MUSE are Matthew
Bellamy (vocals, guitar, piano), Dominic Howard (drums) and Chris
Wolstenholme (bass, vocals)
A Best New Band Award in the 2000 NME Carling Premier Awards, plus nominations for Best New Band/Best Album at the Q Awards and Best New Band/Best Live Act at the Kerrang! Awards.
A notorious record deal with Madonna's Maverick label in the States and equally impressive regional deals right across Europe.
A string of successful singles, a debut album which has sold well over half a million copies world-wide, more than 50 festival appearances in the space of one summer and support tours with the likes of Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The facts speak for themselves.
But they don't come close to speaking for Muse. Nor does the fact that Muse have recently inherited Rage Against The Machine's road crew, or the fact that bass-player Chris Wolstenholme once played on stage with Status Quo (you really ought to ask him).
Or even the fact that singer/guitarist Matthew Bellamy can recite the alphabet backwards and beat-box like a B-boy. Nope, none of this comes close to speaking for Muse.
It barely whispers their worth. The only way to get your head around Muse is to get Muse around your head. Turn it on, turn it up and take in the full-throttle decadence until your arteries erupt and you run screaming from your home to paint your town red with blood.
Yup, that'll probably do it. But first, some more facts...
Muse are a rock band. A rock band who know that the meek never inherited anything. A rock band who do beauty, big and quality in quantity. Not like Slipknot. More like Queen - an eternally evolving everything.
A rock band who'll be still be around long after you've grown too old for rock music and started slipping on Berlioz requiems instead. And yet, oddly enough, a rock band who rather enjoy Berlioz requiems themselves. And any band from Belgium.
A rock band who dream of the genetically-designed, organo-synthetic suits which will one day send them into space.
A rock band who believe there is a hidden symmetry in all chaos; who have adopted sleek, pure scientific theories as their own personal religion.
And a rock band who came into being after Matthew began accompanying the invocational wailings of three local witches on guitar (again, you really ought to ask).
Not Limp Bizkit, then.
It started with a diss. A diss to the local music scene which saw the band (then called Rocket Baby Dolls, which was at least better than the previous names, Gothic Plague and Fixed Penalty) come up against a host of fret-wanking Jamiroq-wannabes in a regional Battle Of The Bands contest.
We came out looking insane wearing weird make-up recalls Matthew. "We caused a real scene, smashed up all the gear - just to take the piss out of the whole competition.
"It was supposed to be a protest, a statement. So, when we actually won, it was a real shock. A massive shock. After that, we started taking ourselves seriously. "
Taking themselves seriously meant Matthew ditching the run of jobs which had barely kept his head above water or paid the rent on his flat above a porn shop.
Goodbye to cleaning shit out of the toilets at a local campsite. Goodbye to the demolition and decorating job.
And, eventually, goodbye to the South Devonshire town of Teignmouth, the place to which Matthew, Chris and drummer Dominic Howard had all relocated a decade earlier, after leaving their respective hometowns of Cambridge, Manchester and Rotherham.
And hello to Muse, their band. "I remember a medium talking about muses, "says Matthew, "How you could summon up muses when you were at a very spiritual point in your life. And... well, I suppose I summoned up this band."
Stage one, you'll know about. Just prior to signing a deal with Taste Media, Muse released two extremely limited EPs via Dangerous Records, 'Muse' and 'Muscle Museum' - ten songs which combined rage and grace like absolutely nothing had before.
Ten songs which devastated everyone lucky enough to hear them, shocked them into a stupor of desperate enthusiasm, that rare, rare feeling that if you didn't see this band soon you'd look back upon your entire youth as a waste.
Inevitably, those early shows (including triumphant appearances at 1998' s 'In The City' festival and New York's CMJ) were even better than the EPs had promised - the gasping, spitting wails of oversized babies clinging to umbilical guitar leads, squeezing their way out of tiny venues and into the limelight.
Those were ecstatic times, the chance to spend a filthy, sweaty night with something way out of your league, and all for three quid and your bus fare home.
After that came more record deals, and a string of singles across the world.
In UK terms, that meant the stalking, Hispanic bitch-slap of 'Uno', the
pent-up catastrophe of 'Cave', the nauseated recoil of 'Muscle Museum',
the fluttering crisis of 'Sunburn', the fragile, co-dependent self-doubt
of 'Unintended' and a final re-release of 'Muscle Museum'.
And, of course, a debut album: 'Showbiz', produced by John Leckie (Radiohead, Stone Roses, The Verve) and hailed by critics as one of the finest albums of the year.
You've probably played it at a party. And received some very strange looks. Next time, buy some Steps.
Then something happened. Muse toured the USA with Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in early 2000 and Matthew changed unrecognisably.
"That tour reminded me what it felt like when we started out," he recalls. "I started running around the stage, having a laugh. That totally changed the way we played live."
More goodbyes then. Goodbye little British indie band. Goodbye inhibitions. Goodbye to being a small time small town small turn.
And hello to painfully exciting shows, shows where all three members of Muse would end up heaped on top of each of in a sprawling butcher's window mess of limbs and hair, where audiences left the venue dazed and dribbling, where the only thing not to get smashed on-stage would be the world land-speed record (though put Matthew in a car and he'd often take a stab at that, too).
And hello to Matthew's suddenly looking like a Smash Martian's sinister little brother, dressed in a different shade of black or red each day; eyes boggling to keep track with his thoughts, mouth shooting off about pure mathematics and corrupt fantasies and man's evolution from spiders and the tenth dimension and swimming with sharks and flying on air currents and this and that and this again, no don't you understand, this, this, this, I mean this, get it? Get it? Right, good.
Hello to the finest, fieriest rock star we have today. Hello, in short, to Muse mark II, which begins with...
"You know
how it would be really cool if we could genetically engineer puppies that never
grow old? 'Plug In Baby' is about that." - Matthew
Bellamy, 2001
...'Plug In Baby', the first taste of the Muse you never, ever expected. Someone described it as 'Elvis swallowing asteroids'. Looking back, he's not entirely sure he did the song justice.
It's galactic music, a mechanical animus, laser-guided pop. Built round a coiling riff that's part Bach and a maniacal vocal that's all bite, 'Plug In Baby' is unquestionably Muse's strongest, rawest, most frenzied single to date.
And, produced by David Bottrill (Tool, A Perfect Circle and Deus), it might just put a few ropey nu-metallers in their place, too.
Matthew says: "Maybe we're looking at that kind of music and thinking: It's all getting watered down and losing purpose, Let's go and do it properly.
"We've always played heavy music, but this next moment, this next album is going to be all about that."
Except, of course, it's not. As well as the unapologetic, "out and out metal" which sprung from their session with David Bottrill at Ridge Farm near Gatwick, Muse's second album promises everything from "pure opera" to "sexy disco" to "voodoo gamalan", courtesy of further sessions with John Leckie at Real World Studios in Bath and Pink Floyd's floating studio on the Thames.
The album is going to be different. Extraordinarily different. "if you had to generalise," says Matthew, "I'd say we are definitely louder, heavier, better - but that's a sweeping generalisation.
"There's new songs which will surprise everyone, songs which come from a totally different angle. We're choosing to do something a bit more special, to bring out music that's totally new and challenging. Fashion will have to come to us."
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