I never dreamed about being in a limo or being backstage with loads of girls. I only visualised playing very well and enjoying it." He says that seeing the attention Hudson gets "definitely puts your world into perspective". Howard reckons that family life has made the singer "slightly more relaxed, but to me he's still as manic and weird and meticulous as he's always been". Because Muse's success rests on tours and albums rather than hits and headlines, they are not quite household names, so some viewers were doubtless puzzled during the Olympics closing ceremony by the trio's performance of Survival, a berserk, operatic anthem that seemed more appropriate to a supervillain than an athlete: "I won't forgive/ The vengeance is mine/ And I won't give in/ Because I choose to thrive." Bellamy admits that the song was already written when the organisers approached him. "It was definitely a bit more demented than I think they realised," he says with pleasure. Survival makes a lot more sense in the context of The 2nd Law , an album which encompasses the global economic crisis, peak oil theory, food security, evolution, the taxation proposals of 19th-century economist Henry George and the concept of the "stress nexus". "It's talking about the second law of thermodynamics and how, as a limited ecosystem, we are on the verge of needing an energy revolution in order to sustain the way that we're living," says Bellamy. "This inner strength we have, this desire to evolve and expand