When life was loud

Rolling Stone USA August 30th 2012 (Issue 1164) "WE ARE DEFINED BY THE FACT that we can't be defined by anybody" says Matt Bellamy, the singer-guitarist-pianist of Muse, as he runs down the range and nerve of the British trio’s new album, The 2nd Law , out in October. “There are electro-pop sounds and songs that are obviously classic rock,” Bellamy notes, referring to the machine-funk nightmares “Madness” and “Panic Station” and,.in the latter category “Big Freeze” and his lead-guitar blowup in “Animals.”  “Then there are the orchestral things,” he adds over lunch in New York: the strings-choir-and-metal “Survival,” already a hit as an official Olympic theme song, and the symphonic chaos of the two-part title suite. The 2nd Law would sound like “three different bands,” Bellamy contends, “if it wasn't for my voice.”  Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard recorded most of the follow-up to their 2009 U.S. breakthrough, The Resistance , in London...

c. 2011 COREY: One more? Okay, one more question. You... MAN: Why doesn't Craig ever talk? ( Laughter from audience ) MAN: I've been waiting years to ask that... COREY: Seriously, or... MAN: No. Seriously. COREY: For real? Or as a joke? MAN: No, no, no...really like...even in Voliminal , they ask him like "How many bodies you have in your backyard", and he doesn't even say anything COREY: Several. There are several, uh, joke answers I can give you. One of which is, he's an Android. ( Laughter ) Another of which is that secretly he's a serial killer ( Laughter ). Which we all call him. We're just like, "You're just a killer, dude." And he just goes...( does a silent nodding/sniff impression )...and he doesn't say a damn word. He's...the honest answer...is that that's just the way he us. He's never...I mean, I'm talking about a dude who I knew, before Slipknot was even a band. You know, we used to go to Rocky Horror Pict...

c.2005 (The video footage starts with DOMINIC in mid sentence)  DOMINIC: …things really...and I was kind of aware of his work, (and he's called Storm Thorgerson by the way), and he does really cool surreal photography based stuff, so we wanted to, you know, we spoke to him and talked about a few ideas and came up with it. MALE HOST: It's very cool stuff FEMALE HOST: Alright, we're going to take a very quick break, but when we come back, more of the most downloaded songs in the country, and more of these guys here...Mooze! (BACK IN THE STUDIO AFTER COMMERCIAL BREAk) MALE HOST: Hangin' out playin' 'Star Wars Republic Commando' on XBOX, and we're countin' down the most downloaded songs in the country, but more importantly right now, we are hanging out with Muse!   MATTHEW: Hello... FEMALE HOST: So, you guys had a good night last night?  MATTHEW/DOMINIC: Yes... FEMALE HOST: Did you guys ever go to bed? MATTHEW: Still kind of...uh...yeah, still going tech...

FHM - OCTOBER 2015 Dressed in jumpsuits, growling dark lyrics and wearing masks, Corey Taylor and his Slipknot bandmates are a physical antidote to music’s infatuation with image.  The mainstream is so mediocre, someone has to balance the scales. Even so, we never thought Slipknot would be such a pinprick to the Zeitgeist. It’s cool - obviously we revel in it as much as possible. But at the same time you’ve kinda got to break the rules. I’ve got three kids. I do their laundry, I cook their dinner and yet I’m still one of the biggest people in the music business. It’s weird: you have to have that yin and yang. We wore masks because all people seemed to care about then was what you looked like. They’d come on to what you sounded like later. For us it worked on both fronts. Screw the face, screw the fashion - here are my overalls, here’s my mask... here’s the goddamn music. The real trouble came when various organisations tried to pigeonhole us to try to understand us. Whether it w...

Portsmouth Evening News  Friday 12th March 2004 Faced with a couple of years with no band, what else could Murderdolls frontman Wednesday 13 do than raise an old band from the dead?   The singer is returning to old material from his days with The Frankenstein Drag Queens to tour around Europe - and he's promising a ghostly graveyard experience for anyone who comes along.   'Visually we don't look anything like the Murderdolls, we look more like Night of the Living Dead ' he laughs.   'Murderdolls is more glam shock rock, this is more monster movie, white faces and stitches.  'I will be made up as well, I look way different - and I'm playing guitar live which is something I never did with Murderdolls'  Murderdolls became a favourite with rock fans after singles such as Dead in Hollywood and a version of Billy Idol's White Wedding , but they've hit a hiatus because guitarist Joey has returned to his day job as drummer with Slipknot to record a...

c.1999 (NOTE: All Chris does is introduce himself) COREY: We're Slipknot. You're watching LOUD TIMES Video Magazine.  HEADER: SLIPKNOT COREY: My name is Corey. I'm the lead singer for Slipknot. CHRIS: Chris. Number 3. Percussion.  HOW'S THE REPSONSE BEEN TO YOUR DEBUT ALBUM? COREY: Well, the response the album has been getting has been overwhelming, I mean we're a fairly young band. It's been unreal. I mean, we've been touring the last five months, three months in support of it, and it has gone from un, just like a small hardcore group of people knowing about us to slowly generating a lot of insanity as far as like a lot of people go. You know, I mean it's like every town we go to more, and more, and more people know of us, or have heard of us, and want to see the sickness, you know? So I mean, uh, you know, it's it's having a definite reaction with uh, kids who are...they feel disenfranchised with the music scene which is going on today, which I...

Total Guitar Issue #85 - July 2001 Muse - Show Biz  The fantastic debut album from Muse pinpoints Matt Bellamy as a player to look out for - no less for his classical influences as well as rock guitar style. 

Book published c.2019 edition Writer | S. Crahan, C. Fehn, P. Gray, C. Jones, J. Jordison, C. Taylor, M. Thomson, S. Wilson Producer | Ross Robinson, Slipknot Label | Roadrunner Album | Slipknot (1999) “Slipknot preach individualism,” chief visionary Shawn “Clown” Crahan told the Guardian , “and we help our maggots to get rid of conformity.”  If the brutal sounds and horror movie visuals didn’t clue you in, the Iowa nine-piece’s “new national anthem” left no doubt about their worldview. Its chorus was splattered across their album artwork, elevating angst to a manifesto: “Fuck it all/Fuck this world/Fuck everything that you stand for/Don’t belong / Don’t exist/Don’t give a shit / Don’t ever judge me.”  Inevitably, this was interpreted more as nihilism than protest, particularly by younger fans. “If their parents aren’t raising them, then someone has to,” drummer and bandleader Joey Jordison told The Face . “Someone’s gotta tell them how it is.”  Musically, the song was...

c.2000 SOOK-YIN LEE (who is wearing a giant HELLO KITTY type head which covers her eyes): Yeah!! Woo! Woo! Woo! All right! I am with a couple (two members) of Slipknot, Joey and the Clown. Hello boys. JOEY: Hey. SHAWN: Hello.  SOOK-YIN LEE: So, Slipknot hails from Des Moines, Ottowa..or Ohio..or IO.WA...Iowa SHAWN: Iowa... SOOK-YIN LEE: And it's a conservative, middle class town is it not? Or what's it like there?  JOEY: It's a graveyard with a bunch of buildings shooting out of it.  SOOK-YIN LEE: So what happened? What the heck happened to you guys from this place? Is it like I imagine it to be? Are there strip malls there?*  SHAWN: No. Nothing really happened... JOEY: You're shaking... SHAWN: We were just born JOEY (reaching forward to touch SOOK-YIN's hand): She's shaking... SOOK-YIN LEE: Am I shaking? JOEY: Yeah... SOOK-YIN LEE: My ears are shaking...I'm like very excited to see you. Or not see you, as it were. SHAWN *Wheezy laugh*  JOEY (nudges Shawn): ...

Edinburgh Evening News  Thursday 17th February 2000 Article by Ben Atherton Let's get it out of the way at the start. Radiohead. Radio-head. Radio. Head.   It's a comparison that hyped new rockers Muse - due to entertain a capacity crowd at the Venue tonight - have heard before.   But mercurial frontman Matt Bellamy says it's one that the outfit who scooped the NME Premier Award for Best New Band last month are soon going to outgrow.  "If the only thing people have to go on is the record, then they may have a point," he admits.   The record in question - 1999's Showbiz album - was produced by Radiohead knob-twiddler John Leckie, and its rock histrionics prompted many a comparison to the Oxford miserabilists.   "But come and see is us live and I think you'll be surprised," Bellamy insists. "See us live and you'll see the record from the right point of view. Because we're English and we're influenced by the same sort of time of lif...

(Note - these are a collection of short interviews. The first longer one, can be read here . These date from the early 2000s onwards) CLIP 1 c. August 2000 DOMINIC: Um, well Glastonbury and T In The Park, Glastonbury was pretty special, cos it is sort of down where we are from. It's where we live, and where we grew up. It's in that area, so we've always gone there when we were young, just to watch bands, so...we had a really good festival this year, as well. There was like, lots of people there, and it was like on a big stage, so...it was pretty magic. MATTHEW: Where we come from, um, where we come from in England, bands very rarely tour there. Not very often. So the only chance we got to see many bands from around the world, is to go to festivals like Glastonbury, and Glastonbury was very close to home. So it was very special to play there, because it felt like we really were a proper band, and a real band.   CLIP 2 c. Early 2000 (judging by the Japanese translation at the...

Belfast Telegraph  Friday 29th December 2006 Muse did pretty well in 2006. Their album Black Holes and Revelations went to number one in Britain and across Europe.   They also cracked the American top 10 and saw their tours get bigger and bigger and sell out in supersonic speeds. But that is nothing compared to the 2007 we anticipate. Muse announced recently they would be the first band (finally) to play the new Wembley. The show, for June 16, sold out in an hour. They then announced a second date which has also sold out. Expect headlining slots at Oxegen, T In The Park and one other major festival to follow.  Bombastic, outlandish and bold space-rock has never had such incredibly wide appeal. And this really is just the start. America will fall before too much longer.  Link to original article (subscription may be required to view) Link to all Muse articles

2004 (MATTHEW is seated cross-legged on a flight case in what appears to be a storage area/rudimentary green room) Q: Hello Matthew. MATTHEW: Hello Q: You have been on Pinkpop before, but this year you are headlining. I guess you could say that you have reached the top. Is that something you set out to do, right from the start of your band? MATTHEW: Erm...I remember watching Red Hot Chili Peppers headline a festival in England, Reading Festival. I must have been about fifteen/sixteen years old, and I remember thinking headlining a festival is definitely the top of being a live band, I think, you know...so I'm very happy to be...I think this is our first...I think this is our headline in any major festival you know...this summer we are doing about, I think, five or six big festivals that we are headlining, and a few other festivals that we are playing in different sections of the stage. Erm, but this is uh, quite an important gig for us, I think yeah. Q: What is it you are trying to...

Modern Drummer Issue 444 November 2016 This month we sat down with Jeremy Berman, a highly respected drum tech and renowned builder and the founder of the Los Angeles based manufacturer Q Drums, to get a little background on his career. We also checked out his latest offering, the Gentleman's Series copper snare.  Berman has been making drums since the '90s, and his resume as a drum tech includes Nine Inch Nails, Muse, Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, Jimmy Eat World, Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, Slipknot, and Norah Jones. Berman got his start in the industry working at Guitar Center in Orange County. "I started playing drums late," he says, "when I was around sixteen. But the first time I sat at a kit, I was hooked. I eventually found myself working at GC, which was where I met John Machado. He was vice president of Orange County Drums and Percussion at that time. Every time he came in, I'd ask if they had any openings.   "Then I was in a se...

Midland Counties Express  Thursday 31st May 2001  MATT Bellamy, lead singer, songwriter and driving force behind Muse is a genius. That is a rare statement to appear in a modern music review, but one that is totally justifiable.   He and the other two members of the band may only be in their early 20s, but their sound is one that defies age.  When Bellamy and co began their set at the Birmingham Academy the music was so fresh and clear that it blew away the dreary atmosphere caused by a non-descript support act.  It is almost impossible to find words to describe the sound of Muse. They recreate recorded songs immaculately, but with the added intensity that only a live gig can muster.  The guitar was making noises that normal guitars don't make and the vocals were from a different world.  Bellamy's voice was high and low, it screamed, it whispered, he took the packed crowd to somewhere far away from a humid night in Britain's second city.  The...

Modern Drummer - Issue 374 January 2011 We've all seen images of Joey Jordison perched behind his mammoth kit—sticks, hair, and sweat flying—and heard the passionate product of his studio dedication. But what is this jack of all trades like behind the scenes at home? Here Jordison opens up about his loves outside of music—and you might be surprised by some of them. MD : What do you do when you're not on tour or working on an album? Are you chugging away at more riffs? Joey : Yup, that's basically all I do. Other than that, I love just laying in my bed or hanging with Mokie, my cat. It's just me and Mokie, and I pretty much live in the middle of nowhere. Otherwise I see my sisters and my mother and my dad, and that's just about it. MD : At home do you play drums or guitar more? Joey : I play guitar. I really don't play drums at all. I mean, I have my V-Drums and one of my [acoustic] kits set up. I usually practice for like forty-five minutes, but I'll have a ...

Total Guitar July 2001 - Issue No #85 It's difficult not to imagine Hugh Manson as Q to Matt Bellamy's James Bond. The Devon-based guitar builder has poured enough gadgets and pyrotechnics into the second Muse six-string to put 007's tech wizard to shame.  But what Hugh's most excited about is the way that this guitar's features will require a totally different approach to playing, thanks to the sustainer pickup at the neck. "This sustains either the fundamental notem the harmonic or both" explains Hugh, "and that means you can do a whole lot with the left hand." So while the sustainer pickup is holding the note for you, Matt will be able to use one of three built-in effects: a Zvex pitchshifter, a theremin copper plate below the sustainer pickup or a revolutionary MIDI effect.   "The MIDI is controlled by a pad similar to the mouse pad you might find on a lap top computer and it can do anything you want it to. I think Matt's original id...

(Book publication date c.2013) Writer: Matt Bellamy Producer: Rich Costey, Muse Label: Helium 3 Album: Black Holes & Revelations (2006) "I was going out dancing in clubs around New York. That helped create tracks like 'Supermassive Black Hole'." Matt Bellamy, 2006 With their first three albums, Muse accomplished the impossible: they made it okay to like prog rock again. Unexpectedly, the fourth - Black Holes & Revelations - seemed as appropriate for rock club dance floors as it was for Dungeons & Dragons tournaments. The album featured acoustic balladry and new wave influences, but the most drastic departure was what drummer Dominic Howard described as "Prince-influenced, groove-based, rock weirdness." For a band long saddled with the "next Radiohead" tag, 'Supermassive Black Hole' was a shocking turn of events.   The song mixes swaggering rock - highlighted by Matt Bellamy's cobra-like strikes of twisting guitar and Howard...

c. June 2001 (Host is Nils Neumann)  HOST (laughing after introduction in German): This was like, total bullshit. It was like ' great pleasure to have uh, the gentleman of Muse, sitting like, having here like ...' (laughs) Um. Haldern. You haven't played this festival before?    MATTHEW (laughs): Yeah, we have. Yeah. We played two years ago. We were the first band on. Yeah. Yeah. HOST: So, how do you like it?  MATTHEW: I can't remember. Yeah. It was alright. Yeah. Last time we played there was only about one hundred people there, and they were just like 'Who are you?' and like 'boooo', and threw a few bottles. And we said, ' We'll come back in two years time '. (laughter) HOST: What do you like on festivals? I mean, how many have you played this year? CHRISTOPHER: How many? Not that many actually. We did about fifty last year. We've done about ten, eleven...   DOMINIC: About eleven or ten this year. But um, it's nice to play outside y...