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Australian
Hullabaloo Interview promo CDR (Interview with Zane Lowe, 2002, Mush)
Zane: Little trouble getting up from Brighton today fellas, yeah?
Dom: Uh, little? Terrible. Three hours; it’s a joke.
Zane (laughing): Terrible traffic. Nice car, terrible traffic.
Dom: Yeah, nice Jag – rough traffic.
Zane: That’s not gonna help you when you’re stuck in traffic!
Matt: I did it through the navigation system though, it’s unbelievable.
Zane: Can’t believe you’ve got one of those things.
Matt: Yeah (laughing), Dom left half an hour before me and I got in two hours before him!
Zane: Y’know you’re the only person I know who’s got one of those tracking systems apart from the taxi drivers.
Matt: Well, I have a phobia of lack of direction. Seriously, a proper phobia. I’m in a car, I get lost and I really get lost.
Dom: Should have seen him before he got it – nightmare.
Zane: You’re in a touring band! You have a phobia of lack of direction and you’re in a rock band?! (laughing) How does that work?!
Matt: It’s only in cars. Driving round in cars trying to get to a restaurant to meet my girlfriend before she dumps me.
Zane: Alright, fair enough. Won’t go into that! Matt and Dom from Muse have joined us to talk about this forthcoming live DVD album extravaganza – multimedia affair. It’s called „Hullabaloo“: Who came up with the title? Who’s to blame for that?
Matt (laughing): Dom.
Dom: Nah, it was kinda both of us really.
Matt: It was something to do with balloons; we used a lot of balloons on the last tour. In the gigs there were a lot and we had a picture of one behind us on the front cover: We were gonna call it „Balloons“ but y’know.
Zane: So you didn’t want to go the whole hog and call it „Hullaballoon“? (much laughter)
Dom: Well, the meaning was a crazy, strange, disturbed noise.
Matt: We needed something extravagant. Something a little bit over the top and we thought that suited us.
Zane: How do you pick these titles? Last time we hooked up „Origin Of Symmetry“ wasn’t even finished, let alone named, but you told me you wanted it to be something symmetrical. Is it always a democratic decision coming up with song titles and things like that?
Matt: With titles definitely. I don’t really know what I’m doing with song titles. I find it very difficult to find the right thing that connects with whatever the song is about, so Dom helps out with that. It was the same with the name of the band actually!
Zane: You were responsible for the band name originally?
Matt: I think so yeah. Well, for the final decision we had a meeting and Dom was warmed to it.
Zane: Do you find it hard then to get perspective after you’ve written it; y’know finding out what they’re about and what they mean?
Matt: No, I’m pretty clear on what I’m feeling when I’m singing it but I just find it very difficult to find a title that suits what it’s supposed to be about. Choosing whether it’s gonna be an obvious chorus lyric or something else.
Zane: What I’ve found is that when I haven’t been working on records and had time off titles come really easily but when you’re in the middle of recording something it’s like bleurgh.
Matt: Yeah. We’re in the middle of recording a lot of new songs at the moment that we’ll probably record at the end of the year for a new album, so that’s why I can’t think of any titles right now!
Zane: So right now they’re just like „Song 1“, „Song 2“, the „Rocking Song“, the „Slow Song“.
Matt: Yeah. „New Born“ was just called the „New One“ for so long then Tom had a baby and he turned it into „New Born“.
Zane: That’s cool man. I reckon that when you’re in a band it must be a dream, for most people anyway, to think about releasing a live album. It means you’re confident enough to go out there and record the stuff you do on stage; which is difficult because live you’re doing it with effective echoes and reverb. Were you always striving to release some kind of live album or DVD?
Matt: Well, one of the bands we’re really into is Primus and their first album released here was „Suck on This“, which was live. So for that reason we were never afraid of doing a live album early on in the band’s life; almost all bands do one at the end when they’re fat and slow!
Zane: True, it’s always a way of writing out of your contract!
Matt: We wanted to show the side of the band that I still don’t think had been captured properly in an album situation. Also, I think the DVD format is on the rise so it’s a good chance to get our heads around surround sound, which will become more common.
Zane: I definitely want to talk about the DVD format (what you’ve done with it and how you’ve made it your own with „Hullabaloo“) but going back to the comparison with Primus; they can play their asses off and so can you guys but right at the beginning they could really, really play. Were you concerned when you decided to do this album that you’d go on stage and every sound might be off?
Matt: We were influenced by quite a contrast of bands, some technically proficient like Primus and some loose like Nirvana or Jimi Hendrix, so for us that’s an excuse to get away with stupid mistakes and say „It’s all about the feeling“. I think if you get too worried about the clinical, technical side you lose the soul element.
Zane: Yeah but you must have been worried about the twenty-eight cameras on stage when you walked on that night.
Dom: A lot of them were the size of lipsticks and stuck to Matt’s mike or my base drum pedal. There were few guys going around but it didn’t really bother us that much. We did two nights: The first night we were a little bit nervous but the second night was a little bit more relaxed.
Zane: From which night did you use the most material and was there a big difference in the performances?
Dom: We got the reels of tape and just listened to them objectively but most of it came from the second night. There were maybe two tracks from the first night.
Zane: Does the difference in the way you performed the songs surprise you? I imagine when you’re on stage it changes every night but when you sit down and compare one night with the other (with the aim of combining the two and creating one overall product) the differences must surprise you.
Matt: Yeah, the first night everything was done at light speed.
Dom: The second night was a bit more chilled out and in control.
Zane: That’s funny – in control? Muse? I thought that was part of the whole thing: The fact that there seems to be some kind of controlled chaos to what you do. Was that always the case when you guys started playing together? Did you always have that „anything could happen tonight“ feeling?
Matt: I think what we do is something you can’t really show to people in ordinary everyday circumstances so it’s a good excuse to get out all those violent tendencies that are hidden inside all of us, suppressed through gradual social conditioning.
Zane: But you had no excuse for spitting on Dom in Frankfurt when you were doing the Bush support – I remember that! I was on the other side of the stage and you walked up and just hacked on him.
Dom: I got twatted in the head by his guitar one night on the UK tour.
Matt: On the DVD there’s a second disc with a documentary on it which has a lot of other bits and bobs from around that touring period, there were a few shots of Dom getting injured by guitars flying at his head.
Dom: Chris jumping on top of me, that sort of thing.
Matt: There is one shot in there I’m very proud of. Our friend Tom filmed the whole documentary and there’s one shot where we’re smashing up the entire stage and he’s actually inside the drum kit being trashed, you get the feel of being there!
Zane: People say that it’s a cliché to go through that whole trashing motion now but it definitely seems like a spur of the moment thing. I saw Trail of Dead doing it recently and there was nothing cliché about it at all. It’s obviously just something that comes up.
Matt: It’s an element of the show that we don’t plan and it happens maybe one out of every five gigs but it’s again an excuse to do something you wouldn’t normally be able to do.
Zane: Do you have to warn your roadies about the fact that they may have to stay up till four in the morning putting guitars back together?
Matt: They have to learn to fix things pretty quickly!
Zane: Let’s talk about the DVD element ’cause this isn’t just a live album is it?
Matt: There are two discs. One is the gig with a few multi camera angles and there’s another disc which is the documentary of the tour and B-sides we’ve recorded over the last couple of years; there’s also an interactive discography, photos, things like that.
Zane: Nowadays anything goes with DVD technology and various artists like Super Furry Animals have proved that over the last few years. Did you let your mind run away with you in terms of what you can do or were you trying to restrain it?
Matt: I think we wanted to keep it as overblown as possible; that’s generally what we tend to do but there is only so much you can fit in so that was what made it into a more concise piece.
Zane: What percentage of the stuff on the „rockumentary“ didn’t make it onto the CD or DVD?
Matt: There’s a fair few pieces; lots of Dom naked.
Zane (laughing): Were there censorship issues over this whole thing?
Matt: There is actually a scene in there of a guy hanging a bass guitar off his dick.
Dom: We met this crazy freak-show guy who hung heavy objects off his genitals; quite a bit of that got cut out cos it was so fucking disgusting.
Matt: There were also various classic shots I took in night vision of Dom doing certain things after gigs but he swiftly removed them from the editing process.
Zane (laughing): So what goes on the road stays on the road! Looking at „Hullabaloo“ it could almost be a Greatest Hits in that all the singles are represented. Did you choose your tour set list with this release in mind?
Matt: That was just a set we were doing at the time. When you’re playing big crowds on tour they generally expect to hear the songs they know the most, so they’ve always got to be in the mix. Some tracks like „Dead Star“ and „In Your World“ were actually written on tour and have completely changed since we’ve been back in the studio.
Zane: In what sense?
Matt: Well, being in the studio we looked at them differently and approached them from a different angle.
Zane: So how are they different on the live album? You’ve obviously released them as a double A-side single to support this.
Matt: The singing and guitar parts are pretty much the same but the arrangements are a bit different; the drum in particular is more intense on the studio version.
Zane: When we caught up before you were using heavy hard rock and were working with Dave Bottrill. As you toured you came up with tracks like „In Your World“ and „Dead Star“, so you obviously continued with this thread.
Matt: Yeah, that’s why „Dead Star“ and „In Your World“ are coming out around the same time. It was written in the same period and could have been on that album. There’s a whole lot of new stuff we’re working on now which is going off in different directions.
Zane: So have you got that out of your system to an extent?
Matt: Yeah, that whole period was about getting that heavy side across, so now the next material will be extreme in other directions.
Zane: Why did you feel the need after “Showbiz“ to come out and kick down the door a little bit?
Matt: What was happening in the live situation was just so exciting we wanted to get that across in other aspects like radio and TV and we pushed for an album showing that live side.
Zane: „Plug In Baby“ seemed to open you up to a whole new audience. Were you just doing what was right for you at the time?
Dom: Definitely. If we had carried on down that „Unintended“ route we probably would have appealed to a middle of the road audience. „Origin Of Symmetry“ was much more live and full on, which appealed to a broader audience.
Matt: Maintaining individuality is very important and we could have very easily crashed in on the whole acoustic movement. I’ve easily got the ability to write that and a lot of „Origin Of Symmetry“ was written in that style; even „Citizen Erased“ and „Micro Cuts“ were really mellow tracks but the more we wrote the more we focussed on a live, heavy vibe.
Zane: Is that the result of playing as a band more? It must be more intimate to play on an acoustic guitar when you’re writing.
Matt: Absolutely. It’s not an area of music that I’m not into, I just didn’t want to take the ovious path that most bands seemed to be taking at that point. I wanted to build up something long-term and have a bit more freedom. If we had gone into that area it would have been very difficult to do the type of material we did on the last album.
Zane: How is touring different to „Showbiz“ now you have the benefit of hindsight?
Matt: We went from being quite loose and emotional on stage and not really in control to having real confidence on the second album where we became aware of the audience. I was very introverted and unaware of what people were thinking: I didn’t really care because i was very caught up in what we were before but in the second album songs like „Bliss“ were written as a way of reaching out to people and feeling like I could be out there myself. It was the first time I had a sense of really wanting to do something that I would want to see.
Zane: At the end of „Origin Of Symmetry“ could you have gone on touring for longer?
Dom: Well we’re still kinda finishing it off now. We’ve been touring for about three weeks in places we didn’t get to last year like Greece, Turkey, Scandinavia and Portugal.
Matt: And over the next few festivals we’ll be bringing in some brand new songs like we did in Dublin.
Zane: How was that?
Matt: Really good. We bought this new projection thing and did this strange interactive video. There was also a completely different stage set up where I’m in the middle. Everything’s completely changed on stage and when we came off we felt like it was the first gig of our lives. It worked but everything was so new again and we had new songs.; I found it really exciting and it’s like we’re doing something never seen before in our live shows.
Zane: You have to step it up really now don’t you considering you’re second to top on the main stage at Reading this year playing before the Foo Fighters. Will you improve on it even more as you get further into the festival?
Matt: Yeah, we’ve never done video projection before and this thing we’ve bought is meant to be the most cutting edge interactive piece of equipment. The lighting engineers can morph music into the music. Eventually we’ll be plugging video cameras into it ourselves and the new stage layout completely changes the way I move and feel on stage.
Zane: How much planning goes into this? Is it spur of the moment or do you really sit down and think of how to take it to the next level?
Dom: We’ve had four months off doing this DVD thing so we’ve had time to think about what we want to do. We definitely want to do something completely different, hence the new stage layout.
Zane: The exploding codpiece never sprung to mind?! Always a winner.
Matt: Actually someone made me a guitar with loads of lasers inside but I thought that was a bit on the edge.
Zane: This must be really exciting. Two albums into your career and with the live album coming out this is the point where you guys are about to embark on becoming a really huge band.
Matt: We always try to make changes to our live set up while we’re touring so that it’s all about getting into this new area we want to be in.
Zane: So you’ve been hanging out in Brighton, how long have you been writing the new material?
Matt: Pretty much on and off over the last six months, mostly in our place where we’ve been living in Brighton. It’s pretty diverse stuff ranging from the exceptionally dark and moody to the extremely uplifting which people would never have expected from us, like really uplifting which may sound cheesy but it does have a really positive, outreaching nature. It just feels comfortable as a three-piece right now whereas we were really pushing the limits of what a three-piece can do.
Zane: You’ve worked with a lot of producers namely John Cornfield and Dave Bottrill. Have you given any thought to anyone you might like to work with next?
Matt: It will definitely be someone we haven’t worked with before.
Zane: I like it that you always try to work with different people where a lot of people stick to the same engineer or mixer which sometimes gives a uniformity to their releases.
Dom: We’ve also always recorded the albums split up into sections; we used about four studios, did five tracks at once, then the remainig songs a couple of months down the line. It would be nice to go into one studio and do it all at once.
Matt: There is a possibility that we might actually record in the house in Brighton or hire another place and turn it into a studio. We might also approach someone like Dave Sardi or Brendan O’Brian.
Zane: Well, thanks for coming in guys; make sure you keep in touch and let us know how everything goes. We’ll have to come down when you’re recording and check it out.
Dom: Nice one, thanks a lot.
Matt: Cheers.