Someday, when you hear a story about the members of Muse being injured in a terrible levitation accident, remember this day as the point where it all went wrong for Matt Bellamy and the boys. That’s because, according to Music Week (via Pitchfork), Muse is currently looking for someone who can build a stage out of magnets that will levitate the band while it performs—in other words, complete and utter madness. Specifically, Muse’s tour director Glen Rowe has put the call out for “any magnet technicians” who might be able to harness the power of magnetism and make Muse fly like Michael Fassbender in an X-Men movie.
To Rowe’s credit, he seems to be joking a little bit—at least, he’s aware of how insane the idea is. “It’s those questions that keep me awake every night of my life,” he says regarding the magnet stage, adding that the band also once asked for “a huge UFO that was going to spit out a trapeze artist” while they were touring behind Black Holes & Revelations in 2007. He thought it was a “drunken, throwaway comment” that he’d never have to deal with, but the next day he got an email from Muse reminding him about the trapeze UFO. “I spent months of my life figuring out how to do that,” he notes.
So maybe the issue here isn’t that Rowe is a madman trying to test the limits of theatricality, but that Muse is a group of crazy people who won’t be satisfied until they’re literally playing “Starlight” while flying through space. Although, in the band’s defense, Kanye West’s Life Of Pablo tour did feature him being carried through the air on a flying stage, so there clearly is a bit of an arms race going on here.