Muse’s headlining set on the Pyramid stage opens with a Big Brotherish figure shouting menacingly at the audience from the screens at either side of the stage. But it’s not always as subtle and nuanced as that. They are a band for whom everything is, metaphorically speaking, turned up to 11: the bass is invariably grinding and distorted, Matt Bellamy’s vocals tend to the mock-operatic, there are are a great deal of guitar solos that go widdly-woo, and a lot of complex, fiddly riffs that sound not unlike Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.
Their desire for grandiosity leads them to do things bands haven’t done in decades. At one juncture, the audience is favoured with what sounds suspiciously like a lengthy bass solo – something unseen in polite society since the pre-punk 70s – at another, a guitar with two necks makes an appearance. The visuals match the musical bombast: the screen at the back of the stage shows vast hands with strings attached to them, as if the band playing in front of them are puppets being manipulated; inflatable balls, streamers and confetti rain down on the audience, fireworks shoot into the sky.
There’s something impressive about the sheer breadth of influences they pull into their musical orbit – over the course of their set, you catch hints of everything from the galloping basslines of Iron Maiden’s Phantom of the Opera to Giorgio Moroderish electronic disco to bovver-booted glam stomp – and if there’s not exactly a great deal in the way of dynamic variety, they’re at their best when they furnish all the bluster and grandiloquence with choruses as vast as their ambitions: the lyrics of Supermassive Black Hole make it an unlikely candidate for a mass audience singalong – “glaciers melting in the dead of night and superstars sucked into the supermassive” – but it becomes one nonetheless.
At their least appealing, you’re struck by the creeping fear that all the stuff in the lyrics and on the screens about the New World Order and survivialism might not be entirely tongue-in-cheek – “No one’s going to take me alive, the time has come to make things right, you and I must fight for our rights,” bellows the chorus of Knights of Cydonia – and Muse start to bear a faintly dispiriting resemblance to Queen, had Freddie Mercury avidly consumed the collected works of David Icke. But there are other moments when it seems both knowingly preposterous and preposterously entertaining, the work of a band who’ve clearly been playing to audiences this huge for years, and have come to the conclusion that more is more. Singing along, letting off flares, the crowd seem to agree.
