The stuff I’m into is early 19th and 20th century where it’s pushing the extremes of the instruments of the time.” I’m influenced by a fair bit of classical music, but when I say that, people think of Mozart, and I hate Mozart. “I played piano, but I didn’t start progressing until after Showbiz. “I’ve tried to push myself to learn new things, be it on an instrument or whatever,” he said. The latter’s leap into ivory-tinkling hyperspace was the result of some back-to-the-drawing-board thinking from Matt. Certainly there weren’t any other albums that year that contained a sci-fi pop Top 20 hit ( Plug In Baby) a brooding, hymnal monolith played on the largest church organ in Europe ( Megalomania) and what sounded like the universe exploding inside a Steinway ( Space Dementia). The new sounds were kicked off by a song called New Born, which provided a neat handle for Muse’s collective mindset and increased success. During sessions, producer John Leckie recalled how he had nicknamed one of the Showbiz numbers as ‘the blues song’ only for a puzzled Matt to reply, “why do you call that the ‘blues song’? What is ‘blues’?” The fact that his father George was a member of 60s surf-psych outfit The Tornados who had a No.1 hit with the Joe Meek-produced Telstar, or that his childhood was spent in front of an Ouija board provided as much or as little clue as each other. As it was, the singer, who boasted only a C-grade in music A-level, preferred to make his own music rather than listen to other people’s and struggled with simple genre terms. With a self-taught musical ability verging on the virtuosic, Bellamy seemed like the kind of supernerd wunderkind that would be able to reel off catalogue numbers of the obscurest of bands ad infinitum. “If you document everything, you can lose your grip on what’s relevant/irrelevant.”). “You can have endless ideas, but you’ll probably only remember the ones that were good,” explained Matt. Yet from the white-hot fret-lunacy that erupted halfway through album opener Sunburn, to the Mediterranean lilt of Muscle Museum, the Radiohead-inflected Unintended or the pomp and glory of closer Hate This (And I’ll Love You), the record showcased a burgeoning vision of rock expression delivered with far more eloquence and proficiency than three lads from a small Devonshire seaside town, barely out of their teens, had the right to be (impressively, Muse wrote songs solely from memory rather than demo. Despite the myriad combinations of musical notes available, too many bands have been content to put them through the most standard of groupings.
The warning came early enough with the release of their debut full-length, Showbiz, in 1999. But while endless column inches have been dedicated to documenting the trio’s Herculean achievements, from spotty Teignmouth teens to stadium-stuffing titans, finding out where it all comes from has been a slightly trickier business. All interchangeable entities in Museworld. Where a song could mean a multi-faceted prog meltdown as much as a three-minute pop hit, where instruments could mean guitars as much as they meant animal bones or bubble wrap, and where recording studio could mean mixing desk as much as it meant a swimming pool, or indeed, the lav.
This is a band, after all, who have spent much of their career demanding the impossible from the most improbable of situations. Or that the fruit of such sessions, according to frontman Matt Bellamy, is likely to see the album heading for Classic FM, rather than Radio 1 reception. It probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to learn that Muse have previously posted online footage of themselves recording part of their fifth album, The Resistance, in a toilet.
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