Review: Muse in Munchen

Munich’s Olympiahalle is a 75,000-seat, oval-shaped auditorium with a massive pit in front of the stage.

On Friday 20th November 2009 the stadium was almost at maximum capacity. The few seats that weren’t occupied were those that were directly behind the stage.

The pit held around 3,500 people who mostly bopped, waved, shouted, screamed and – occasionally – got pulled out over the barriers, covered in blood, by the security staff.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s look at the whole evening.

Getting to the Olympiahalle is as easy as:

1. get on underground train in the centre of Munich
2. get off underground train at Olympiazentrum
3. walk for three minutes to the Olympiahalle
4. erm…
5. that’s it

With Teutonic efficiency we were brusquely ushered through the security check and on our way to our seats as the support – Biffy Clyro – fired up.

If I’m being honest I was bitterly disappointed with our seats. We were slightly behind the front-of-stage line and about 15m above it.

This meant that two of the Scottish Threesome (aka Biffy Clyro) – Simon Neal and James Johnston – were in front of us and never played (or acknowledged) our section of the crowd. We just couldn’t see the third member of the band.

It also meant that we had an unrestricted view of a huge canvass-covered gantry about 10m in front of us. But I’ll come back to that in a moment.

It takes a hell of a lot for three musicians to fill a superdome with music – and have it sound like good music, not like bad noise. To their credit Biffy Clyro did their very best. They showed the live audience a harder edge to their music than the side the mainstream radio audience has been getting; bare-chested rock-and-roll, folks, that’s what we got.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Biffy Clyro fan, more of a person who has, up until now, tolerated their work. But from now on I’ll be listening more carefully. They deserve that.

After what seemed like an inordinately long changeover things began to happen.

The air started to fill with pseudo-classical pleasantness, the lighting system began to breathe life in to the light/dark shadows and that big canvass-covered gantry in front of us? It flickered in to life and revealed itself as a many-layered projection surface.

As the music built to a curved climax the images sharpened to show a graphic of a man climbing a never-ending staircase and then the music FLARED in to our ears and the lighting almost BLINDED us and the sound of Muse throbbed loudly around the stadium and the canvass screen DROPPED to reveal it wasn’t a solid structure and there STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF US AND LEVEL WITH US AND BANGING HIS BASS GUITAR WAS CHRISTOPHER WOLSTENHOLME.

Calm down dear, it’s only a concert.

Suddenly, we had shifted from sitting in what were possibly the worst seats in the entire 75,000-seat stadium, to very close to the best seats in the house.

To be so close, it felt like within arm-reaching distance, to a group like Muse is to achieve what the front-row-dwellers aspire to but can never get; the security cordon and assorted bouncers (not to mention the increased height of the stage) will always get in the way. None of those obstacles got in our way.

The pit-inhabitants went mental as approximately 3,500 pairs of arms were raised stagewards and we sang, we *all* sang and as the lightshow quickly scaled superlatives as it chased the music, we sang our hearts out and we stood and we danced and…

And once again Muse put on a brilliant show. They threw themselves in to the performance; there was little chat but there were many instrument changes, alternating mood shifts and the crowd was carried upwards on the crest of each musical peak that Muse shouldn’t have been able to eclipse. But they did.

There was a commendable use of stage too; Matt and Chris did, now and then, switch sides when the podiums reverted to stage level. This obviously brought them closer to the sides of the arena but it also, for me, demonstrated the mobility that I have always associated with Muse’s live performances.

Yeah, mobility; they threw themselves in to it for us.

In the name of objectivity I have to say there was, for me, a flat spot in the night.

The United States of Eurasia is the most bum-suckingly awful musical work I have heard since my three-year-old daughter blew her first few notes in to a cracked, plastic, pre-school musical group recorder. It is unimaginative, derivative and just plain fucking horrible.

If we could persuade Matt Bellamy to drop it from the set list there really would be nothing to describe the experience, other than a lorry-load of superlatives. But with it nestling in there like a large bright pink glob of pus on a teenagers nose, it demands attention and, frankly, it’s difficult to leave the fucking thing alone, so I don’t; I sit here and tell you just how shit it is.

However, the shitness of United States of Eurasia was more than cancelled out by the feeling of highly-charged sexual arousal that surged around the stadium with the spine-tingling introduction to Hysteria.

As far as the musical content of the night goes, the set was finely balanced with a nice blend from past albums: Showbiz, Origin of Symmetry, Absolution, Black Holes and Revelations and, naturally, The Resistance.

I’d have to give the experience of the night a 9.2/10. I would have given Muse a 9.9/10 (and maybe a little more) if they hadn’t included The United States of Eurasia, really I would have!

The musical experience concluded with a healthily-long encore (but why did they make the crowd wait quite so long?), but the night didn’t end with the last few notes echoing around the Olympiahalle.

Oh no.

Along with the rest of the occupants of the venue we had to leave the stadium and get on to the underground back in to the centre of Munich. Do you know how difficult and unpleasant that was?

Not at all!

Seriously, there was no pushing, no shoving, no crowding, no random crowd impressions of tinned sardines. We joined our colleagues-in-music, walked to the station, got on the train and… there is nothing else to add.

So it wasn’t only a top musical night, it was a top night out.

The scores on the doors are:

Muse: 9.2/10
Olympiahalle/Munich 10/10

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