‘`So what do you think of Muse?’` she asks.
The sun is setting above the trees to the left of the stage, the sky tinged with orange.
‘`I like their first album,’` I reply. ‘`It’s like Jeff Buckley’s third album, had he not, you know.’`
She smiles at that. She likes that record a lot; doesn’t care for anything after that.
We’re waiting for the band to start. We missed whatever support there was ‘` Americans in suits playing generic punk from the sound of it ‘` and now, like twenty or thirty thousand others, we’re waiting for Muse to come on stage.
I check my watch, and it’s time for her to go; we agree to meet afterwards.
I stand on my own, and look around. The people in the audience fall neatly into two camps. First, there’s the casual music fan, who’ll gladly pay money to stand in a field or room and drink whilst watching some band with a hit record, like Muse and ‘`Supermassive Black Hole’. The other camp… Ah, the other camp. The sort of person who loves Muse ‘` very distinct from the first camp ‘` when I was at school, that person loved the Smashing Pumpkins. Fragile little people, carving out an identity through angsty music. It could be any number of other bands, depending on the time, from Mansun to the Manics, from Placebo to The Cure.
The lights go up; the crowd surges forward in anticipation. A bird flies away from the stage, high up. I’m hanging back, keeping a distance; a couple stand a few metres in front of me, definitely in the first camp, her towering over him and joke hitting him with her bag as they wait. The band appear on stage, three discrete individuals ‘` rock star singer and rock star guitarist in one black leathered body, tall bassist in bad summer clothes with bad back-combed hair, and drummer.
They play a song off their new album which sounds like the theme from Black Beauty or like that Pixies song that does. They play that song ‘`Hysteria’; the metal-classical bass riff getting huge recognition. They play ‘`Supermassive Black Hole’, the slick r’n’b mixed up with metal guitar falling flat live; the couple in front dance ‘` this is the song they want to hear, this is the song they’ve spent £50 to see ‘` they mouth the words at each other.
Then she reappears. They play a song off the first album ‘` she grins recognition to me, but it’s the one song we don’t like. Frustrated, we retreat, and sit in the grandstand, watching the small ants on the stage, the music washing over us live, the wind blowing the sound all over the place.
There are songs I recognise and like – ‘`Apocalypse Please’ and ‘`Plug In Baby’, the only other hit in their repertoire, which gets the crowd jumping.
I tell her my thoughts about the two sets of fans, and she agrees. We both say that Muse are the ultimate school band; show-off guitarist that’s played guitar in his room since he was 12, teaches his best friend to play his basslines, and they get a drummer.
‘`So what do you think?’` I ask her.
The sun is down by this point, it’s dark; the only light is the stage.
‘`I still like their first album,’` she says. ‘`Apart from that song they played.’`
I laugh at that.
