“You’ve got to have control over the creative side. If all you’re interested in is the music then you’re gonna get shafted”: 25 years on from the release of their debut, revisiting a 1999 interview with Muse
Muse always had the ambition and the mindset to become one of the UK’s biggest bands , even if the music wasn’t quite there yet when they started. It took their 2001 second album Origin Of Symmetry to show they could come up with the bombastic rock brilliance to match their grandiose plans but it their 1999 debut Showbiz did a necessary job in laying the groundwork. The album turns 25 next week – it was originally released on 7 September, 1999 – and an interview from the time demonstrates where Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dom Howard’s heads were at. They had their eye on the long game.
“People keep talking about stardom, but surely a lot of bands get that, and then the album comes out and it flops…The thing we’ve got is we’re aware of how it all works,” Bellamy told Rock Sound. “We’re hands on with the creative side, and we’ve learnt there’s so much more. There’s interviews and photos and artwork. In America the video is more important than the album and I sussed that out before we made any deals. I’m not interested in all the lawyers and meetings but you’ve got to have control over the creative side. If all you’re interested in is the music then you’re gonna get a bit shafted.”
Muse were about become synonymous with Bellamy’s histrionic falsetto, a singing style the frontman moved away from as they got deeper into their career, but the singer said he’d only recently discovered he could belt it out like that. “I’ve only started to sing properly in the last two years,” he explained. “I was whispering before and I’d had enough of people telling us we had to get a new singer. We wrote Cave and I realised the only way I could get that note was to give it some fucking nuts and it changed my vocal chords, doing that song at every gig. That changed the way I wrote songs.”
Bellamy also speculated on what might have happened if Muse hadn’t taken off in the way that they did, saying the waiting around and interviews on tour were fine with him compared to his previous mode of employment. “It’s more interesting than what I used to do – painting and decorating,” he explained, also revealing what he planned to do for a job before he decided to be a musician. “I wanted to be a paramilitary instructor, or a scuba diving instructor,” he said. “Something that was outside. I couldn’t do that nine to five thing.”
And now, as I have done, take five minutes to yourself and think about Matt Bellamy doing those three things. Matt Bellamy the painter and decorator. Matt Bellamy the paramilitary instructor (?) and Matt Bellamy the scuba diving instructor. Actually it might take more than five minutes.