It’s still a staggering spectacle. The band had wanted to fly blimps and satellites all over the shop but it was never necessary. What’s iconic is the image of these three small men absolutely owning this gigantic stadium. Wembley looks like a space telescope even without Muse’s lashings of satellite dishes and acrobats gliding across the sky suspended from giant white balloons. They do a damn fine job of convincing you they are about to fly off into the sky, and it’s this sense of sheer scale that ‘HAARP’ maybe can’t quite realise, simply because no film could. Muse have been like a spaceship circling pop consciousness for almost a decade now, but it’s still something to listen to the CD half of the HAARP package and be blown away by the range and quantity of hits they’ve racked up: the baroque melodrama of ‘Butterflies & Hurricanes’, ‘Supermassive Black Hole’’s sleek robopop, ‘Map Of The Problematique’’s Blade Runner-ish soundscapes, ‘Time Is Running Out’’s low-slung new wave, ‘New Born’’s neoclassical acrobatics and the DVD-only ‘Soldier’s Poem’’s, er, barbershop. The shows also saw rare dustings off of single ‘Unintended’, still the most heart-rending ballad moment the band have ever pulled off, and a nuke up the arse of those who would claim that Muse can’t do emotion.
