Move over ELO and P-Funk, Muse is cooking up their own out-of-this-world stage prop for their upcoming winter U.K./European tour. Singer Matt Bellamy revealed in an interview with NME that the power rock trio are going back to the future for the outing in support of their just-released 10th studio album, The Wow! Signal, with dreams of pioneering new laser techniques and building a traveling mothership.
“We’re trying to build a spaceship – as you do,” Bellamy said of the plot to land the ship in arenas later this year. “The quote came in and it’s more expensive than some of these houses [in Primrose Hill], and that’s saying something around here. We’re trying to work with that, build a spaceship, do some new stuff with lasers that’s never been done before, and yeah, it will be a classic. It’s going to be more in the space, sci-fi realm, which I think is cool for us.”
Fans of the veteran band are probably not surprised about the rocket ride Muse have planned for them considering that singer/guitarist Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard have long filled their live shows with eye-popping laser, massive pryo, drones and elaborate, space-age staging.
Describing his hopes for the spacecraft, Bellamy said the trio is “trying to make it fly,” though financial considerations may ground that dream. “I don’t think it will,” he said about the prohibitively high cost of the prop taking flight. “That’s the thing that costs more than a house, but it will be something cool, I promise.”
NME noted that the spaceship prop is in tune with the title of the new album, which was inspired by an enduring interstellar mystery: a powerful, unexplained 72-second burst of radio sound detected by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977 that originated in the Sagittarius constellation and whose bandwidth and intensity suggested it may have come from an extraterrestrial source.
The U.K./European tour is slated to kick off on Nov. 12 in Manchester, England and run through a Dec. 8 show in Zurich, Switzerland. U.S. fans, however, will have to make do with a more stripped-back presentation fitted to the amphitheaters the band will play beginning on Thursday (July 2) at Summerfest in Milwaukee.
“It’s the only viable summer tour in America that’s outdoors unless you’re at stadium level, which we’re not in the U.S.,” Bellamy said. “It’s in between arena and stadium size, but the issue is you can’t do the craziest production.”
