Super massive
Muse prepares for an extravagant tour experience
How to describe the latest tour by British band Muse? “It’s just gonna be mental, I think,” drummer Dom Howard. “It’s gonna be like a crazy, theatrical, otherworldly rock concert experience of some kind.” Intrigued? We are.
Shortly after Muse came off the Drones World Tour, which found them flying actual drones over the audience, the U.K. rockers’ tour director Glen Rowe shared his dreams of doing something even more adventurous the next time out while speaking at a music conference in London.
“We want to do a stage made of magnets,” he said, “so the band can levitate on other magnets.”
So we ask Dom Howard whether there’s some element of levitation going on in Muse’s Simulation Theory World Tour, which launches Friday, Feb. 22, in Houston.
“Well, he’s said a lot of things,” Howard says with a laugh when reminded of Rowe’s comments.
“I mean, quantum levitation is not quite user-friendly enough yet for mass viewing. Maybe one day. Unfortunately, in the world of concerts, people are still relying on wires and pulleys.”
They’re still a week out from rehearsals when the drummer phones from London to discuss the tour.
“It’s just gonna be mental, I think,” Howard says with a laugh. “It’s gonna be like a crazy, theatrical, otherworldly rock concert experience of some kind.”
At first, they were thinking of stripping it down a bit, he says. “But actually, it feels like it’s gone even further, even more extravagant than before in many ways. It’s just so different from the last tour that I can’t wait to get it up and running.”
The show will incorporate other performers, Howard says, including singers, musicians and “physical performers,” as he puts it.
“We wanted to move away from just a band playing on stage with a screen in the background playing a bunch of stuff on it, which is something we just feel like everyone seems to be doing these days,” he says.
“We wanted to have more people, more performers with us on stage and have the whole thing be more theatrical. And yet have this bit more humanity in the show rather than just tech, which is kind of what the last tour was about.”
The Drones Tour was great, Howard says. “But it felt like an ominous tech invasion on your senses, whereas this one, we want it to feel more like a celebration of humanity that also sort of transports you to a different universe in some ways.”
With a laugh, Howard add, “That’s a really weird explanation of what we’re gonna do, but that’s how I imagine it to be. It’s just gonna be so different than anything we’ve done before. But it’s still gonna be a big rock show.”
The Simulation Theory World Tour is named for Muse’s latest album, whose synth-heavy sound was inspired in part by the movies they screened while recording.
“We were often projecting movies onto a big screen, either in the control
“It’s just gonna be so different than anything we’ve done before.” Dom Howard on the latest Muse tour
room or on the wall in the studio,” Howard says, “just for a bit of atmosphere. And we ended up certainly watching but also reconnecting with a bunch of movies we used to enjoy when we were a lot younger.”
That meant lots of horror movies and science-fiction classics, from John Carpenter’s “The Thing” to “Blade Runner.”
“It started off just us having that playing in the background as we were recording and dipping in and out of it as we were working on the music,” Howard says. “And it just generally started to remind us of our youth and some of the first music that we were exposed to and actually got into as younger people. And it started creeping its way into the album and actually helped shape the sound of the album. Then it kind of opens a wormhole and you’re off. You get sucked in and you kind of discover the direction that you want to take the music.”
Singer-guitarist Matt Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and Howard were still in high school when they connected over their shared love of ‘90s alternative.
“A lot of Seattle stuff,” Howard says. “And Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden even. A lot of that heavy American rock music of the early ‘90s had a big impact. And then, I think we started rediscovering a lot of your earlier influences as kids and I think that’s when the film music starts coming back in.”
You can hear that in the evolution of their sound, he says.
“We started off quite simple and quite raw. And then after the first few albums, we started reconnecting with film music and I think the sound of the band became more and more experimental and more epic the more influences we incorporated into it.”
Howard feels the ’80s science-fiction films they screened while working on the album also had an impact on the lyrical themes they explored.
“Those ’80s visions of the future were really quite something,” he says.
The title track was inspired, he says, by humanity’s current obsession with technology.
“Everyone is so wrapped up in their own technological world. We’re all guilty of it, typically. Not everyone but a lot of people are in modern culture. We’re close to being in a simulated world anyway. And then the idea of what simulation theory actually is, an actual theory that once computer power becomes so great and fast enough, we can actually create a simulation of the universe.”
Howard pauses, then adds, “Who’s to say we’re not actually in one right now? The resolution just needs to be high enough for it to feel real.”
The inspiration of those ‘80s science-fiction classics also seeped into the album cover, brilliantly designed by “Stranger Things” artist Kyle Lambert.
“It just felt like the right time to do that kind of album cover,” Howard says.
“Number one, I’ve wanted to do something like that for years. I’ve often said, ‘Hey why don’t we try to do this kind of film poster thing for the album artwork?’ And I’ve never got the idea approved. It’s always been like, ‘Nah, not right.’ And I think this time around, it seemed to fit because we’d made a series of videos before the album came out and we started to develop this whole different kind of visual world, this simulated world within the videos.”
There were quite a few dominant characters in those videos, so it only made sense to put them in the album art, thereby completing the impression that it’s all just one big movie. Lambert, of course, was a natural fit. “To be honest,” Howard says, “I was aware of Kyle’s artwork and just thought he was the man to do it. So we got in contact with him and he was like, ‘Yeah, cool.’ We wanted it to have a scifi, slightly dystopian feeling to it but also very neon. And he kind of nailed it.”