Muse head towards rock's major league

By ALEXIA LOUNDRAS

Julien looks fit to burst. The young Frenchman throws his arms up in the air and explodes: "C'est fantastique!" He is trying to explain what he feels for Muse - the band that 16,000 excited French fans have come to see play tonight in Lyon.

Muse have a big following in Europe, especially in France. Since last year's release of their third album, Absolution, their profile has rocketed and the album has sold nearly a million copies - reaching the top of the British charts and continuing the band's ascent into the major league.

Tonight in Lyon, Muse arrive on stage to a hero's welcome. And despite it being the biggest gig of their career, the band more than live up to it, with their thundering sound and hugely theatrical performance - punctuated by rippling spacecraft lights, choreographed films and giant balloons.

Frontman Matt Bellamy darts between his keyboard and stage-front guitar like a man possessed. The equally crazed crowd throw themselves about, electrified by the pulsing force of the music, a clashing thing made up of classical piano, razor-edged guitar rock and stalking basslines from the trio of Bellamy, drummer Dominic Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme.

In the past, Muse were dismissed by the British music press as sub-Radiohead wannabes.

They were derided for their over-the-top, pretentious musical tendencies. And rightly so. Muse's debut, 1999's Showbiz, and their 2001 follow-up, Origin of Symmetry, overflowed with pomp and unrealised ambition.

Even their critics, however, had to admit that Muse's wedding of the grandiosity of classical piano with the excesses of epic rock had a certain nerve. And the bold and confident Absolution is evidence of the band hitting their stride: Muse have come of age.

Three days after the Lyon gig and Muse's touring menagerie has moved on to balmy Barcelona.

As we wander the winding medieval alleys of the old city's Barri Gothic, the frontman discusses the previous day's promotional duties.

"Looking back, it really wasn't the coolest choice," says the impish Bellamy. The band had flown out to Madrid to play the single Time is Running Out on a TV pop show. Muse hadn't realised they'd be performing to a studio audience of pre-teens.

"I ended up playing completely differently - really happy and smiley, trying to make the song sound light-hearted," says Bellamy.

In the event he succeeded only in terrifying the mites: trying to pull off a knee-slide - a performance staple for him - he hurtled head-first into the young crowd.

Bellamy has always been portrayed by the music press as something of a sci-fi-loving eccentric, a serious and hyper-intense crank obsessed with space, evolution and religion.

His interest in the books of Zecharia Sitchin - who claims humans are an alien/ape genetic mix - is often cited in support of this "oddball frontman" theory. Not surprisingly, the singer often feels misrepresented.

"I don't think it's unusual to talk about these bigger things," he says. "But journalists exaggerate what I say. When the piece comes out in print, what I've said to them looks like it's meant as a series of statements, as opposed to a conversation."

The band are definitely enjoying what Bellamy calls "the more touristy side of touring". Although still in their mid-20s, they have put their wild days behind them.

In the past, their tours could be reckless affairs. Long periods of "relatively non-stop touring" gradually took their toll and, as Bellamy admits, "you start to lose it".

Muse dealt with it by living out the on-the-road cliche: working their way through groupies, partying excessively and, when gigs went badly - which in their exhausted state happened frequently - trashing their equipment.

Having for the most part put such excesses behind them, this time around Muse are enjoying the experience of being on tour. And, in a concerted effort to make sure the gig/tour bus/gig treadmill doesn't get to them, they've traded in those rampages for a touch of culture.

In Nuremberg they used their day off to visit the war museum. In Florence they took up the mayor's offer of a trip to his palace. And in a few days they plan to visit Figueres to check out Salvador Dali's house.

All very civilised. Muse, it seems, have grown up. "Yeah, it feels like we have," agrees Howard, settling into the dark-wood benches of a bustling cantina. He explains that their transformation didn't happen overnight but took place over the period of their first and second albums.

Because of their intense schedules it wasn't until Muse finished touring Origin of Symmetry and returned home that the band realised they - and their priorities - had changed.

Wolstenholme has just had his third child with his long-term partner, and both Howard and Bellamy are in relationships.

And, as Absolution proves, their music has benefited from this emotional development. Bellamy's lyrics show that he's finally prepared to invest something of himself in his songs.

"I think maturity is when you are no longer embarrassed," he says, staring intently at the crayfish in his paella. "In the past, I would never have sung anything as revealing as a love song, but I've gradually evolved into wanting to share something in some way with other people - showing inner fears and hopes. And it feels nice to do so. It makes you feel ... " he pauses, searching for the right words, "not alone."

"The sound of our music has always been more important than the lyrics," admits Bellamy. Muse music has always exhibited great care in putting disparate musical elements alongside each other, rather like the way early Roxy Music did in another era.

Bellamy is a huge rock fan, but he's also passionate about Romantic piano composers. When he talks about his favourites - Debussy, Rachmaninov, Berlioz and Chopin - he glows with excitement.

He also professes to taking inspiration from European folk music, for its "vigorous energy and passion", as well as the 16th-century choral music of Palestrina.

And although this might sound horribly pretentious on paper, the actual effect is hugely powerful. Muse's music delivers a massive explosion of surging noise where elegant flourishes cut through the sound of the stormy wired guitars to stunning effect. "It's nice to try to create something that is in some way larger," says Bellamy.

If he needed further encouragement to create something larger, Muse couldn't have picked a better place to visit than Barcelona's wondrous Sagrada Familia, the Modernista-movement cathedral designed by the visionary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.

Like the sound of Muse's music, this place is vast. Bellamy loves it. From the moment we arrive at the landmark, he's squeezing between tourists to read about Gaudi's botanical inspirations and marvelling at how the architect was allowed to get away with such flamboyance.

When the time comes to leave, he is genuinely disappointed that we haven't seen the crypt in which Gaudi is buried. He consoles himself with a book about the Sagrada Familia from the gift shop and leafs through it during the taxi ride to Razmatazz, tonight's venue.

Bellamy is, I suspect, drawn to the higher sense of purpose manifest in the buildings of a profoundly religious man who believed that his work was communicating directly with God.

It's the same sense of unwavering faith that he finds in his favourite composers and that makes their music so powerful.

And although unsure if God exists, he hopes to inject a similar passion and other-worldly feeling into his own music.

"I do love rock music, but when I hear that Romantic stuff, it sounds like the meaning of life," he says, passionately. "It's as though the composers were using the peak of their intelligence to express the deepest of emotions. And this gives me hope.

"When I hear choirs singing that Palestrina stuff, I think, there is a God - there is a heaven!"

Five hours later, and Razmatazz is heaving. If the Lyon show was impressive on a huge arena scale, the effect of Muse's tides of brain-scrambling noise on those crammed into this dingy cavern is bigger, bolder and nothing short of exhilarating.

With performances this good, it's not surprising the band are determined to remember the experience. After the show, Muse are still fired up from the gig.

As they stand about, chatting and blending Baileys with banana smoothies, the conversation turns back to the cathedral. Beautiful, grandiose and unapologetically extravagant, the cathedral demands respect for its bold ambition. Bellamy may not realise it, but the same could be said about Muse.

- INDEPENDENT

BDO Performance

* What: Big Day Out, Ericsson Stadium, today* Who: Muse, British rock band

* Where & When: Blue stage (main stadium), 6.30pm to 7.30pm

* On CD: Third album Absolution is out now

* nzherald.co.nz will feature updates throughout the day from the Big Day Out beginning at 12pm on Friday.