Muse

I hadn't ever heard Cooper Temple Clause before… at some points early on I was getting 'prog' alarm bells going off in my head… but what first felt like a pending aural emergency ended up winning me over… I liked his voice, and I liked the music, and though the cavern-like acoustics of Brixton did their many-layered sound no favours, there certainly was wheat in amongst the boomy chaff. At one point they 'let off' an analogue synth that threatened to shake the house down… aye…. That's the spirit, chaps! Sometimes I do wonder , with this kind of grandiose synth- enhanced rock… if shaggy haired wannabe Stones and bootlegged Beatles was the 'old' retro…is 80's-esque music the New retro ??

Ok, Ok…guilty as charged Officer, I secretly came to see Muse, and I've been getting all excited. When I first came across them last year I was working, and it was hard to relax…but today… kick back and enjoy the ride…. At least that's my plan….

The lights go dark and there's the stage, scattered with flowers and candelabra, and walls of Marshalls bringing the spirit of rock and goddamn roll! …they opened with a song I hadn't heard before, a strange choice given that 'Newborn', which followed , is such a born opener…. So maybe my spiritual beginning to the set was then… 'cause it KICKED ass… and so the rollercoaster began… new songs interspersed with 'Showbiz' favourites… they rocked like b*d's!! Matt Bellamy… chorister, showman, guitar hero… giving it large from the starting line to the finish…. Dom and Chris the phat foundations, pillars holding up the roof of this temple while a small skinny man jumps up and down on it like a flea on a hot tin roof…. 'Unintended' makes my heart skip a beat…. And I feel a tear lining up to jump….then, without a gap, more tunes.. A musical adventure that ends with some customary guitar destruction…. But let's not mistake this for clichéd 'angst' … this is driven by the urge to ENTERTAIN, more like Nirvana's slapstick end-of set chaos… brought to a close by a dashing bow… How do I describe you, Matthew … you have all the showman's knowing grins, too-loud guitars and precocious talent of a certain Prince Rogers Nelson , but combined with that soaring voice that tonight reminded me of Midge Ure lost in Vienna …Tom Morello's earnest sonic experimentation has been overtaken… with a guitar that bristles with controls, you mutate into a scientist , Frankenstein raising his sinister creature with the power of electricity… …and lets look around Muse's castle for the day…. 'cause this is the finest lightshow I've seen in Brixton, maybe even better than the show Korn did, with three globes above the band, targeted by projections, making it seem like we're in a video…. lights probing us from the stage, linking us to the band with a cascade of beams, and a final barrage of six foot diameter balloons that made us feel like we are refugees from 'The Prisoner'

This wasn't a perfect Muse show… the industrial sounding kick drum was a bit too intrusive when everything was supposed to be soft, they weren't generally playing as tight as they need to and some of the experiments, like when 'Sunburn' became a keyboard-only area, didn't work quite as well as the originals… But maybe we should just anticipate the great shows later on in the tour, and the festivals… though Muse have some homework still to do, they're still the state of the art….

… maybe that'll be my lasting impression of the gig. This is the state of the art in rock at the moment, having the light and dark and shades of dynamics and instrumentation that's all missing in MTV metal…producing sounds that could only have happened TODAY, NOW… a benchmark for 2001 …. Catch them if you can…… 'cause they're WORTH it!