Photo: Renaud Philippe
The band that closes a festival like The Festival D’Ete in Quebec needs to be something very special indeed. When you are up to entertain an audience that has seen The Who, Metallica and Gorillaz on this stage, simply turning up and phoning it in won’t cut it. That’s why getting Muse up for the last showdown is such a smart move – this band has no idea how to produce anything an inch below their top level, and they simply can’t be anything but a force of nature as a live show.
Three men with a guitar, a bass and a drum kit can make some seriously impressive noise – ask Motorhead – and if you add a couple of extra people in for your live turn-outs, as Muse do, then really you can easily hammer home your material, especially if you can enjoy probably the best live outdoor sound anywhere in the world.
The notion of pacing themselves is something Muse don’t appear to have heard of – by the end of ‘Psycho’, Bellamy has shown the audience the back of his studs-and-chains jacket while he forces his guitar into a violent interface with his amplifier cabinet (the cabinet loses and falls over under the weight of attack) before slinging his axe into the mosh pit. And we’re only two songs into the set!
Having thundered their way through ‘Interlude’, Bellamy is liberating his inner-Hendrix, flossing his teeth with his guitar strings and letting lose some chest cavity-threatening feedback in the process. Yet for all the media labels of ‘progressive’ ‘symphonic’ ‘space rock’ and all those other efforts to pigeonhole Muse’s sound, this is pure pop, but it’s pop with big boots on.
“You’re free to touch the sky, while I am crushed and pulverized,” croons Bellamy, looking and sounding anything but as ‘Dead Inside’ makes its way through the collective consciousness of the Quebec faithful. Bellamy looks deliriously happy as he decides to go walk-about down the barriered-off cable tracks across the arena ground. He’s having great fun, hugging and kissing, and stopping to sign homemade poster and cardboard sign adorations for the lucky few.
‘Time Is Running Out’ is not only a song, but also a statement of fact, as the last act in this most wonderfully OTT rock-out hits the top with explosions of confetti and streamers. ‘Uprising’ continues to make deeply incised holes in the labels Muse are burdened with by the media, and for those who know their pop history this is a glam rock rhythm, with Muse delighting in its endless primal appeal to the senses.
The final week of Quebec’s fiftieth Festival D’Ete has seen the cream of music’s stadium elite come out to play, and the achievement of creating and sustaining such a wonderful feast of musical and cultural heritage for the city has been worthy of the anniversary. Muse needed to come and cap everything that had gone before, to send the people home happy, and looking forward to 2018. And they did. You should seriously consider coming out to join them next year.
