Interviews: Muse

Rock Sound talk to Muse bassist Chris Wolstenholme about the band's career and new album 'The Resistance'.

Posted Monday, 7 September 2009 in

Muse Rock Sound recently caught up with Muse bassist Chris Wolstenholme to talk about the band, their success and their cracking new album 'The Resistance', check the chat out below…

Five albums into your career, where do you find the inspiration to keep making music that's so unexpected and ambitious?
“It's about being as open as you can be. Some bands run out of stuff with the more albums they make, but it's the opposite for us – with each album we learn something new and our musical education improves. We learn things all the time from every new album we listen to, or if we listen to music from the past. There are infinite possibilities with music and I don't think we're anywhere near being able to exhaust them yet.

There's a lot to learn from classical music and jazz and things like that, things about chord structures and grooves that you wouldn't associate with rock music. When you take those things and incorporate them in a rock set-up, you create something that sounds new."

There's pop, disco, Rn'B and classical music on the new album - do you still see Muse as a rock band?
"I've never really gone for labelling bands. I find it impossible to do it with us. How can you summarise a song like ‘Undisclosed Desires' or ‘Stockholm Syndrome' in one word? They're a bit of everything. You can't say that the three-part symphony on ‘The Resistance' is a rock song, because it isn't. It's a piece of classical music. But then you have songs like ‘Uprising' which, as poppy as they are, still sound like a rock song to me. I think the way we play as a band and our set-up is influenced by rock and is rock. But our delivery of music is pretty random!"

Do you get a kick out of defying people's expectations of what Muse is?
"Yeah, absolutely. There's nothing more pleasurable than when people hear your music for the first time and say, ‘That's absolutely amazing. It's not at all what I was expecting. I don't even know what I was expecting!' I think that's the thing with us - with each album that's come out, no one ever really knows what to expect, and that's a nice place to be. The only thing people expect is something new and surprising.

There are still elements that make it sound obviously like Muse. But it's nice to be able to surprise people and to make music that they're totally blown away by. A lot of bands find a formula that they know works, and it must be very easy to continue knocking out that formula to please your fans. It's nice to be able to please our fans by not doing that."

It's ten years since your debut album ‘Showbiz' was released – back then, did you ever imagine that you would get this far?
"No, I don't think so. We always had confidence. We'd all been in other bands before, so we knew what it was like. But when this band got together there was something different. The chemistry between the three of us was different, the way we played together was different, and there was a proper confidence that we never had in previous bands. So we always knew that we could do something, even though the music we were making back then was probably rubbish!

We dreamed of playing Wembley Stadium but I don't think any of us ever believed that we'd get that big, because not many bands do. There are still things we do that completely surprise us, like people camping out on the street overnight for tickets for the Teignmouth shows. Probably in excess of 5,000 people turned up, and there are only 15,000 people in Teignmouth! It can be quite overwhelming sometimes."

What surprises have you got in store for the UK tour later this year?
"It's going to be pretty great. We've decided to go for something a little bit different this time. With the last few tours we've done, as big and spectacular as they've been, sometimes we watched them back and thought, ‘At the end of the day, it's three guys on a stage with a big movie screen behind us!'

That's great, but we've done it a couple of times now and we wanted to go for something a bit more set based, as opposed to a stage and a load of lights. We're working on a system where the three of us are on these big building-type things that move up and down, and things come down from the ceiling. We're involving visual performers in it as well. So I think it's going to be quite different. It's all new for us, so hopefully it's going to work!"

To see pictures from the band's Teignmouth shows this past weekend click here and for a review of the gig click here.

Muse play the following November shows:

NOVEMBER
04 - SHEFFIELD Arena
05 - LIVERPOOL Echo Arena
06 - DUBLIN O2 Depot
09 - GLASGOW SECC
10 - BIRMINGHAM NIA
12 - LONDON 02 Arena
13 - LONDON 02 Arena