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Muse face legal action in Australia and could be banned from the country for five years after lighting up during a concert in Melbourne.

Bassist Christopher Wolstenholme smoked several cigarettes during the gig at the Ron Laver Arena on 14 December, say reports. He apparently initially tried to hide his actions by only puffing when dry ice fog rolled over the stage, but by the end was smoking freely between songs.

A spokewoman for the venue said Muse were warned before the gig not to light up. “Officials spoke to the band before and after the show and we were extremely disappointed when they decided to flaunt our strict no-smoking policy,” Jo Juler said. “They are known as an anti-establishment style of performance group, but it was still sad that they decided to go ahead regardless.”

Officials were also angry that Matt Bellamy encouraged fans to “mosh out” during the set, a direct violation of the venue’s strict rules. Moshing is banned in the country following the death of a teenage girl during Limp Bizkit’s set at the Big Day Out festival in 2001.

A local gig promoter told The Sun that the band now faced a potential five-year ban: “These guys will never be allowed to perform again in Australia if they try it again. Doesn't matter how hot they are. The law is the law. Promoters won't get insurance for them – simple as that.”

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Shit!! Allt detta endast för att Chris rökte och Matt uppmanade till moshpit.... XD

MUSE <3

Q: Is it true this Muse tour is making its way to Australia by boat?

A: Well, the gear is. I'm tempted to come by boat, but I think I might get bored after three weeks at sea.

Q: How would you describe the production?

A: It'll definitely be the biggest production we've ever done in Australia by a long way. In terms of indoor arena concerts, it's probably the most expensive production we've ever done, bringing that whole thing to Australia - now you can understand why the boats are getting involved.

Q: What is the concept?

A: The idea is 1984, George Orwell, utilitarian buildings with the band playing within them. We're playing in these structures which puts us in quite a distant position from the audience, it's like we're trapped away up in this building, but then partway through the gig it comes down and it pretty much just becomes a regular rock show.

Q: Has anyone fallen out of the building yet?

A: No one's fallen yet, but we've had loads of Spinal Tap moments. The worst show was in LA, it all went tits up. The platforms we're playing on have got these curtain-sock things around the outside, which get released and show we're there. This time one of them got caught and pulled all my guitars off the platform and broke all my guitars. That was the first thing that went wrong. The second was that Chris's (Wolstenholme, bassist) one didn't come down - we played the whole of the first song, Uprising, and no one could see Chris.

Q: Does this Australian tour mark the end of your album The Resistance?

A: Pretty much. We're talking about doing a couple of bits next year, but not really touring. We've missed out Moscow, so we might do a gig in Moscow at some point. We might play one festival. U2 - we might do a tour with them in South America.

Q: You played Where the Streets Have No Name with The Edge at Glastonbury this year ...

A: It's one of my favourite songs, it was great to get the chance to sing it. I couldn't really work out the guitar part so it was great to have The Edge there playing it. I love the way he plays guitar, it's really different.

Q: Did The Edge return the compliment about your guitar skills?

A: He said a couple of nice things, but I think he just said it to be nice. He's like me - we're into effects pedals and trying to make the guitar sound like something other than the guitar. So we connected on that area.

Q: Jay-Z raved about Muse's set at Coachella this year. Did he tell you how much he loved it?

A: I met him briefly and the first thing he wanted to know about was Devon, which is where we're from. He's friends with Chris Martin, the singer from Coldplay - not many people know Chris is from Devon as well, he's from the place where I went to college. Jay-Z connected on that - he went, "What's going on down in Devon?

A: Devon must be a really cool place". I felt like saying, "Yeah, come over for a cup of tea and check out the sheep and cows" (laughs). It was quite funny that from his point of view it seems like Devon is a happening place, when it's actually a bit of a rural backwater, really - in a good way!

Q: At the Big Day Out in January you said it was time to buy a tractor and disappear to a farm. Is that still on the agenda?

A: Yeah, I've become a sheep farmer. I'm serious, I've got 50 ewes and two rams. As we speak, I'm letting the rams loose on the ewes. I got the sheep mainly because I've got a farm which has got a lot of steep hills, so the grass gets out of control unless you can get grazing animals in there, and it was too steep for cows. I've got Dorset Downs, they're pretty hardy, they can handle the weather.

Q: So you're seriously a farmer now!A: Yeah, I don't bulls---! They're shearing sheep. But the main thing is they keep the land together. I don't live there, it's just land with a couple of jaded barns that need to be renovated. It's a nice place to camp. My long-term plan is to grow industrial hemp for making paper and material, but I haven't got 'round to that. When I stop touring I'm going to hang around there for a while and start shearing sheep.

Q: If you thought about making new music right now, what direction would Muse go?

A: It's too early to say. I like the idea for the next album for all three of us to be living in the same place. It's been a long time since we all lived in the same place, basically when we were in Devon years ago. The last album I was in Italy and those guys came over to stay there for a bit. I like the idea of us all being able to go around each other's house for a jam, not taking it so seriously, getting back to how it was when it first started. So we're trying to agree on an area to live in.

Q: You'll be married by the time the band gets around to making a new album. Well, that's what the gossip mags say.

A: Oh I've got no idea what you're talking about (laughs). No idea at all.

Q: You're tabloid fodder since you started dating Kate Hudson. Are you feeling intruded-upon?

A: Erm, I don't notice it really. It's less invasive than I thought it would be, d'you know what I mean?

A: You hear those people that whinge about it all, but what I've seen it's not that bad.

Q: Is it also that you're so happy with your relationship, who cares if there's a photographer over there?

A: That's definitely part of it, yeah. When you're in a good place you don't really care about all that other stuff.

Q: When you tour with U2, you must get a good lesson in how a band keeps it together for 30 years, let alone 10.

A: Those guys were partying hardcore (laughs). I was impressed. They've given me hope for my late-40s. I don't remember partying that hard in my mid-20s. We were going through a period where we'd been a bit more laid-back, but those guys, they were raging! I remember thinking, "Whoa, maybe the late-40s are not so bad!" (laughs).

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MUSE <3

Andrew Murfett

Muse frontman Matt Bellamy is no stranger to grandiose visions - and neither is his music.

MATT Bellamy likes the drama. You can hear it in the melodramatic music of his band, Muse. You can see it in the pomp and theatre of their visceral live shows. And, if you were to be snide, you could say his dating of actor Kate Hudson is further evidence.

The 32-year-old is, of course, frontman and songwriter-in-chief for one of the biggest bands in the world. The English trio - Bellamy, drummer Dominic Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme - met as teenagers in Devon and have expanded their fan base with each of their five albums.

Initially dismissed as ''Radiohead-lite'', since their 1999 debut Showbiz, each Muse album has had more pomp, campness and sheer liberty than its predecessor.

In conversation, the diminutive Bellamy is polite and relatively modest. He is a little diffident in explaining the creation of the 15-minute, three-part centrepiece that defined Muse's 2009 blockbuster album, The Resistance.

What Muse have become and the role Bellamy has played in that requires something more than a polite phone manner and faux modesty, however. And it's telling that as a child, Bellamy experienced what he thought at the time were random dreams. In these, he could graphically see himself playing on the big stages of the world, headlining huge stadium gigs. Today, he can vividly recall being 18 and thinking about holding court on the stage of a stadium. Doesn't every music fan have those dreams?

''Yes but when they come true, you look back and think about it,'' he says. ''You think, is the dream seeing the future or just having the confidence, believing in it and just making it happen? It's weird. I so clearly saw some things that actually happened, certain concerts and moments, and I felt like I knew that was going to happen. It was either arrogance or predicting the future.''

The Resistance, a massive commercial success, divided critics. A common query - aside from whether Bellamy is bonkers - is whether he is, in fact, taking the piss. The album features an orchestra, operatic tracks and air-combat sound effects. There are tales of civil unrest, the rise of a shadowy superpower and the so-called cowardly resistance to corporatisation. Oh and a love story: a romantic narrative transforms into a reflection on life, using love as a key to escaping the world's problems at large.

''I like the album,'' he says. ''It's got some very different things on it and they seemed to work.''

Much of the album was written in the throes of England's current economic crisis. Bellamy's London flat is close to the US embassy and he would watch each week as the protests grew larger and larger.

It also motivated him to revisit George Orwell's 1984 novel, the first time he had read it since high school. In fact, Resistance was based on the book's narrative; the theme was a love story against a backdrop of civil unrest.

''That definitely had an impact,'' he says. ''There was a sense of uprising and a feeling that people might crack. Like what happened in Greece, for example. England was quite close to that. There was a feeling that it was time to rise up against the bankers and politicians and make change.''

The Resistance did not generate the hit singles of previous Muse albums. It did, however, help the band grow their fan base.

This past European summer, the band headlined nine stadium shows, averaging crowds of about 70,000. They have closed stages at Wembley, Stade de France, Coachella and Glastonbury, where Muse were set to face off against U2 before Bono's back ailment put paid to the Irish rockers' headlining performance.

''I was nervous,'' Bellamy says. ''When we found out U2 weren't playing, I thought I'd get Edge involved and do a U2 tribute, because a lot of the crowd bought their tickets expecting to see U2. I was blown away that he was into the idea.''

Bellamy says the band also learnt from their slots supporting U2 last year.

''A lot of bands treat the people they work with like shit,'' he says. ''U2 don't do that. We're more like that with our crew now.''

He also studied U2's stagecraft. This coming tour, for instance, will be Muse's first experience of playing in the round at arenas.

Bellamy's mind began to wander as they toured with U2. Could Muse cope with being as big as the Irish superstars? You adapt, sure. But to play a show every night in which the band pushes itself emotionally and also ups its showmanship is daunting.

''I'd be into it for sure,'' he says. ''I've always been one where we have to rise to different challenges as a band every year. You raise the bar and go with it. You think it might all go wrong but often you want to even prove yourself wrong.''

There's also the small matter of proving others wrong. Like, say, Bellamy's infatuation with conspiracy theories.

When you write a song that explores ''megalomaniacal'' foreign policy makers that he believes view the world as a chessboard to be manoeuvred, you have to be prepared for some blowback.

''From day one, we've had screaming, negative abuse and everything in between,'' he says. ''If you let that influence you, you start to let it affect your writing and then it's not coming from a real place.''

Daunting to follow up?

''All our albums have done a bit better than the one before. It's been gradual. This album did well but it wasn't like our debut was massive and everything is in its shadow. So none of those fears ever come.''

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