sent the band skyward.

In 2003 Muse released their multi-million-selling album Absolution, and by the time Bellamy was 25, the band were headlining Wembley Arena. In 2007, a year after their album Black Holes And Revelations went to number one, they were headlining across the road, at Wembley Stadium. When the Olympics came to London in 2012, they were asked to do the official song for it, Survival, which today he laughingly declares “The worst Olympic song ever written”. Right now, Muse are “easing back” into playing live, which involves just playing at the weekends headlining festivals.

In all this, the frontman’s lyrics have often been of a much darker stripe than one might normally find in such echelons. New Born deals with a fear that technology is advancing at a rate that will eventually be beyond human control. Plug-In Baby’s setting is a future in which people are linked together with cables, losing their individual characteristics. The entire Drones album from 2015 was themed on a soldier breaking his indoctrination and eventually deserting. Even Survival takes a skewed view of its sporting patron. “I wanted to ask what’s at the root of competition? What is wanting to beat others? There’s a darkness about that,” he says.

He’s also been public about how “I went down a few rabbit holes” with conspiracy theories. In 2006 he was quoted saying – since redacted – that there was “massive evidence” that 9/11 was an inside job, citing a document titled Project For The New America Century, “which clearly says, ‘We need a Pearl Harbour-level event so we can have an excuse to invade the Middle East.’” At a 2012 White House dinner, he asked former Bush Administration Secretary Of State Colin Powell why the US army was buying hollow point ammunition – it expands on impact and is illegal under the Geneva Convention – having read about it in what he called “conspiracy press”.

These days he’s more measured. “I’ve always been interested in [the idea of asking], to what extent are we just going on with narrative of the mainstream media?” he says. “In the late 90s and early 2000s before conspiracy internet really took off, there was a sense that the government and politicians weren’t being entirely honest with us. And the media maybe isn't really fully honest with us. And then the internet kind of set that whole thing on fire, and it all went crazy. And now everybody can go down any rabbit hole they want, or any kind of wild conspiracy theory, any kind of crazy direction you want to go down.”

Fittingly, on Will Of The People, there’s something more real. Written in the times it was, titles like Compliance and Won’t Stand Down feel prescient. One line in the title-track contains the word ‘sheeple’. It ends on an energised, heavy number with a huge, almost ironic sing-along chorus, succinctly titled, We Are F---ing F---ed. “That’s a fun one to play,” he grins. “I wanted the lyrics to be raw, firstly because I’m not a great lyricist, but mainly because I wanted to just be as blunt as possible, in that moment.”

Elsewhere, though, things aren’t so flip. But what he saw during the past two years, including American democracy appearing to eat itself live on TV during the storming of the Capitol, left him anxious about where things are going. On Compliance, he wonders about the point at which a group like that actually just becomes a mass no longer sure of what it’s doing or why. And that, he says, is a real danger.

“Usually, people have a fear of not being part of a group,” he says. “That makes you want to go along with stuff. That's where I’m coming from in the song. The mob rule thing is, you think you can go along with it, and then there's a part of you that steps back and goes, ‘We’re all crazy. Is this what we're fighting for? What does this actually mean? What's this actually about?’

“There was actual talk of real civil war [in America],” he says of the aftermath of January 6. “It was actually palpably believable for a couple of moments in time that it could happen. And I still think it could happen. Things that we think are really extreme are quite mobilised within online communities, who would do anything to get their point across.”

Muse (L-R): Dominic Howard, Christopher Wolstenholme and Matt Bellamy, 1999 - Getty
Muse (L-R): Dominic Howard, Christopher Wolstenholme and Matt Bellamy, 1999 - Getty

Did he expect that such things might actually happen in his lifetime and on his doorstep? “I’ve always felt known through childhood and through my teenage years that our generation – in the West anyway – has been very lucky in that we haven't really had any sort of direct major issues to deal with,” he says. “We should talk to our grandparents about these things, and stop looking at what they're saying as, ‘Oh, that was then’. Because it's quite likely that during our lifetime, we're gonna experience something similar.”

Ask “like what?” and he points to a list of possibilities, from the shift in the balance of super-power from America to China, to solar flares disrupting communications or power to a devastating degree.

“Without going too doomsday-ish, I think there's things coming within our lifetime that are going to really make a lot of the noise and gossip [of modern life] seem ridiculously trivial,” he says. “I do think there's going to be some kind of tectonic shift in the way that we live and the way that we think of ourselves. My personal hope is that that can somehow happen in a way that is non-violent. It’s more likely to be brutal than it is not. That’s my fear. But I don't want that to be the case.”

This is all very familiar rockstar-declares-the-end-is-nigh stuff. Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman, for one, has been talking like this for almost as long as Matt Bellamy has been alive. In the early 80s, he fled to Iceland, fearing an imminent nuclear apocalypse. His bandmate, Martin “Youth” Glover, once reacted to thinking the end was imminent by walking down the street burning wads of banknotes.

Bellamy and his wife Elle Evans - Gabriel Olsen
Bellamy and his wife Elle Evans - Gabriel Olsen

Sitting opposite Bellamy, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything like that. Too polite, too reasonable, too British. For those wondering: he’s jabbed. He “went along” with California’s mask mandates, seeing the sense in it (although he says he still wonders about keeping young kids masked up for long periods at school). Had he been in charge, he’d have made sure that “really at-risk people who really needed to be protected got everything they needed, for free”.

Similarly, he hopes it’s possible to weather parts of whatever storm’s coming in a pragmatic, practical manner. Some years ago now, he became “a bit of a weird prepper”, taking a Devon house off-grid and raising “sheep, chickens, stuff like that”. It also taught him about natural energy, having harnessed the thermal power of the county’s hills. These days, he invests money in similar energy solutions on a much larger scale, particularly backing nuclear fusion.

That’s for the future, though. Will Of The People’s pessimism is very much based in the here and now, from watching real events unfold from a studio window and on TV as Muse made it. It will see Muse continuing to play football stadia for as long as they fancy it, as well as keeping them in the lifestyles to which they have been accustomed for almost their entire adult lives, but that doesn’t diminish the worries and the fears at its heart.

So how “f—ing f—ed” does Bellamy think we are? “On a medium timeline, like sort of 50 years, 100 years, I think, actually, we’re not f—ed,” he ponders. “I think there’ll be a massive technological innovation that really solves some of the world’s biggest issues. I’m not talking about Elon Musk flying off to a different planet and just living somewhere else, I’m talking about huge energy transitions, huge. Weather control, getting off fossil fuels completely, having completely sustainable energy, asteroid defense systems… the list goes on.”

He rises to leave, and quickly adds something like he’s just remembered an important detail. “Long-term, though,” he nods, “we are all f—ed, obviously.”


Will of the People is released on August 26 via Warner