My first pick is an album that was played to me by my housemate during our second year of university – Muse, Showbiz.
It was 2000 England: the indie music that my friends and I had lived for in the 90s was all but gone from the mainstream. Although the mark of the last decade was still burning on so many of us, it wasn’t quite as red hot – the music that five years ago didn’t get a look in was now taking over the radio, and the notion of what was cool was being turned on its head. The Spice Girls were invited to TFI Friday, where only a few years before they had been laughed away, Britney Spears could now get an interview on BBC Radio 1 as a serious artist (Radio 1 itself was about to undergo a huge genre shift). The world had turned upside down. Those of us who enjoyed the 90’s indie mainstream music and luxuriated in hearing our teenage angst given voice by the biggest bands of the day, had suddenly been given a rude awakening.
In that world of a gone but not forgotten movement, you would go from CD collection to CD collection, sharing a silent moment of sadness with its owners – like an organisation that had had it’s heyday and now lived on as a secret society, occasionally making its voice heard in the defiant sounds of student radio, but knowing that the inevitable march of history was leading us closer towards a world of Simon Fuller’s popstars.
But suddenly I was in my housemate’s room, on a rainy Birmingham night in January – frankly it could have been any month and it still would have been raining. We were probably consoling each other about how crap our millennial parties were, when he pulled out a new CD he had bought over the Christmas break. I listened, gob-smacked, to this album that grabbed me from the first arpeggio. When the album finished, I borrowed it, took it to my room and played it again, listening to it more closely.
Muse’s similarities to Radiohead have well been documented. But those documentarians don’t do Showbiz justice by half. This wasn’t just Radiohead (my favourite band of all time): sure, there was the same passion and hugeness as Just or the instrumental break of Climbing Up The Walls, but Muse took it even further, and spread it out over a whole album. When they get to the 6th song on the album, Showbiz, this Matt Bellamy guy out Thom Yorkes Thom Yorke. It was as if they had heard my favourite bits of my favourite band and said ‘we want to make an entire album taking those choice bits even further and, if we can, do them even better’. It was as if my thoughts were in someone else’s head, and they were realizing the album that I wanted to put out when I first heard The Bends, but much much better and with a lot more musicanship.
As a purist music lover, this album was amazing.
But as a teenager of the 90s who felt that he was standing on the edge of the abyss and watching all the ground that he had built his identity on, crumbling away around him, this was an industrial strength winch tied around my waist and an army of indie kids pulling me with all their might away from the cliff edge, to a magical paradise that I didn’t even know existed. As the album lifted me up, all I could hear was overly breathy vocals that got caught in massive compression, bass fuzz and double kick pedals, big fat power chords against the crashiest of crash symbols, and a falsetto dripping with so much passion it made me sweat.
I couldn’t get enough of that album during 2000. I played it wherever and to whomever I possible could. My CD started to skip from overuse. And then something happened – in the middle of 2000 we went to see Muse at Wolverhampton town hall, a rundown venue that had seen better days, and was probably 500 people at full capacity.
Their opening act had just released their white label single called Shiver (more on that in a later blog), which we had also been playing constantly around the house. Matt Bellamy came on wearing a smart looking Mens Wearhouse style yellow shirt. As they picked up their instruments, I remember wondering where the other members of the band were. If you listened to indie music in the 90s you were well acquainted with three piece bands and what they could sound like – and you were also acquainted with two guitarists in four piece bands who both played open chords on ES335s and what they sounded like – but surely a three piece band couldn’t actually replicate the huge sounds of Showbiz? And who’s going to play the lead guitar when Matt is singing?
So they broke into Sunburn, Matt opening the song on the baby grand piano, also wearing his guitar. When they got to the chorus, he ran to the front mic to hit his power chords. We went nuts with the appropriate amount of moshing. When they got to the solo, I paused and looked up to watch closely if he was going to play the solo live, and then what would happen over the last chorus. Matt looked out into the audience like a man possessed, with his guitar at an angle to his crotch and, as sexually as he could, played the solo flawlessly. He then played the lead bits under his vocals on the last chorus perfectly, singing and solo-ing perfectly.
Holy mackerel. Holy f-ing mackerel.
Ok this band is pretty special. At that point in my life I had never seen what I was currently witnessing. Complicated piano parts, complicated vocal parts, complicated lead vocals, complicated vocals and lead guitar parts together. All in one song. And that song was their opener. That digital marketing guy in me could say that they were very clever to develop their sound and personalities congruently – their confidence and self-assurance matched the ardent passion of their music –, but that was just them. They made passionate music, because they were passionate and self-assured.
They made music that grabbed you by the balls because they had big balls.
And we’re not talking Noel Gallagher ‘I want to be rockster so I’ll talk a big game and play pentatonics on my carefully chosen hollow body guitar’ size balls – not that there is anything wrong with that (I love Oasis). We’re talking ‘let’s lay it all on the line and be the hugest sounding and most awesomely talented live band in the UK for the last 30 years’ style balls. Let’s have the lead singer playing the piano, soloing on the guitar, hitting notes above Thom Yorke and we’ll overcome everyone who sees us because we are just that good. And it would be so easy not to try and do any of that. Muse in 2000 would still have been a phenomenal band even if they hadn’t tried any of the above. But they did. And they did it better than anyone else I have heard or seen. Ok, enough about Matt Bellamy’s balls.
For a twenty year old who was still mourning the death of his indie teenage years and the ever nearing reality of a young adulthood where his musical tastes were not represented anymore, Muse were like a dose of electric shock therapy, that jolted me back to those emotionally rich adolescent years; a searing, blinding, white hot light that burned right thought my body and made me sweat once again, as every inch of me wanted to be playing and singing these songs; a slap round the face that gave me a clarity that I had lost: namely that other people felt exactly the same as me, and that I wanted to again be an incredibly talented and funny looking straight man.
Flash forward fifteen years, and Muse still retains that special place in my heart. For me they will always be the jolt of serious, passionate, great music that came along while the world was about to go insane, and allowed me to feel like mainstream music had my back for a few more years. And even now, a part of me still wants to be Matt Bellamy. Although not the part that would have to watch a Kate Hudson movie.