Three notable British eccentrics, my favorite kind of people:
Screaming Lord Sutch – if we’re going to talk about monster raving loonies, where better to start than the original Loony himself, the founder of the U.K.'s Official Monster Raving Loony Party? Although he ended up a fringe politician/performance artist, he started out as a musician, with songs like “Jack the Ripper”, and continued making music throughout his political “career”.
Jaz Coleman, composer, producer, songwriter, singer, genre-hopping global-music genius (specialties: post-punk, metal, industrial, Czech folk, Arabic, Maori, and contemporary symphonic), and former frontman of the English rock group Killing Joke. Jaz is obsessed with the spectre of global eco-political-economic collapse (and right now it’s admittedly hard to dismiss his fears outright), has founded two self-sustaining “eco-villages” in the South Pacific and Chile, and has a book coming out soon about music and living in a self-sufficient style without money. I’ve read off-Wiki that he’s largely retired now to his own tiny, private island 100 miles off the coast of New Zealand. I’m not sure if he’s one of those island (or barge or platform-owning) kooks who claims an individual national sovereignty, but he’s pretty independent-minded and probably doesn’t pay taxes to anyone. (Well, he is trying to live without money, after all.) It wouldn’t surprise me if he has half his land covered with solar panels so he can live a modern life off the grid, but I’m just guessing.
Matt Bellamy, current frontman [singer, gtr., piano, and sole songwriter] for the band Muse. Tagged “Barmy Bellamy” and “Barking Mad Bellamy” by rock critics, Bellamy is known for his forthright defense of conspiracy theorizing as a necessary populist bulwark against the monopolizing of information by governments and media conglomerates. (I have to admit I agree with the basic concern over media access, but a better response to that concern is the citizen-journalist-blogger, not c-theorists per say.)
But Bellamy has apparently also drunk the conspiracy authors’ Flavor Aid, saying in interviews that he believes that mankind is descended from Martian colonists, that 9-11 was perpetrated by the U.S. government, and that he can communicate with the spirits of the dead. There’s a decent chance he was actually B.S.ing (or, as the Brits would put it, taking the piss out of) some of these interviewers, and he has a reputation for saying some other outrageous things. (No one’s ever been able to get a straight answer from Matt about what the lyrics to “Plug In Baby” really mean; once he said it was about puppies genetically engineered to never grow up. I think the best theory is that it’s his love song to his favorite guitar… but since he was 'shrooms when he wrote it, it probably doesn’t really mean anything.) Nevertheless, the Muse discography is punctuated by lots of songs with weirdly apocalyptic and outer-space themes: alien signals and invasions, civil war on Mars, astronauts with cabin fever, etc.
Other eccentric Bellamy tidbits: one of the first things he splurged on when the band started to make money was… a jet pack. As in James Bond, You Only Live Twice, strap it on when you need to make a quick getaway… only Matt’s jet pack has a propeller. (I can only hope he doesn’t get himself killed with it.) And he used to trace his veins in blue ink… it wasn’t a heroin thing (he occasionally does mushrooms, but supposedly never anything else), he just liked doing it.
And he’s had more than his share of outlandish hairstyles, flamboyant costumes and metrosexual outfits, and generally doesn’t shy from acting in ways (like skipping across stages… how many American rockers would be caught dead skipping? Strutting, yes, running, yes, but never skipping) that feed speculative rumors about his sexuality. The thing is, he’s engaged to his girlfriend of six years, so if he’s really straight or mostly straight (and I believe he is; for one thing, there was that incident from maybe a couple of years ago when he apparently tried to pick up the mother of one of the **Arctic Monkeys **in a bar… while that band was also there), he’s unusually comfortable with projecting the whole sexual ambiguity thing. (As are his bandmates, who are similarly accomodating.)