Muse’s Matt Bellamy talks conspiracy theories and music making, with Andy Welsh

WHATEVER you do, don’t call Matt Bellamy eccentric. He’s just caught a glimpse of a prestigious music magazine, of which he adorns this month’s cover, and he knows what they’ve written before he even turns to the article.

“‘Matt’s an oddball’, ‘Matt’s paranoid’ is it?” asks the Muse frontman, who is playing a sell-out gig at the Echo Arena in November.

Well, kind of, comes the meek response.

“It’s always the same and it’s boring,” he adds. “The thing is, I was talking to them about other stuff that’s much more interesting and serious; constitutional reform, how we should change the way we vote for the Prime Minister and that sort of thing. But no, they’re more interested in lizards,” he says, coming to the end of his mini, if well-mannered, rant.

You see, Matt’s very interested in conspiracy theories, whether they’re concerning the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, America secretly running the world or, as he says, the idea, once peddled by ex-Coventry goalkeeper-turned-professional-crackpot David Icke, that our very own Queen and other world leaders are related to a secret race of shape-shifting reptiles from the Alpha Draconis star system.

That doesn’t mean he believes them, though.

“I’m not so interested in them now, but I definitely was,” begins the 31-year-old, having just been handed a double espresso. As if he needed fuel for his fire. Even as he’s being absorbed by the oversized soft furnishings of his hotel suite, Matt is hugely energetic; bouncing around, changing topic at the drop of a hat or going into great detail to explain what he thinks.

“Conspiracy always stinks of paranoia, but I am genuinely interested in researching the mechanisms behind powerful organisations. I feel I missed so much at school, and there are so many things I want to know, but they weren’t taught to me.

“Be-cause of that, and because I watch the news and see these things going on in front of me, I’m drawn to research. That can take you down weird paths, towards conspiracy theories and wacky ideas, but that doesn’t mean I believe them,” he continues, unstoppable.

“You can find loads of stuff about 9/11 on the internet, and it’s interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct, or that there’s enough of it to make a conclusion. I think believing something that’s completely unproven is the beginning of madness – you can look at religion that way, too. I’d just say I’m a devout rational thinker, or at least trying to be one, unless something is solidly proven.

“But it doesn’t matter how much I talk about that sort of thing,” he says, drawing to a close on the subject. “People just want to hear about the lizards.”