The band, owning the worldwide performing rights to the name, flexed their muscles and forced her to desist. Muse were now their own entity, spiritually and legally, which they proved when Celine Dion tried to use their moniker as the name of her Las Vegas show in 2002. The first single from second album Origin of Symmetry, it signposted Muse forging their own distinct identity, the Radiohead comparisons gradually dissipating. “Out of the squall of feedback rose a snaking guitar riff,” said Beaumont, “writhing up the neck of Matt Bellamy’s guitar as if trying to wriggle clean out of the song.” What “my plug-in baby crucifies my enemies” actually means is open to conjecture, but that spiralling riff – with more than a nod to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – connected with audiences in a way that nothing from Showbiz had. Plug In BabyĪccording to Mark Beaumont’s Muse biography Out of This World, Plug In Baby didn’t just arrive on any old evening, but on Millennium, and it was first outed at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. The disgusted local mayor was then pictured on the cover of the South Devon Herald Express dropping a copy of Showbiz in the bin and quoted as saying: “Thousands of inner-city kids would have loved to have been brought up in a living hell like this.” 3. Wolstenholme said as much in an interview, calling Teignmouth a “living hell”. “Fifteen thousand people scream,” references the people of their hometown, Teignmouth, and many of the lyrics concern the frustration and ennui of living in a provincial backwater. Though musically it harks back to the sound of the blues spiritual, the lyrical theme might have been concerned with something closer to home, or even home itself. Fragile, sparing, and draped tenderly over a slow swinging 6/8, Bellamy shows uncharacteristic restraint throughout, his falsetto barely a whisper, following a tenderly picked guitar line sliding up and down the frets and yielding to the bends. It’s fair to say Radiohead’s influence was writ large throughout their debut, though it was Jeff Buckley, that secondary influence so prevalent during the 90s, that informs Falling Down. The Devon trio had finally arrived, but unhelpful comparisons to Radiohead soon dogged them.
#MUSE OF MUSIC MOVIE#
In the same way that movie special effects or horror sequences lose their filmic impact over time, so the histrionics of the chorus now sound rather tame in light of where we now know Muse can go. The octave-defying bass playing of Chris Wolstenholme and the sparse drumming of Dom Howard contrast against the emphatic build and chorus wig-out. Taking its name from the two words that surround “muse” in the dictionary, Bellamy wrote Muscle Museum around a quietly intricate and strangely enticing guitar line he came up with whilst on holiday in Greece.
#MUSE OF MUSIC LICENSE#
They didn’t last long with the record company, eventually ending up on EastWest in the US, but the superstar connection finally piqued the interest of UK publications and other labels keen to license Muse around the world. While ignored by the music press at first, Muse found a champion in Steve Lamacq on Radio 1, and in the unlikely guise of Madonna, who indirectly signed them to her Maverick label in the US (by indirectly, I mean she had nothing to do with it). The slog to Top of the Pops is documented throughout debut album Showbiz, from playing the toilet circuit to the corporate shows mentioned on album opener Sunburn “I’ll feel a guilty conscience grow,” sang Matt Bellamy, although having disinfected every toilet in a West Country caravan site before becoming an international rock star, he needn’t have felt too guilty. It would take three rereleases before Muscle Museum landed in the charts at No 25 in 2000.
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