Muse were never going to settle for a life of Carling Apollos. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images
And the first band to announce a gig at the new 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium is ... surely not Muse? But it's true: assuming the place is ready by then, the cheerily bombastic Devon trio are scheduled to play the most high-profile show of their career at Wembley on June 16. Good luck to them, and all that, but ... since when are they big enough to headline the country's flagship stadium?
Muse just don't have the attributes of a stadium band. Wembley is where acts like Madonna and the Rolling Stones touch down to make contact with their UK subjects before helicoptering off to the next stop on their world tour. Muse, though, are anonymous chaps who are household names only in the houses of NME and Kerrang! readers. They haven't produced an OK Computer or Joshua Tree - a career-defining classic album - and, despite 7m record sales and a Brit award for best live act in 2005, they haven't registered in the wider consciousness. Could this be the first time a group has reached stadium magnitude entirely through music-press coverage and a reputation as a good live act?
Maybe it was inevitable that Muse would tackle Wembley - a band whose singles include Knights of Cydonia and Supermassive Black Hole were never going to settle for a life of Carling Apollos. Even in 1999, when I reviewed an early gig at a club in Newport, they had a predilection for epic, "Everest-scaling guitars", so it seems that the band are merely taking things to their logical conclusion. I just can't decide whether the ascent to super-gig status - with accompanying ticket prices and a sense of disconnection from fans seated half-a-mile from the stage - is a positive step. Can you?
