Muse announced their return to the UK with a relatively intimate performance at Camden’s Roundhouse. For a band used to the grandiose surroundings of Wembley Stadium and the San Siro, a show in front of 3,000 competition winners was a rare treat for fans who had queued for hours just to get a place in the crowd.
With a new album just about to be released, this marked their first UK show of the new touring cycle, and just over a year after their appearance at Reading and Leeds.
Opening with new falsetto-infused album track ‘Supremacy’, the trio performed a sixteen song set taking tracks from their last five albums.
With this as only their second live appearance, mistakes were to be expected, but perhaps not in quite the frequency that Matt Bellamy produced them inamongst his prancing across the wide Roundhouse stage.
Despite the various errors, highlights included a number of new tracks which came to life compared to the studio versions, particularly Nero-produced ‘Follow Me’, whilst old favourite ‘Time Is Running Out’, which frontman Bellamy introduced by saying “Check out this dubstep bassline from 2003”.
Certainly The 2nd Law showed that the rumours of a dubstep concept album were false, but the influence is clear.
Fan favourites ‘Knights of Cydonia’ and ‘New Born’ came towards the end of the evening, although perhaps the biggest cheers of the evening came for live-staple ‘Plug in Baby’, which Bellamy led the crowd into a mass sing-a-long, after yet another mistake.
The gig closed with Olympics anthem ‘Survival’, a fitting ending to their first show in the nation’s capital since the summer games, leaving the sweating, heaving crowd satisfied.
If their new tracks were anything to go by, Muse are back after a blip, and in spite a couple of mistakes in this performance.