The world is constantly racing to catch up with Muse. Like some kind of musical super-intelligence, the three schoolmates from Teignmouth in Devon left less visionary acts dawdling in the blocks when, at the first strike of the 21st century, they began merging noir-ish synthpop, classical symphonics and space rock, bound up in sci-fi fantasies, conspiracy paranoia and quantum physics. Twenty million album sales later, they’re a stadium-destroying spectacle and a band that’s always at least half a decade ahead of its rabidly devoted fans. “The fanbase we have, there’s this time-lag where five years later they get it,” says frontman Matt Bellamy, sitting in a west London recording studio. “When we put ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ out, I remember there being a huge backlash. The first time we started playing that live, the crowd reaction was absolutely dead… the crowd would just stand there. [Then] ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, for a while, was the number one most streamed song in the UK in the last two or three years, and when we play it live it gets the best reaction, in the top three or four songs we have.” History repeats. Bellamy is addressing the more negative fan responses to the first…