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muse live in oslo 2009
Muse on stage in Oslo, 25 October 2009. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

Ever since the early days of Muse, frontman Matt Bellamy and drummer Dom Howard have shared a running joke about success. Before each major concert, each step up the ladder, Bellamy turns to Howard and says: "Is this it? Have we made it yet?" Every time, the drummer shakes his head and replies: "Not yet. Nearly."

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Muse's unabashed hunger for megastardom is unique among British bands of the post-indie era, who tend to reject it (Radiohead), blow it (Oasis) or be pathologically humble about it (Coldplay). Muse, however, never flinch at excess. Only health and safety thwarted their plans to dangle acrobats from a helicopter over Wembley Stadium in 2007. Their forthcoming tour in support of sixth album The 2nd Law will find them playing beneath an inverted pyramid of LED screens: an upside-down version of the "all-seeing eye" beloved of conspiracy theorists. "It's turning the power structure of the world on its head," Howard says matter-of-factly.

Muse have sold more than 15m albums. Their last one, 2009's The Resistance, was No 1 in 19 countries. Like Depeche Mode in the 1980s, they are taken more seriously outside their homeland, in countries where people are less likely to arch an eyebrow at songs with rococo arrangements and titles such as Exogenesis: Symphony Part 2 (Cross-Pollination). Since releasing their debut album, Showbiz, in 1999, the trio from Teignmouth, Devon have made their quixotically ambitious music a global concern by touring longer, farther and harder than anybody else. They used to say yes to everything, working themselves to exhaustion and becoming, says Howard, "cynical and weird". Success has bought them a saner work-life balance.

I meet Bellamy, Howard and bass-player Chris Wolstenholme separately during breaks in tour rehearsals at north London's Air Studios. When they made The Resistance each of them was living in a different country but this time they're all based in or near London, although Bellamy and Howard also have homes in Los Angeles. The singer is engaged to the actress Kate Hudson, which makes him future son-in-law to Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and the couple have a one-year-old son, Bingham Hawn Bellamy, whose foetal heartbeat is sampled on the new album's dubstep-disco-U2 monster Follow Me.

So by any measure 34-year-old Bellamy is a star, but he doesn't have the aura of one. His sharp features and stick-figure frame jangle with a wary, wiry intensity and he talks quickly, with many nervous giggles. If you didn't know what he did, you might assume he was a talented software programmer with a small fortune in Silicon Valley stock options.

"On stage it's easy," he says. "There's something about the audience and the energy that takes you to this place. I have trouble being like that when I'm not on stage. I tend to be a bit quiet – a touch avoidant, y'know? I think you do get what you visualise. 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 and explore, I do love that about humanity. At the same time it's scary what it does on a global scale. I'm very much caught between the two." Bellamy is self-aware enough to have considered the quandary of criticising overconsumption while traversing the globe in a gas-guzzling stadium rock band. "Exactly! We're all a function of the world. I think for every finger you point out there should be three pointing back at you."

You don't get this kind of stuff from the Kings of Leon, but then Muse have been putting grand ideas into their records for years now. Black Holes and Revelations, the 2006 album which broke them in the US, was in part a bilious condemnation of the architects of the Iraq war while The Resistance was an us-vs-them concept album heavily inspired by Nineteen-Eighty-Four. (They dismiss as "complete nonsense" a recent $3.5m claim that it was plagiarised from US songwriter Charles Bollfrass.) I suspect Bellamy's politics are often overlooked because (a) he has never aligned himself with a specific cause and (b) he frames them in such a blockbuster manner that people assume he's joking – which, he insists, he is not. "I don't think our records contain obvious humour," he says, a touch defensively. "We're not cracking gags."

A few years ago, Bellamy's reading list was more outré. He often recommended that interviewers imbibe the wisdom of David Icke, although even he admitted the theory about the royal family being alien lizard people was a little too ripe. "I was getting very drawn into obscure conspiracy theories," he concedes. "As time's moved on I've become far more rational and empirical and I've managed to focus on slightly more realistic, tangible things."

It's a wise move. Muse were taken aback when The Resistance was embraced by swivel-eyed Fox News demagogue Glenn Beck ("the lyrics are just dead-on [about] what's coming our way") and the single Uprising began soundtracking YouTube clips produced by the kind of people who believe climate change is a socialist conspiracy and Obama is an Indonesian Muslim. (Conservative attention seems to run in the family: Bellamy's father George used to play rhythm guitar in the Tornados, whose 1962 chart-topper Telstar was one of Margaret Thatcher's Desert Island Discs choices.)

"In the US the conspiracy theory subculture has been hijacked by the right to try to take down people like Obama and put forward right-wing libertarianism," Bellamy agrees. He defines himself as "a left-leaning libertarian – more in the realm of Noam Chomsky. It doesn't all have to be about guns and land protection, y'know? So yeah, I do find it weird. Uprising was requested by so many politicians in America for use in their rallies and we turned them down on a regular basis."

Bellamy's motives as a lyricist aren't polemical but personal, even therapeutic. "When I dabble in watching the news and reading about current events I tend to get a future negative view and that's something I've dealt with through music. It's quite possible I'm slightly paranoid." A giggle. "But I'd say making music is an expression of feelings of helplessness and lack of control that I think a lot of people can relate to."

His songwriting stems from the belief that music can transform and transcend the everyday. "I remember the first classical music I heard, Berlioz and Chopin– it did something to me that I still can't put into words. It's a sense of timelessness. It's something to do with the whole condition of life and death and time. It somehow makes all those things connect." He's full of wonder when he talks about music, but laughs neurotically whenever I mention fame or ambition. "Dom's the one to speak to about ambition," he says. "I think basically the band's career is me trying to please Dom."

Dom Howard is Muse's unflappable rock pro: the free-and-single, up-all-night one who uses the phrase "rocking out" without reservation. "Even when we were sitting around in Matt's nan's basement writing songs we'd be dreaming of headlining the main stage at Reading," he says. "We've always had our sights set on being the biggest band in the world." He laughs, because it's an unfashionable thing to say these days, but not that hard, because he means it. "Still going for it. Why not? If you're going to do it, do it properly."

Before they wanted to be the biggest band in the world, Muse simply wanted to be bigger than Doctor Frank, a funk covers band from Teignmouth. "They were the local heroes: the big boys with their posh instruments," says Wolstenholme, remembering Muse's first "battle of the bands" show in 1994. "There wasn't much of an original music scene in Devon and when we started we realised why – because nobody wanted to watch original music. We played gigs to nobody."

Here are the roots of Muse's unusual tenacity. For a long time they had no supportive scene, no wise mentor, no industry connections. Bellamy, a gifted musician but naturally shy, only reluctantly became singer and chief songwriter because "nobody wanted to join our band". They played gigs for five years before releasing Showbiz and even then Bellamy struggled as frontman. "It wasn't as fun as I thought it would be," he says. "The songs were a bit moody. When you're having to play them every night it can be a bit draining."

He had an epiphany during Muse's first concert in Japan. Maddened by the audience's lethargy, he thought "fuck it" and executed a corny knee slide while shouting "Come on!" "They suddenly went mental," he remembers, smiling. "I thought: if I act stupid and have fun the crowd likes it. That's when we stopped taking it seriously."

Muse have had many "fuck it" moments, becoming more fearlessly flamboyant each time. When I ask bassist Chris Wolstenholme if he's ever thought, in the studio, that a Muse song was too ridiculous he replies, half-jokingly: "Probably every song we've ever done [is]. You can go on writing traditional pop-rock songs and get stale or try something new. There are risks either way." Howard cheerfully says, "I love the excessiveness of the whole thing. I love Survival for that. You could say the choir's too much but you know what? It makes it. I like pushing it as far as we can."

It's always an achievement for a band to retain its original line-up on the long and tricky path from youth clubs to stadiums. It's especially remarkable when one band member trod most of that path as an alcoholic. If you had to guess which one you'd choose the neurotic singer or hard-partying drummer over Wolstenholme, an affable family man who has the names of his wife and four of his six children tattooed in various languages on his arms and, until recently, still lived in Teignmouth. He is so untouched by fame that the other dads at school only found out he was in Muse while talking in the pub after playing football and went home to google him to check he wasn't making it up.

But there's a genetic precedent: his father, a pub landlord, drank himself to death when he was 40. Wolstenholme combines rock-solid blokiness with the compulsive candour of someone who has undergone rehab. Only his nervous hand-rubbing betrays the weirdness of discussing the worst experience of his life with a stranger.

His drinking began in earnest when Muse's career first took off and he was away from his family for as long as two months at a time. As the band grew so did his intake, until he was knocking back a pint of spirits, two bottles of wine and countless beers a day. It seems inconceivable that, for several years, nobody but his wife realised there was a problem. "I kept my guard up," he says. "I was quite crafty about how I drank and where I did it. Matt and Dom probably didn't realise how bad it was because I wasn't a nasty drunk. I didn't cause anybody any problems. I just retreated."

"For some reason he could still play the bass, even though he was shitfaced," says Howard. "It went wrong literally two or three times in 10 years, which is nothing." Eventually, however, it became unignorable. "He was drinking on stage," says Howard. "I started counting how many drinks he was having during the set and I could see him getting more and more glazed. By the point we came off stage he'd be fucked. It just got too weird."

Did they give him ultimatums? "Yeah, a few times. Chris now says things like, I can't believe they put up with me for 10 years. Which is true. I can't believe we did. But we did. I've always believed in band integrity and sticking together. There's something about the fact we all grew up together. We've been together for 18 years now, which is over half our lives." Asked what difference Wolstenholme's sobriety has made to the band, he says simply: "It's given us a future."

During 2008 Wolstenholme developed panic attacks. "You drink more to cover the anxiety and then the drink triggers more anxiety and you find yourself in this cycle of hell, basically." On April Fool's Day 2009, after a particularly bad period, he "had a bit of a meltdown and that was it. I made a decision". The hardest part, he says, was confronting all the difficult emotions he had spent so long submerging. "Everything I should have dealt with in the previous 10 years suddenly hit me in the face. There are some things I regret. There are probably moments I should have enjoyed more than I did and that's a bit upsetting. With the mess I was in you don't feel any intense emotion any more. You're just subdued all the time. But the upside of that is I'm enjoying it now. I threw myself into music in a way I hadn't done for 10 years. It sounds corny but it was the only thing that made me feel peaceful."

Previously unable to finish a song, Wolstenholme wrote two about his condition, Save Me and Liquid State, for The 2nd Law. Bellamy compositions such as Madness and Big Freeze are also unusually personal. Together, they suggest a quieter, more intimate Muse. Bigger-is-better escalation has got them this far but you wonder how much further they can push it without toppling into absurdity. I put it to Bellamy by quoting a track from The 2nd Law: "An economy based on endless growth is unsustainable."

"It's a funny one," he says thoughtfully. "As you asked that question, I realised for the first time there's a link between that and the political moments I'm talking about. If there's not an energy revolution we'll have to devolve and live a simpler lifestyle. In Muse, in our music and political things, we're striving for that not to be the case but knowing that we have to change. So yeah, I do want to expand on the subtler, quieter side of the band. Maybe go to a farm in Devon, live off the land, get out the acoustics and go full devolution." He laughs self-consciously. "But I have said that before."

It's an intriguing idea, this downsized Abel & Cole version of rock's most expansionist band, but Bellamy has no time to dwell on it now. He's been summoned back to rehearsals and leaves the room to address the pressing business of touring the world with an upside-down LED pyramid.

The 2nd Law is released on 1 October on Warners

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