Bellamy laughs out loud. The short answer is that the news got to him. He had already planned a low-key one in 2020 because his wife, Texas-born model Elle Evans, was due to give birth in June and he wanted to be home for his daughter’s first few months. Then you know what happened and he had no choice. During the first phase of the pandemic, Muse’s regular producer Rich Costey fled to Vermont, handing Bellamy the keys to his downtown Santa Monica studio. “Rich was like, I want to get out of Los Angeles, and I think I want to be here. I love being right in the middle of it.” Through the studio window, Bellamy observed the seasons of discontent. One month, the streets were empty. the next, they were being patrolled by military vehicles during Black Lives Matter protests. “If you’d asked me six months ago, I would have tried to get away from the old dystopian thing, but then it unfolded in front of me,” he says in a raspy, sped-up voice that sounds like a podcast playing on 1½. Speed. “There is a huge fire, there is a pandemic, there are riots in the streets and my wife is going into labor. Three of them happened at exactly the same time. When you see all this happening, you think, “Wait a minute, we’re all screwed.” Bellamy says all this over lemon tea in the cool, dark corner of a favorite pub near his Primrose Hill home. He lives in Los Angeles during the term to be near his son with actress Kate Hudson, but spends the holidays in London and hopes to return permanently one day. “Coming back here, you realize there aren’t really any major natural disasters,” he says. “And whatever people say about the national health system, at least we have one. There are certain things you take for granted. There was a moment [in the US] when it felt like Mad Max 2. It felt like it was one step away from absolute mayhem.” He had to evacuate his home twice because of fires, one of which burned his backyard and every house across the street. “Los Angeles is an impressive place. It is literally on the verge of a really big earthquake. The flip side of this is that risk takers and dreamers come up with the craziest ideas. This heightened sense of danger is a double-edged sword.” The 44-year-old seems mysteriously unchanged from his 12 years in Los Angeles and the passage of time in general. He still has nonchalantly spiky hair, a scraggly goatee, and a wry, inappropriate sense of humor. His presence in the pub goes unnoticed (he says he gets recognized once a day, if that), which is strange for the frontman of a rock band that has released six No.1 albums, headlined Glastonbury three times and packed stadiums from Moscow to Buenos Aires. He is very happy about it. “Obviously, with my ex I had a different reputation,” she says. “Not mine, hers. This is a bit more invasive and aggressive. It changes the way you plan your day.” Exhales. “Strange fishmonger.” Matt Bellamy, front, with Dominic Howard, right, and Christopher Wolstenholme, left, in 1999. Photo: Jim Dyson/Getty Images Bellamy is an introvert in an extrovert’s job. Formed Muse in Teignmouth, Devon in 1994 with drummer Dom Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme. Even when they drew smaller crowds than local cover bands, they dreamed of being the biggest band in the world. But he had to grow into the role. “I was a lot more flashy and nonchalant,” he says. “No physical movement, no eye contact.” After a few years he realized that the more theatrical he was, the more people liked him. And the bigger the shows got, the grander their music became. The title Will of the People has a double meaning: it is also about giving the people what they want. When the label asked for a greatest hits album, Muse responded with the history of their career – prog-metal, glam-rock, electro-pop, ballads – but they said it with new songs. “It feels a bit like the end when you do the greatest hits,” says Bellamy. “And I just don’t know if we’re having enough hits. We’re not really a pop group.” In typical Muse fashion, a format will be the first NFT to be chartable. My brain has been so manipulated by Stranger Things and 80s nostalgia that I can’t remember what’s real and what’s not Bellamy is currently planning the format of Muse’s next major tour. In the set design arms race, Muse is a superpower, known for developing robots, acrobats, LED pyramids, aerial drones and all manner of cutting edge technology. Although he has talked for years about making a smaller, quieter album, perhaps acoustic, perhaps electronic, one has yet to materialize. The reason, it seems, is that it would be a tour. “Our live show is so much fun, I can’t even tell you,” he says with a huge smile. “Huge lights, huge crowds, everyone singing together. It’s a little more intense. It’s like being in a football team and scoring the winning goal every day.” One day, he predicts, they’ll tire of world tours and look beyond “large-scale music” – but not yet. Bellamy’s album concepts are usually political: populism, climate crisis, drone warfare. With nearly half a billion Spotify streams, 2009’s rousing Uprising could be the most popular rock protest song of the 21st century. However, Muse are often overlooked in discussions of political music, perhaps because Bellamy’s ideas are couched in the colorful language of movies, video games and comics. Not that he minds. When he starts talking about politics, he says, there are usually two reactions: “One – who the hell is this man? Just go and play the guitar. And two – people don’t want to hear it anyway.” Growing up in Devon, Bellamy doesn’t remember worrying about the state of the world, or much, until his parents divorced and his father filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s. “I think my brain has been manipulated by Stranger Things and I think that’s how it was all our childhoods,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve seen so much ’80s nostalgia that I can’t remember what’s real and what’s not.” His political education was self-directed and he is humble about his mistakes. “I’m not an intellectually trained thinker,” he says. “I made the usual mistakes that people of my background make, which is conspiracy theories and all that stuff.” At one point, he became prone to talking about UFOs, David Icke and how 9/11 was an inside job. Matt Bellamy at the San Siro Stadium, Milan in 2019. Photo: Sergione Infuso/Corbis/Getty Images In the late 2000s, however, Bellamy began to think more seriously about how the world works. “I got out of my own ignorance and tried to understand as best I could what was going on,” he says. “I started to get out of, shall we say, swagger.” In the age of QAnon, Stop the Steal and Covid denial, conspiracy theories no longer seem like harmless fun. The pandemic exposed and intensified the strange paranoia of artists from Ian Brown to Van Morrison. As a reformed conspiracy theorist, can Bellamy explain the fascination? “Yes,” he says, leaning in. “First of all, it’s a distraction from the really pressing issues. It makes people feel engaged in topics that really lead nowhere. When it comes to human psychology, there is a comfort that maybe human beings somewhere, even if they are evil, are in control, when in reality the truth is much scarier – there are no humans in control and everything is a mess. “ Occasionally, Muse records like The Resistance (think Nineteen Eighty-Four, directed by James Cameron) have been drastically misconstrued. A decade ago, Bellamy was moved to distance himself from fans of Fox News host Glenn Beck, who responded: “As inconvenient as it is for you, I’ll keep playing your songs loud… Thank you for singing words that echo a man in his struggle to be free”. There is a comfort that human beings, even if evil, are in control, when the truth is far more terrifying Today, Bellamy seems somewhat disappointed when I suggest that Cranks will capitalize on his reference, in Ghosts (How Can I Move On), to the Great Reset, a World Economic Forum initiative that has inspired conspiracy theories about a one-world government. The song is actually about people who lost partners during the pandemic. What, I wonder, is more worrying? “Massive wealth inequality, massive political division and ridiculously unserviceable debt – all of these signal the end of an empire,” he says without hesitation. “I think in the West a lot of people feel that there is a real need for some kind of systemic change. My concern is that this is not going to happen. The worst case scenario is that some kind of extremist emerges and a revolution takes place that results in George Orwell’s worst nightmare.” But wait, it gets worse. An alternative is “absolute chaos and civil war, and players like China are starting to take advantage of that. Every empire eventually ends. The sum of all fears, apparently, is world war. Figuring out how to avoid it becomes harder for me to imagine than actually happening.” “I love being right in the middle of it” … Muse at Air Studios in Hampstead. Photo: Sarah Lee/The Guardian As the title of Muse’s 2004 track Apocalypse Please suggests, Bellamy used to enjoy destruction. Now that the world…
