Fort Canning came alive to the loud dancey rock numbers of British rock trio Muse two weeks ago. Made up of vocalist cum guitarist Matthew Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard, Muse staged a rocking good show, performing hits after hits such as “Knights of Cydonia,” “Supermassive Black Hole,” “Starlight” and “Time Is Running Out,” getting the crowd all hyped up.
When I was younger, I had a bad temper. When I was at school, I used to freak people out a little. There’s nothing about me that scares people now. I hope not. I’m easy going. Most of the time at least (laughs).
I’m scared of moths. I have a phobia of moths. Can’t stand them. I’m scared of death. And pain.
My all time favorite song? Probably “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys.
I gave up smoking a year-and-a-half ago. I had a very bad cough and I had cancer as well. So I stopped smoking and promised myself that I’ll never smoke again for the rest of my life.
Music has always been quite important to me from an early age. I can’t really remember thinking too much about what else I wanted to do. I wanted to be a doctor for, err, about five minutes?
I was a guitar player then I played drums for a while. Then Muse started, and I picked up the bass guitar.
Until Muse, Matt was more of a guitar and piano player. So when we started Muse, it was fairly new to Matt and me because we were both on instruments that we have not really played before: His voice and my bass.
Matt is not your typical rhythm guitar player. The way he plays the guitar is very melodic and he leaves a lot of space for the bass to fill out. For that reason, I’m always, well maybe, slightly freer than the bass players in other bands.
When Muse first started playing, we were pretty much listening to a lot of American bands like Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins. These might be the bands that probably made us want to be in a band in the first place.
Now, I’ve been listening to Wolfmother a lot actually.
I think it’s a great Australian band.
When we first got together, we thought it would be a great achievement just to play at a gig. Just any gig, anywhere.
Playing at Glastonbury festival a couple of years ago was a big highlight. Going to festivals were the only way to see bands, especially American bands, when we were young. To headline festivals like the Glastonbury festival is something we dreamt of doing when we were kids.
We got a very big gig coming up in summer time at Wembley Stadium. That’s gonna be a new challenge because we’ve never done a stadium show before. The whole approach of the show is going to be new too. We’re really looking forward to that. It’s very nerve-wrecking. It’s a very big show on Jun 16 or 17.
We don’t really get recognized on the streets. You have bands that achieve that kind of celebrity status and get pestered by press people or things like that. We never really had that. It’s good because it shows that the music is more famous than us as people. And that’s the way it should be. It should be about the music and not about the face.
We’ve received a lot of presents. I think, it was at Russia or somewhere, that somebody gave Matt an oil painting of him with two birds on his shoulders. Recently in America, a girl made some paper dolls of us and also, every single article of clothing we’ve worn in the last seven years. It was kind of odd but nice.
I think people have gaps in their lives and they fill it with different things. The town where we came from was pretty quiet. Music was for us an escape from that.
