Magazine: Kerrang Magazine 12 November 2009

[grosvenormum]

In this week's Kerrand magazine. Enjoy

[Suvi]

aaaw, thanks.. they look good.

[iminvincible]

thank you, but the 2nd link isn't opened.O_O

[Natural_Disaster]

Is it an article?

[grosvenormum]

Originally Posted by Heino

aaaw, thanks.. they look good.

I'm glad you can see them. All I'm getting is the code and it won't let me view the files Here's the second one again.

[Suvi]

Originally Posted by grosvenormum

[iminvincible]

Heino, thank you.^^

[Natural_Disaster]

I've just rung my Dad and told him to get it for me
It's about time a magazine had a Muse article Haven't had one since...NME, over here, I think.

[grosvenormum]

Originally Posted by Heino

Glad I got them to work eventually. Thanks to my sixteen year old son who has waited patiently for the PC

[Obi]

Nothing we didn't know already really.

[saski86]

Ohh nice photo, might have to buy it to read the article.
No way I can read that print with my eyesight

[psyence53]

I opened the mag and thought.... i'll wait and see how much i spend on Fri 13th.. I did overspend, but hell, i'll just buy the sodding thing. Also want to get the reviews of the O2 in the next issue

[youlightupmydarkestskies]

some people have trouble reading this?

ShowShow this spoiler

WITH THE RESISTANCE CEMENTING MUSE'S POSITION AS THE UK'S BIGGEST ROCK BAND, THE TRIO LOOK BACK AT MAKING THEIR FIFTH STUDIO ALBUM AND HOW THEIR HOMETOWN OF TEIGNMOUTH SHAPED THEM...

Holed up in an airy Devon studio, the three members of Muse - Matt Bellamy, Dom Howard and Chris Wolstenholme - are in positive mood. With their fifth studio album The Resistance having hit the top spots in albums charts in 13 countries, including the UK, on its release in September, the band are surrounded by the countryside in which they grew up, and all is right in their world.
"It's very nice being here," says frontman Matt, who now lives on Lake Como in Italy. "It's nice to see friends, to see all the old places where we grew up."
It's perhaps not just the Devon air that has brought about the upbeat frame of mind.
Ten years ago, as their debut album Showbiz was released, they were written off by much as Radiohead copyists, as miserablist show-offs. In that decade, they've become one of the country's biggest, boldest and brightest rock bands - their two-night residency at Wembley Stadium in 2007 being the icing on the cake.
They've achieved it by remaining true to themselves and, as The Resistance demonstrates, that's still something that remains at their heart. Taking in electro, psychedelia, orchestral bombast and tenderness, Balkan piano, R & B and more besides, it's an album that veers from flamboyance to preposterousness in equal measure, sounding like both Muse and nobody or nothing else at the same time. Which was, of course, exactly the plan....

The Resistance has been a great success. How much did you discuss the direction of the album before you recorded it?
Dom Howard (drums): "We did have a conversation before we started recording where we said, 'what shall we do?'. We thought about completely changing the concept of the band and doing something very radical. Then we thought, 'Nah'. But that was perhaps why we decided to produce the album ourselves because, in doing that, we wanted to make something that was typically Muse. we wanted it to be, in some way, defining of what the Muse sound is. Having said that, in doing so, we made an album that's quite diverse, with lots of different styles of music on it. It's very hard for us to make it all sound the same! That attitude of doing whatever we want is something we've had on all our albums but particularly this one."

Was producing yourselves difficult?
Dom: "It was posittive but challenging as well. There were many times we'd hit boundaries or musical hurdles and sometimes you just get stuck. You turn around and look at each other and ask, 'What are we doing?' only to get the reply, 'Fuck knows!'. Normally in that situation you turn to a producer but we didn't have that person this time, so we had to dig quite deep inside ourselves. We quickly realised that nothing could happen without all three of us being together in the studio making decisions. If there were debates, things got resolved quite quickly. So it was a great process and we did pretty well."

Lyrically, there's a blend of political themes and conspiracy theories, as well as more personal ideas. What were you inspired by?
Matt Bellamy (vocals/guitar): "The song Uprising is a soundtrack to the G20 protests. I liked the idea of everyone putting on silly costumes and having a peaceful protest by dancing around outside the Houses of Parliament. Resistance is more abou the idea of love itself as a form of resistance. It's about the idea that love can break barriers - how one person can hold one political or religious belief while someone else might hold another, but they can still fall in love across those boundaries."

U.S. Foreign policy comes in for criticism, too
Matt: "The song [USO] Eurasia comes from a book call The Grand Chessboard. It's about U.S. foreign strategy and was written by the guy Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a foreign policy advisor in America. It was like reading something written by Dr Strangelove. These people really are megalomaniacs! They sit around talking about real countries like they're chess pieces. They talk about warfare in such cold terms and it really blew me away how mad these people are.
"I imagined writing an anti-Grand Chessboard song which, in some ways, is about a megalomaniac who wants Eurasia [the European and Asian landmass] to be unified. Again, it's taking the resistance position, but it's taking it from a ridiculous megalomaniac position. But, at the end of the song, I wanted to throw in the horrific truth of it all - you end up with collateral damage. These people might have these crazy ideas but, underneath it all, innocent people die.
"But there are [love songs]. We wanted to expose the band a bit more. I wouldn't want to make an album that gave people the impression that all i think about is the bloody unification of Eurasia!"

The album closes with an epic piano and string-laden triptych called The exogenesis symphony. It's quite a grand statement - it must have taken some work.
Dom: "Matt has been playing those piano parts over the past couple of years. He's be playing things here and there on tour that are now in the symphony. That free style of piano playing is something Matt naturally does when he sits down at the keyboard. It's quite awkward, though, to fit that into a rock band! It was pretty hard to make it sound like Muse. But once we started working on it, it began to come together."

Matt: "The piano parts have been around for quite a while but i've never really thought of a way to get them into the band. But Dom and Chris seemed quite willing to try and incorporate bass and drum parts to make it feel like a Muse song. Because of their contribution, I had a lot of time to work on the string and orchestral arrangements. That was quite a challenge. I wanted all the arrangements to be done by me and the band so that people would know, when they heard all the orchestral stuff, that it is acutally Muse."

There are few other bands doing this sort of thing - does this album put you into a category of one?
Dom: "I guess so. Ever since we started and certainly since ou rsecodn album [2001s OoS], we've always been making music that seems to be different from everybody else. That's how we've always felt. We still feel like that - as though we're out on a limb experimenting. We've always felt there was quite a distance between us and our contemporaries.
"Perhaps that's because we come from a small town away from lots of people. Being back here rehearsing, I think it's become quite apparent how mcuh that's influenced us over the years. We actually rehearsed a lot of this album in Devon before we recorded. It reminded us how to be completely free and to do whatever we want."

[Morinphen]

Is it just me or Matt looks a bit like Billie Joe Armstrong there?

[Microfuzz]

Thanks for the transcription!