Muse at Wembley – thoughts of a living atheist

Stadium rock is a genre I’ve avoided in a concert going career that began with the Stranglers in the Ulster Hall in 1978. I may need to re-think this aversion. Wembley stadium I’m told is used by the English soccerball team. Apparently it’s a sport with a large underground following but it’s got a great venue for this sort of music.

Muse are bombastic, operatic, melodramatic, deafening and prodigiously brilliant live. They worked the space to terrific effect. The three of them, backed said singer Matt Bellamy by a crew of 80, filled the huge stadium in a way you couldn’t have imagined. All through their set videos and random images were projected on a huge, clear screen. I’ve got a feeling we were being given subliminal messages to go to a record shop tomorrow and buy cds of challenging Finnish avant-garde composers and prepare for the arrival of our alien overlord from a distant galaxy. I’d like to be wrong but that was the aesthetic of the evening. At one point they had two people attached to large ballons floating over the audience doing a type of balletic trapeze dance. I feel a career change nearing.

Their audience is a funny demographic. On my left for part of the evening was a group of white van drivers who spent most of their time swearing at each other and doing that homoerotic playfighting with lots of mutual groping that teenage boys do. They seem to have prepared for the evening by getting coked up and learning Homer Simpson’s dance routines to impress the ladies. The ladies had the good sense to be unimpressed. On the other hand I overheard a conversation about “drinking a shameful amount of champagne in Cannes and being part of the largest hostile business takeover ever”. Rock n’ roll!

My advice is that Muse are probably the best live act on the circuit at the minute and any chance to see them should be seized immediately. Here are videos of Supermassive Black Hole in which the band sings about a visit to Romford and Plug in Baby.