Muse: Pomp and Circumstance

Photograph by Alexei Hay

It's midnight on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and the apple-cheeked guitarist in the baggy tank top doesn't know what's coming. "Yeah, we've got another show in Brooklyn in a couple days," brags Apple Cheeks to Dominic, a skinny blond Englishman in a black leather jacket. It's early summer and the two are standing outside the front door of a small club/bakery called Cake Shop. The musician's band finished playing a few minutes ago, and he's still feeling flush. The sidewalk is lousy with well-appointed degenerates who look as though they've also got another show in Brooklyn in a couple days.

"We're playing a place called Bruar Falls," he says, arching his eyebrows above his thick glasses. "I'm pretty sure we're headlining." Bruar Falls is the size of a rich man's bathroom.

Dominic looks up from his iPhone. "My band's playing New York. Not till September, though."

Apple Cheeks isn't impressed. "Oh really?" he asks. "Where?"

A goofy grin spreads across Dominic's face. "Giants Stadium."

Apple Cheeks' jaw goes slack. "Wh -- what band are you in?"

If all goes according to plan, Yankee obliviousness toward Muse is about to change. In their native England, drummer Dominic Howard, 31, guitarist-singer Matt Bellamy, 31, and bassist Chris Wolstenholme, 30, have assumed the role of geeked-out rock Übermenschen. Proggier than Queen and heavier than Radiohead (a frequent, if irksome, comparison) and with a vocalist who graduated summa cum louder from the Jeff Buckley school of keening angels, the trio has a gift for dour prophecy and bombast (both on record and onstage) that has made them one of the U.K.'s most popular bands. In 2007, 140,000 punters crammed into two sold-out gigs at London's Wembley Stadium. Equally immodest crowds witnessed headlining sets at the Glastonbury, Leeds, and Reading festivals. Eighty-five thousand tickets for a November tour of the U.K. disappeared in less than 30 minutes. Their last two studio efforts, 2003's Absolution and 2006's Black Holes & Revelations, have sold five million copies worldwide. And barring an act of God or Michael Jackson dying again, The Resistance, the band's fifth album, will easily top the U.K. chart upon its release this month. (Critical adoration, however, typically pales comparatively.)

In America, though, largely due to an early transatlantic stumble, Muse are still catching up. Here, Absolution and Black Holes were certified gold, selling a combined 1.3 million copies, with the latter reaching No. 9 on the Billboard albums chart. In 2007, the band filled arenas on both coasts, selling out the Forum in L.A. and Madison Square Garden in New York City. The leap to American enormodomes continues September 24, when Muse open the first of nine dates on U2's current tour, which, as Apple Cheeks now knows, includes Giants Stadium. (Or, as Howard innocently referred to it, "The place where the Yankees play.")

The band from tiny Teignmouth in southwest England is threatening to break in America in a way that no British band has done since Coldplay. This is not an accident.

"I expect Muse to be a long-running arena act," says Tom Whalley, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., the band's U.S. label. "I understand that it's hard for a young act to do that nowadays, but they've already shown they have the potential, both in terms of album sales and concert success. So we're going to do all we can to keep growing their career. We believe that this band can be as big as it wants to be."

Which, explains Bellamy, is really, really big: "We'd like to be remembered amongst the best bands in the history of rock. It's necessary to have sustained success in this country for that to happen. But we've got a lot of work to do. We're perceived differently here."

Or, as Howard puts it, "We're the biggest band America doesn't know anything about."

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