Childhood
Matthew, Christopher, and Dominic are childhood friends who hailed from Teignmouth, Devon. For Matthew, Teignmouth wasn’t a good town to live in, as he explains: “The only time the town came to life was during the summer when it turned into a vacation spot for visiting Londoners. When the summer ended they left and took all the life with them. I felt so trapped there. My friends were either getting into drugs or music, but I gravitated towards the latter and eventually learned how to play. That became my escape. If it weren't for the band, I would probably have turned to drugs myself.”
All three members of the band are not originally from Teignmouth, but from other English towns.
Matt was born in Cambridge on the 9th of June 1978 to George Bellamy, the rhythm guitarist of the 1960s English rock group, the Tornadoes, who were the first English band to have a number 1 hit in the United States, and Marilyn James. They eventually moved to Teignmouth when Matt was 10 years old.
When Matt was 14, his parents got divorced. "It was okay at home, middle class, we had money,” Matt says. “Well until the age of 14. I think I almost got everything I wanted until the age of 14, yes. Then, everything changed, parents got divorced, and I went to live with my grandmother, and there wasn't that much money. I have a sister who's older than me, she's actually my stepsister: my dad had her from a previous marriage, and also a younger brother. Until the age of 14 music was part of my life since it was part of the family circle: my dad was a musician, he had a band, etc. But it's only when I moved in with my grandparents that I started playing music myself. It was like a need to me.”
Matt moved in with his grandmother, which helped him find out that music was a need for him. He played piano since he was 6, but with the absence of his parents, he turned towards the guitar. His parents and older brother played with a Ouija Board to contact the dead, which he discovered when he wandering downstairs late at night. His interest with the Ouija Board grew bigger at the time of his parents’ divorce. “It was exciting to go to school and to tell 10-year-old kids all about it, as they found it all quite scary and I was quite impressed that I was doing something that was scary to other people but that wasn’t to me. I did get quite into that.” His beliefs changed after one correspondence predicted the first Gulf War a year before it started. “My beliefs in the whole thing changed. I now believe that you’re contacting something in your subconscious, which is quite different. Something that you might not have known was already there. That’s probably more realistic than thinking you’re contacting somebody who’s already dead. And I do practice that.”
Chris, however, was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, on December 2, 1978. His family moved to Teignmouth when he was 11. His mother would buy record regularly, which would influence him to learn how to play the guitar. Later on, he would play drums for a post-punk band. He would eventually give up the drums to play bass for Matt and Dom, who struggled with two bassists in a different band.
Dom was born on December 7, 1977, in Stockport, England. When he was 8 years old, his family moved to Teignmouth. He learned to play drums about the age of 11, when he was inspired by a jazz band performing at his school.
Formation of Muse
Dom played drums for a band called Carnage Mayhem, when he met Matt. By that time, Matt didn’t have a stable band yet. Not long after, Matt was drafted by Dom and his band members as their guitarist. It was at this time that Chris would meet both Matt and Dom. At the time though, Chris was playing drums for another band in town. As time passed by, Matt and Dom’s band would fall apart, leaving them without a bassist. Fortunately, Chris would give up drums to play bass for them.
“I met Matt and Dom quite a few years before the band started because we went to school together – they were at school ahead of me, but I knew them from seeing them around town. Then a load of bands popped up out of nowhere where we lived – all of a sudden everyone wanted to play the guitar and be in a rock band. I was in a band, Matt and Dom were in another band, but theirs was on the edge of self-destruction and mine was falling apart too, so we got together from there,” Chris, on how he got together with Matt and Dom.
They would rename the band Rocket Baby Dolls, and with a Goth image, they entered a battle of the bands competition. "I remember the first real concert we've ever made was for a band competition,” says Matt “We were the only real rock band; all the others were pop or funk-pop, kinda Jamiroquai if you want. We knew we had no chance to win - we were not the best musicians - it was a matter of 'fitting'. So we did the best we could, we took advantage of our feeling of being 'different'. We came on stage with make up all over our face, we were very aggressive, we played very violently and then we broke everything on stage. All that to say that the will, the attitude meant a lot to us. So we won. And I think that psychologically it changed many things in our heads. Because we came to lose, we expected to lose. And we were angry somehow. And we had just realized at this time that we could replace lots of things. We realized that emotion, the vibrations that you create are as important as your technical skills. We had just discovered something: music is a matter of emotion.” It was during this time, that the band would name their band Muse.
Chris Wolstenholme (bass, backing vocals)
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