Muse, V Festival, Hylands Park

don’t play tracks from their first album anymore, and sometimes they can take the prog thing a bit too far. That’s it. That’s the grand total of what we can come up with when it comes to finding reasons not to place the Teignmouth trio as the Greatest Festival Headliners In The World. In the positive column; massive, stage dwarfing satellite dishes, laser light shows, giant robots, smoke and flames. That’s without even touching the music, too.

Matt Bellamy may be about three feet high when standing on his tippy toes, but his band are massive. So massive, in fact, that massive sounds really rather small when describing the size of the sound they produce. A three piece (four when live, granted) shouldn’t be able to create sounds so huge, and yet opener ‘Map Of The Problematique’ sounds like it’s about to engulf the entire planet, even if it does sound a bit like the title music to Casualty. ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ does exactly what it says on the tin, satisfyingly squelching its way through an extended guitar solo, while ‘Dead Star’ sounds positively anthemic for a track that often gets forgotten amongst the rapidly expanding lexicon of Muse.

‘New Born’ and ‘Butterflies And Hurricanes’ both bring the piano into play before Bellamy’s multi instrumental skills really come into the fore on ‘Feeling Good’ and ‘Space Dementia’, while ‘Time Is Running Out’ and ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ sound like they only surfaced for the first time yesterday.

It’s the encore that really shows how big Muse have become, though. ‘Starlight’ touches on the epic before ‘Plug In Baby’ sends things mental and ‘Knights Of Cydonia’ turns it all just plain silly.

There may be no ‘Sunburn’ or ‘Unintended’ these days, and even ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ centre point ‘Citizen Erased’ might be nice, but this is a true festival headliner’s set from a band who have created a body of work that, put together in the right way, is positively fearsome. Good luck to The Verve following this; quite frankly they’re going to look tiny.

Set List
‘Map Of The Problematique’
‘Supermassive Black Hole’
‘Dead Star’
‘New Born’
‘Hysteria’
‘Butterflies And Hurricanes’
‘Feeling Good’
‘Space Dementia’
‘Invincible’
‘Time Is Running Out’
‘Stockholm Syndrome’
‘Take A Bow’
‘Starlight’
‘Plug In Baby’
‘Knights Of Cydonia’