The story of Muse

Three boys in a seaside town

Muse begin in Teignmouth, a small seaside town in Devon. None of the three were born there. Matt Bellamy was born in Cambridge on the ninth of June 1978. Dominic Howard was born in Stockport in December 1977 and moved to Devon at about eight. Chris Wolstenholme was born in Rotherham in December 1978. Music ran in Matt's family. His father, George Bellamy, had played rhythm guitar in the Tornados, the instrumental group whose 1962 hit Telstar topped the charts in Britain and America. Matt tried violin and clarinet as a child and gave both up. At about eleven he taught himself piano by copying his dad's Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder records, and at thirteen he won a talent contest playing boogie woogie.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then Matt saw a video of Jimi Hendrix smashing a guitar and switched to rock guitar. At seventeen he took flamenco lessons for about six months, and that opened the door to classical music. He went on to study A level music at Exeter College, where a tutor remembered him as a quiet student already playing gigs outside class. Home life was not easy. In the early nineteen nineties his parents divorced and his father went bankrupt, which Matt later said was the first time he really worried about anything. He was a naturally shy teenager, and he later said he only took on singing reluctantly because nobody else wanted to join the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At Teignmouth Community College the three boys played in separate school bands. Matt joined Dominic's group, Carnage Mayhem, as singer and songwriter, and the band was renamed Gothic Plague. When other members drifted off, they asked Chris to join. He was a drummer in a band called Fixed Penalty, but he agreed to switch to bass and started taking lessons. They became Rocket Baby Dolls, with a goth glam look, and got a grant of one hundred and fifty pounds from the Prince's Trust for equipment. In 1994 they entered a local battle of the bands and smashed their gear on stage as a kind of protest. To their shock, they won.[1] [2] [3]

Winning made them take themselves seriously. They changed the name to Muse, liking that it was short and would look good on a poster. There was little local scene to join. Chris later remembered that the heroes of Teignmouth were a funk covers band, and that nobody in Devon wanted to hear original music, so they often played to empty rooms. Dominic remembered them dreaming of headlining Reading while writing songs in the basement of Matt's grandmother's house. Even then there was a running joke between Matt and Dom. Before each step up, Matt would ask whether they had made it yet, and Dom would always answer, not yet, nearly.[1] [2] [3]

Sawmills, the first EPs and Showbiz

The break came through a man who had watched them grow up. Dennis Smith owned Sawmills, a residential studio in an old water mill on a creek of the River Fowey in Cornwall, reachable only by boat or on foot. He knew the boys' parents and gave them studio time, to be repaid only if they were ever signed. In the autumn of 1997 Muse recorded their first EP there with producer Paul Reeve. It came out on the eleventh of May 1998 on Smith's own label, Dangerous, in just nine hundred and ninety nine hand numbered copies, sold in Devon record shops and by mail order. Dominic made the cover from photocopies of his own face.[1] [2] [3]

Smith had a business partner, the music manager Safta Jaffery, and together they ran a company called Taste Media. They signed Muse, managed them for free, and shopped them around. Their first London and Manchester shows came supporting Skunk Anansie. A second EP, Muscle Museum, came out in January 1999 and reached number three on the NME indie chart. Steve Lamacq played it on Radio 1 and the NME took notice. Yet British labels still held back. The deal came from America instead. On Christmas Eve 1998, after showcases in the United States, Muse signed to Madonna's label Maverick, while Taste arranged separate deals across Europe and Australia.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The debut album, Showbiz, was recorded in the spring of 1999 at RAK Studios in London and at Sawmills. Alongside Paul Reeve came John Leckie, who had produced the Stone Roses and Radiohead's The Bends. Most of the songs had been written years earlier. Showbiz came out in the autumn of 1999 and reached number twenty nine in the UK. Critics kept comparing Muse to Radiohead. Leckie brushed that off, saying any British band that sang with passion and played guitar at the time got the same comparison, and that he had picked Muse precisely because they were different. The single Sunburn reached number twenty two, and Unintended did even better at number twenty.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Showbiz also brought the piano back into Matt's life. He had given it up for guitar as a teenager, but while recording Sunburn the song sounded weak on guitar, so he tried it on piano. It worked, and piano became part of the Muse sound. On stage the band were still stiff. Matt has described those early shows as shy and shoegazey, with no eye contact. Two things changed that. In 1999 they opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters across the American Midwest, and watching Flea every night convinced them to raise their game. Then, at their first show in Japan, a frustrated Matt tried a cheesy knee slide, and the crowd went wild.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Origin of Symmetry and the fight with Maverick

For the second album Muse wanted something heavier and stranger. They cut the backbone of it, including Plug In Baby, New Born and Bliss, with producer David Bottrill, and when he left to work with Tool, John Leckie returned. Sessions moved between Sawmills, Ridge Farm in Surrey, Real World Studios in Wiltshire, and David Gilmour's houseboat studio on the Thames. For Megalomania they recorded a real church organ in Bath. Matt played a custom guitar from Manson, a Devon workshop, with a fuzz effect built into the body. The title came from a book by the physicist Michio Kaku, which imagined a future work called The Origin of Symmetry.[1] [2]

Origin of Symmetry came out on the eighteenth of June 2001 and reached number three in the UK. It included a cover of Feeling Good, the song Nina Simone made famous, released on a double A side with Hyper Music. Plug In Baby became their biggest single yet at number eleven, driven by a riff that echoes the opening of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The album is now seen as their breakthrough, and Q and Kerrang readers later placed it among the best British albums. Not everyone agreed at the time. One Guardian critic called it overblown and self important, a charge that would follow Muse for years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In America the album hit a wall. Maverick felt Matt's falsetto was not right for radio and wanted changes, including a new version of Plug In Baby. The band did try recording one in Massachusetts in September 2001 but were unhappy with the result, and the relationship collapsed. Origin of Symmetry was not released in the United States until 2005. Back in Europe, a double album called Hullabaloo gathered B sides and a live recording from two nights at Le Zénith in Paris, with a concert film alongside it. By now Muse were building a reputation as one of the most intense live bands around, winning Kerrang's best live band award in 2002.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 2002 the name Muse itself became a fight. Celine Dion was planning a new Las Vegas show and wanted to call it Muse. The band owned the worldwide performing rights to the name and threatened to sue. Dion's side offered fifty thousand dollars for the rights, and Muse turned it down. Matt explained that they were about to try to break America and did not want people there to think they were Celine Dion's backing band. Dion dropped the name. Around the same time the band showed a stubborn streak in another case, suing Nestlé for using their Feeling Good in a coffee advert without permission, and giving the damages to Oxfam.[1] [2]

Absolution, Glastonbury and a death in the family

Muse took their time over the third album. In early 2002 they rented a country house near Brighton to write, and during this period Maverick dropped them. Serj Tankian of System of a Down tried to sign them to his own label, but Maverick wanted half a million dollars to release them. Recording began at Air Studios in London, and American producer Rich Costey, who had worked with Rage Against the Machine, took over with a mission to make them sound huge. Most of the album was made at Grouse Lodge in Ireland. They recorded kick drums in the swimming pool, and even Chris diving in, a splash you can hear on Thoughts of a Dying Atheist.[1]

The sessions were tense. Muse had a strained relationship with their record company and a lawsuit with their production company. When their co manager arrived to check on progress, they threw him out of the studio, and Matt later said there was a real sense of doom around the band. Chris was also drinking heavily. The music changed with the news. Matt had planned an album about insanity, but after the Iraq War began the lyrics turned toward endings and apocalypse. The designer Storm Thorgerson made the sleeve by photographing hardboard figures in a chalk pit. Absolution was released in September 2003 and went straight to number one in the UK.[1]

Time Is Running Out became their first UK top ten single, at number eight, and their first real hit on American alternative radio. Hysteria, built on a relentless bassline Chris created from a riff Matt played at a soundcheck in Doncaster, became a fan favourite. Signed now to Warner Bros in the US, Muse finally broke through there, and Absolution later went gold. The first American show of 2004, in Atlanta in April, ended early when Matt jumped, fell onto his guitar and split his upper lip. He needed stitches, one show was cancelled, and he proudly called the scar a proper rock star scar. He admitted he had earlier cut Dom's eyebrow with a swinging guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On Sunday the twenty seventh of June 2004, Muse headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, closing the festival. The band later called it the best gig of their lives. Dominic's father, Bill Howard, was there to watch. Shortly after one in the morning he collapsed near the Pyramid Stage and died of an apparent heart attack. He was sixty two. Police said the death was not suspicious, and the band cancelled their next show in Italy. Matt said it felt surreal that their finest moment was followed within an hour by such loss, and that the band spent a week simply trying to support Dom. The single Butterflies and Hurricanes was dedicated to his father.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Absolution tour rolled on through 2004 and 2005. That August Chris broke his wrist playing football, and a musician called Morgan Nicholls stood in on bass at the V Festival. Muse won best alternative act at the MTV Europe awards, best live act at the Q awards, and best British live act at the Brit Awards in 2005. They closed the tour with two sold out nights at Earls Court in London and played Live 8 in Paris in July 2005. Behind the scenes their business changed too. In 2005 Dennis Smith and Safta Jaffery stepped down as managers, Warner Music bought Taste Media, and Muse's contract passed to Warner.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Black Holes and Revelations and the new Wembley

For album four Muse went looking for new sounds. They started at Studio Miraval, a chateau in the south of France, with Rich Costey back as producer. Progress was slow, so they moved to New York, where Matt spent nights in clubs and learned to DJ. That club life fed straight into Supermassive Black Hole, a funky, falsetto dance track that critics compared to Prince. Costey insisted the song needed a guitar solo in the middle. The band resisted, and in the end Chris fetched a guitar from his hotel room and played the part. Released in June 2006, it reached number four, still their highest UK chart position.[1] [2]

Black Holes and Revelations came out on the third of July 2006. It mixed love songs with lyrics about corrupt leaders, alien invasions and revolution, and it closed with Knights of Cydonia, a galloping space western with trumpets. Matt said its guitar sound was inspired by Telstar, his father's old hit with the Tornados. The album went to number one in the UK and reached number nine in America, their first US top ten. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize and lost to Arctic Monkeys. Starlight, which Matt said he wrote on a boat in bad weather, became their biggest American radio song so far, reaching number two on the modern rock chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour that followed became famous for its spectacle. Morgan Nicholls joined as a permanent touring player on keyboards, percussion and guitar, a role he held until 2022. Muse headlined Reading and Leeds in 2006, won a second Brit Award for best live act in 2007, and then made history. On the sixteenth and seventeenth of June 2007 they became the first act to sell out the newly rebuilt Wembley Stadium. The stage was dressed like the antennae of HAARP, an American research station that has attracted many conspiracy theories. Health and safety rules stopped one idea, dangling acrobats from a helicopter over the crowd. The shows became the live album HAARP.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Black Holes tour kept going for two years. Muse sold out Madison Square Garden in New York, headlined Lollapalooza, and played their first shows in South America, South Africa and Dubai. Knights of Cydonia topped the Australian radio station Triple J's Hottest 100 poll for 2007, beating Silverchair by just thirteen votes. In 2008 the band played the Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust. That September the three of them were given honorary doctorates of arts by the University of Plymouth, not far from where they had played to empty rooms as teenagers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Resistance, sobriety and the top of the world

Behind the success, Chris was in trouble. His drinking had grown with the band. At its worst he was getting through a pint of spirits, two bottles of wine and many beers a day, and he later said he would drink until he vomited blood. For years Matt and Dom barely noticed, because he still played brilliantly and then vanished to his room. Eventually Dom began counting the drinks Chris took on stage, and the band gave him ultimatums. In 2008 he started having panic attacks. Alcohol had killed his own father, and he realised it would kill him too. On April Fool's Day 2009, after a meltdown, he made the decision to stop.[1] [2] [3]

Chris got sober with the help of treatment and therapy, just as the band were making their fifth album. Dom later said sobriety had given Muse a future. The Resistance was recorded in their own studio on Lake Como in Italy and, for the first time, produced by the band themselves. Matt had reread George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and said that this time he was more struck by the love story than the politics. The album closed with Exogenesis, a thirteen minute symphony in three parts with an orchestra of more than forty players, about astronauts sent to seed humanity on another planet. Matt had arranged the strings himself over several years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Resistance came out on the fourteenth of September 2009 and went to number one in nineteen countries. In America it reached number three, and the lead single Uprising, with its glam stomp that many compared to the Doctor Who theme, spent seventeen weeks at number one on the alternative chart and gave Muse their first Billboard Hot one hundred hit. It became their best selling single. The band launched the tour with two homecoming shows in Teignmouth, called A Seaside Rendezvous, then opened for U2 across North America. In February 2011 The Resistance won the Grammy Award for best rock album.[1] [2] [3]

In June 2010 Muse headlined Glastonbury for the second time. U2 had pulled out because Bono hurt his back, so Muse invited the Edge on stage to play Where the Streets Have No Name, one of the moments of the festival. A week later Roger Taylor and Brian May of Queen presented them with the O2 Silver Clef award, and Taylor called them probably the greatest live act in the world. Brian May had already praised the Queen flavour of The Resistance. At the charity auction that night Muse gave a guitar Matt had used only once, while rehearsing with the Edge. It sold for thirty three thousand pounds, to the band's own booking agent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Some of the attention was unwelcome. The American Fox News host Glenn Beck praised The Resistance as if it predicted the future, and Uprising turned up in online videos pushing conspiracy theories about President Obama. Matt described himself as a left leaning libertarian, closer to Noam Chomsky, and said Muse regularly turned down American politicians who wanted Uprising for their rallies. Muse also found a new audience through Twilight. The author Stephenie Meyer had written the books listening to them, Supermassive Black Hole played over the film's famous vampire baseball scene, and Muse wrote Neutron Star Collision for the 2010 sequel Eclipse.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The 2nd Law and the Olympic Games

In 2010 Matt began dating the American actor Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn. They got engaged in April 2011, and their son Bingham was born that July. Chris had moved his large family to the outskirts of Dublin. Muse spent 2011 on the road, supporting Rage Against the Machine in Los Angeles and headlining Reading and Leeds, where they played all of Origin of Symmetry to mark its tenth birthday. Then came an unexpected job. Matt had been asked to write a song for the London Olympics, and in May 2012 the band carried the Olympic flame through Teignmouth as thousands turned out to watch.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their song, Survival, became the official song of the London 2012 Games. It played as athletes entered the stadium and before medal ceremonies, and Muse performed it at the closing ceremony, although the American broadcaster NBC did not show their set. Matt admitted the song was already written before the organisers came calling, and that it was probably more demented than they realised. Critics had fun with it. One Guardian writer called it a hilarious onslaught of camp somewhere between Queen and a Monty Python sketch. The album it trailed, The 2nd Law, was named after the second law of thermodynamics and dealt with energy, economics and collapse.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The 2nd Law, released in October 2012, was Muse at their most restless. There was funk, film score and even dubstep, inspired partly by Skrillex, and the song Follow Me, produced with the electronic trio Nero, opened with the heartbeat of Matt's unborn son, recorded on an iPhone. For the first time Chris wrote and sang lead on two songs, Save Me and Liquid State, both about his battle with alcohol. The single Madness, which Matt said grew out of a fight with Kate Hudson, spent nineteen weeks at number one on the American alternative chart, a record at the time. The album reached number one in the UK and number two in America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The same autumn a songwriter named Charles Bollfrass sued Muse for three and a half million dollars, claiming The Resistance and Exogenesis copied a science fiction rock opera he had pitched to them in 2005. Muse called the claim complete nonsense and said they had never seen his work. In April 2013 a New York judge threw the case out, saying the two works shared only a very general idea of planetary breakdown and space travel. That July Muse played Rome's Olympic Stadium to more than sixty thousand people. It became the first concert filmed in 4K, released as Live at Rome Olympic Stadium. In December 2014 Matt and Kate Hudson announced they had ended their engagement.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Drones, Simulation Theory and life in Los Angeles

After two self produced albums full of electronics and orchestras, Muse wanted to sound like a three piece rock band again. Chris admitted some of The 2nd Law had been a bore to play live. So they hired Robert John Mutt Lange, the producer behind AC DC's Back in Black, so they could focus on performance. Recording ran from October 2014 to April 2015 in Vancouver. Drones was a concept album about a soldier who loses hope, is turned into a human drone, and finally rebels, and Matt used drone warfare as a metaphor for losing empathy. Released in June 2015, it gave Muse their fifth straight UK number one and their first ever number one in America.[1] [2] [3]

Drones won Muse their second Grammy for best rock album in February 2016. On tour they flew real drones over the audience, though it did not always go to plan, and at one show in Detroit several failed at once. In June 2016 Muse headlined Glastonbury for the third time, on the Friday night, becoming the first act to top the Pyramid Stage on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Glastonbury refused permission for the drones. By then Matt was living in Los Angeles. In February 2015 he began dating the American model Elle Evans, who appeared in Muse's video for Mercy that year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Next Muse changed direction again. Instead of making an album as a whole, they worked one song at a time, starting with Dig Down in 2017. The result, Simulation Theory, released in November 2018, was a bright, synth heavy record soaked in nineteen eighties films and games, with a cover by Kyle Lambert, an artist who had worked on Stranger Things. Pop producers Timbaland and Shellback joined Rich Costey and Mike Elizondo. Matt said Thought Contagion was inspired by watching rolling American news. The album gave Muse their sixth consecutive UK number one, but reviews were mixed. The 2019 world tour featured dancers, a brass band and a giant alien robot.[1] [2] [3]

Away from Muse, Matt found other outlets. Since the early two thousands every guitar he played had been built by Manson Guitar Works in Devon, and in 2019 he became its majority owner. He also played bass in the Jaded Hearts Club, a covers band that grew out of a friend's birthday party, and in January 2018 he and Dom jammed Helter Skelter with Paul McCartney. On the tenth of August 2019 Matt married Elle Evans. Their daughter was born in June 2020 and their son in May 2024. In 2020 he bought the yellow Telecaster Jeff Buckley played throughout his album Grace, the record that convinced Matt a high voice could work in rock.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The pandemic kept Muse off the road. When lockdown hit Los Angeles, Rich Costey left town and handed Matt the keys to his studio in Santa Monica. From its window Matt watched empty streets, then protests and military vehicles, while wildfires burned and his wife prepared to give birth. He had to evacuate his home twice because of fires. He released solo pieces, including Tomorrow's World and a gentle new version of the early Muse song Unintended, and in 2021 a small solo collection called Cryosleep. The band looked back too, releasing the Origin of Muse box set in 2019 and a remix of Origin of Symmetry for its twentieth anniversary in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Will of the People, The Wow! Signal and Muse today

Muse returned in January 2022 with Won't Stand Down, one of their heaviest songs, which became their first number one on Billboard's mainstream rock airplay chart. Their label had asked for a greatest hits album. Instead Muse made Will of the People, which Matt called a greatest hits album of new songs, touching on glam, metal and ballads. Released in August 2022, it became their seventh UK number one, and the first chart topping album in Britain to be sold as an NFT. Kill or Be Killed earned a Grammy nomination for best metal performance. The new tour had a new face on stage. Morgan Nicholls stepped aside, and producer Dan Lancaster took his place.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Will of the People shows were Muse at full volume, with giant masked figures, a light up suit and a huge inflatable devil. But critics were cooling. A Guardian reviewer wrote in 2023 that hit and miss albums had dented Muse's once bulletproof reputation, and Matt later admitted that the last two albums had not landed with critics or fans. His own views had shifted too. He now called his old conspiracy theories quackery, said such theories had been hijacked by the political right, and described himself with a word he coined, meta centrism. In 2024 Chris launched his own project, Chromes, stepping out as a frontman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In the summer of 2025 Muse opened a European festival tour in Helsinki with a brand new song, Unravelling. Produced with Dan Lancaster, it was the first Muse song played on an eight string guitar, and it mixed metal riffs with electronic synths. Early in 2026 the band cancelled shows in Abu Dhabi, South Africa and India, citing circumstances beyond their control. Matt later said the past year had brought difficult personal events, and that he had needed to be at home for his children. He said the songs for the next album poured out of him, and that making it felt like a lifeline, the way music had when he was a teenager.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That album, The Wow! Signal, arrived on the twenty sixth of June 2026. It is named after a mysterious radio signal picked up by a telescope in 1977 and sometimes held up as a possible message from aliens. For the first time Muse handed most of the production to someone else. Dan Lancaster produced eight songs, and Matt admitted the band were control freaks who found it hard to be told to play better by someone younger. The song Hush became the first Muse track with a guest singer, Ellie Goulding, who happened to be recording next door and added her vocal late one night. Matt credited Chris Martin, who had given him a book about collaborating.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Wow! Signal went straight to number one in the UK, Muse's eighth consecutive chart topping studio album, drawing them level with Oasis, Led Zeppelin and R.E.M. on eight number ones. NME called it their most satisfying album since Black Holes and Revelations, while Rolling Stone and Pitchfork were far less impressed, and the Guardian admired its total commitment to its own preposterous world. A North American tour began in July 2026, with a European arena tour due from November. More than thirty years after winning a school battle of the bands, the same three friends from Teignmouth are still together, as of 2026, still aiming for the biggest show on earth.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Muse

Matt Bellamy and Dominic Howard. Matt joined Dom's school band as a teenager and they have played together ever since. Dom is the unflappable one, the drummer who always wanted Muse to be the biggest band in the world. Matt once joked that the band's whole career was him trying to please Dom. Their running gag, is this it, have we made it yet, answered by not yet, nearly, has lasted decades. Matt even said Dom deserved his sexiest male awards.[1] [2] [3]

Matt Bellamy and Chris Wolstenholme. Matt and Dom talked Chris into giving up the drums for bass, and his heavy, distorted basslines became a signature of Muse. For about ten years his bandmates put up with his drinking, then gave him ultimatums. After he got sober in 2009, Matt made room for him to write and sing two songs on The 2nd Law. Dom summed up what sobriety meant for the three of them in four words. It gave them a future.[1] [2] [3]

Matt Bellamy and Kate Hudson. Matt began dating the American actor Kate Hudson in 2010. They became engaged in April 2011, and their son Bingham was born that July. His heartbeat opens the song Follow Me, and Matt said Madness grew out of an argument with her. The couple announced in December 2014 that the engagement was over. Matt later said her kind of fame felt like living in a fishbowl, and he has spent term times in Los Angeles to stay close to their son.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Matt Bellamy and Elle Evans. Matt began dating the American model and actor Elle Evans in February 2015, and she appeared in Muse's video for Mercy that year. They married on the tenth of August 2019. Their daughter was born in June 2020, just as the pandemic, wildfires and protests gripped Los Angeles, and their son followed in May 2024. Elle is also stepmother to Matt's son with Kate Hudson.[1] [2] [3]

Matt Bellamy and George Bellamy. Matt's father George played rhythm guitar in the Tornados, whose 1962 instrumental Telstar was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and which Margaret Thatcher once chose as one of her Desert Island Discs. George played his son Robert Johnson and Ray Charles records, and the sound of Telstar echoes through Knights of Cydonia. Matt's parents divorced in the early nineteen nineties.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Muse and Dennis Smith and Safta Jaffery. Studio owner Dennis Smith had watched the boys grow up and gave them free time at Sawmills. With the manager Safta Jaffery he formed Taste Media, which signed Muse, managed them for free, and executive produced their first three albums. In 2005 the pair stepped down as managers, though Jaffery kept the publishing rights to those first three albums. He died in 2017.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Muse and John Leckie. The veteran producer of the Stone Roses and Radiohead's The Bends started coming to Muse gigs in 1998 and produced Showbiz and Origin of Symmetry. He dismissed the endless Radiohead comparisons and opened Matt's ears to Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Jimi Hendrix, playing records in the dark after sessions. Years later Matt publicly thanked him for teaching Muse how to produce.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Muse and Rich Costey. The American producer joined Muse for Absolution, aiming to make them sound colossal, and went on to produce Black Holes and Revelations. He overruled the band to add the guitar solo to Supermassive Black Hole, and returned for Simulation Theory and the 2021 remix of Origin of Symmetry. When the pandemic hit, he left Los Angeles and handed Matt the keys to his Santa Monica studio.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Muse and Maverick Records. Muse signed to Madonna's American label on Christmas Eve 1998, but the partnership soured over Matt's falsetto, which the label did not think was right for radio. Origin of Symmetry was shelved in America until 2005. When Serj Tankian of System of a Down tried to sign Muse, Maverick asked for half a million dollars to release them. The bitter end fed into the lyrics of Absolution.[1] [2] [3]

Muse and Queen. Muse have often been compared to Queen, and the band welcomed it. Brian May praised The Resistance, calling them extraordinary musicians who let their madness show. In 2010 May and Roger Taylor presented Muse with the O2 Silver Clef award, and Taylor called them probably the greatest live act in the world. Matt told them, we owe you so much.[1] [2] [3]

Muse and Dan Lancaster. The producer, known for his work with Bring Me the Horizon and Blink 182, mixed Won't Stand Down and joined the live band in May 2022, replacing Morgan Nicholls, who had played with Muse since 2006. He went on to produce eight songs on The Wow! Signal. Matt said Lancaster pushed the band past the lazy point of middle age and was almost a member.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Muse

• Muse's first grant came from the Prince's Trust, which gave the teenage band one hundred and fifty pounds for equipment. Back when they were still called Rocket Baby Dolls, the band won a small grant from the Prince's Trust charity to buy gear. They later smashed some of their equipment on stage while winning a local battle of the bands.[1]
• Muse's debut EP was pressed in only nine hundred and ninety nine hand numbered copies, with a cover Dominic made from photocopies of his face. The 1998 Muse EP came out on Sawmills owner Dennis Smith's tiny label, Dangerous. Smith said it was never about making money, but a statement of intent to the music industry.[1]
• Matt only returned to the piano because Sunburn sounded bad on guitar during the Showbiz sessions. He had abandoned piano after seeing a video of Hendrix smashing a guitar. While recording Sunburn around the age of twenty, he tried it on piano instead, and it became a Muse trademark.[1] [2]
• The title Origin of Symmetry came from a book by the physicist Michio Kaku. In his book Hyperspace, Kaku suggested that a future scientist might write a work called The Origin of Symmetry, echoing Darwin. Matt loved the idea of looking for where the balance of the universe comes from.[1]
• Part of Origin of Symmetry was recorded on David Gilmour's houseboat studio on the River Thames. The sessions moved between several studios, including the Pink Floyd guitarist's floating Astoria studio. For the song Megalomania, the band also recorded a real church organ in Bath.[1]
• On Absolution you can hear Chris Wolstenholme diving into a swimming pool. At Grouse Lodge in Ireland the band recorded two kick drums in the studio's pool for Apocalypse Please, and captured Chris's dive for the bridge of Thoughts of a Dying Atheist.[1]
• Muse turned down fifty thousand dollars from Celine Dion for the right to call her Las Vegas show Muse. In 2002 the band held the worldwide performing rights to the name. Matt said they did not want to arrive in America with people thinking they were Celine Dion's backing band. Dion dropped the name.[1] [2]
• Muse sued Nestlé over a coffee advert and gave the money to Oxfam. In 2003 Nescafé used Muse's recording of Feeling Good without permission. The band won the case and donated the damages to charity. Later, sixty per cent of the proceeds from their download single Apocalypse Please went to Oxfam.[1] [2]
• Matt Bellamy was listed by Guinness World Records for smashing one hundred and forty guitars on a single tour. The record, printed in the 2010 edition, was set on the Absolution tour. He later bought a majority stake in Manson, the Devon workshop that builds his guitars.[1] [2]
• Matt called the scar from his 2004 Atlanta accident a proper rock star scar. He fell onto his guitar mid show and split his upper lip, spending four hours in a hospital waiting room. He admitted it felt like karma, since his swinging guitar had once cut Dom's eyebrow.[1] [2]
• Telstar, the hit Matt's father played on, was one of Margaret Thatcher's Desert Island Discs choices. George Bellamy played rhythm guitar in the Tornados. The Guardian noted the irony, given that Muse's own songs were later embraced by American conservative commentators.[1] [2]
• Supermassive Black Hole was used to wake astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. It was played as a wake up call on what was expected to be the shuttle's final day in space, the twenty sixth of May 2010.[1]
• The guitar solo in Supermassive Black Hole exists only because the producer overruled the band. Rich Costey thought the bridge was weak. Muse did not want to add anything, so Chris fetched a four string guitar from his hotel room and played the riff used as the solo.[1]
• The Knights of Cydonia video claims to be copyrighted in 1981 and filmed in the People's Republic of Socialist Romanistan. The spaghetti western spoof, directed by Joseph Kahn, was actually shot in Romania, London and California over five days, with the band appearing partly as holograms.[1]
• Knights of Cydonia won Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2007 by just thirteen votes. The Australian radio poll put Muse ahead of Silverchair's Straight Lines. Two years later the song was voted number eighteen in Triple J's Hottest 100 of all time.[1]
• Health and safety rules stopped Muse from dangling acrobats from a helicopter over Wembley Stadium. The band finally got a flying saucer on the Resistance tour, after failing on earlier tours, with an acrobat dressed as an alien dropping out of it above the crowd.[1] [2]
• Undisclosed Desires was the first Muse song on which Matt played neither guitar nor piano. Dom programmed the drums and Chris played slap bass, joking that slap bass has probably never been cool. Matt said the lyric was a personal song about his girlfriend.[1]
• Chris Wolstenholme's school gate friends only found out he was in Muse after chatting in the pub, then went home to google him. The Guardian described him in 2012 as an affable family man with his children's names tattooed on his arms. He would go on to have ten children.[1] [2]
• Muse carried the Olympic flame through their home town of Teignmouth in 2012. Thousands turned out on day two of the torch relay. A few weeks later their song Survival became the official song of the London Games.[1]
• Madness was played on a Misa Kitara, a touch screen MIDI instrument, instead of a bass guitar. Chris used it for the song's main bass riff. Matt said Madness started after an argument with Kate Hudson, when he realised she had been right.[1] [2]
• The heartbeat at the start of Follow Me belongs to Matt's son Bingham before he was born. Matt recorded it on his iPhone, and called the song an ode to fatherhood. The track was co produced by the electronic trio Nero.[1] [2]
• Muse's 2013 Rome concert was the first ever filmed in 4K. Sixteen 4K cameras captured the show at the Stadio Olimpico in front of more than sixty thousand people, and it was screened in cinemas around the world.[1]
• The riff in Psycho lived for years as a live jam after Stockholm Syndrome before becoming a song. Fans knew it by its guitar tab numbers. The band wanted to sample the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket but were refused, so the military chants were recreated.[1] [2]
• Glastonbury refused to let Muse fly drones over the crowd in 2016. The band had been flying them at arena shows on the Drones tour, though not always successfully. At one Detroit show several failed at the same moment.[1] [2]
• Matt borrowed a stage idea from Lady Gaga, wearing video glasses to perform Madness in 2012. He saw her play to about five hundred people in 2007 and dragged the band along. He later confessed he had straight up ripped her idea of phones turned into glasses.[1]
• Matt Bellamy owns the Telecaster Jeff Buckley played on his album Grace. He had a team verify it with Buckley's family before buying it in 2020. Buckley's voice had convinced the young Matt that a high singing voice could work in rock.[1] [2]
• Will of the People was the first number one album in Britain to be sold as an NFT. A limited digital pressing of one thousand copies was sold through the web3 marketplace Serenade, and counted toward the Official Chart.[1] [2]
• Matt has an Irish passport, through his mother, who was born in Belfast. After Brexit he said he wanted to regain European citizenship, and in 2023 he told a Dublin audience that the passport had come through.[1]
• Muse promoted The Wow! Signal by sending a tablet about thirty three kilometres above the Earth. They worked with an English company called Sent Into Space to launch the device when they announced the album and released the single Be with You in March 2026.[1]
• Ellie Goulding recorded her part on Hush in about an hour and a half, after popping in from the studio next door. She was working with Marshmello when she looked in around eleven at night. It is the first Muse song with a guest singer.[1] [2]
• Chris Martin gave Matt a book called The Collaborative Way as a Christmas present. Matt took it as a hint that he needed to learn to work with others. He said Hush, written with a small team, was the only collaborative co write he managed on The Wow! Signal.[1] [2]
• Unravelling was the first Muse song to use an eight string guitar. Critics compared its heavy sound to Meshuggah and Sleep Token. Muse opened their 2025 tour with it in Helsinki before it was released.[1] [2]
• The title Map of the Problematique comes from the Club of Rome think tank. It refers to the group's idea of a global problematique, a set of looming world problems, linked to the 1972 book The Limits to Growth.[1]
• Matt has said Bliss was his favourite Muse song because its arpeggios remind him of a children's programme he heard at five. He joked that he probably ripped it off that show. On the Origin of Symmetry tour, Bliss usually closed the night with giant confetti filled balloons.[1]
• Muse's guitar used just once, in a rehearsal with the Edge, sold for thirty three thousand pounds at a charity auction. They donated it at the 2010 Silver Clef awards for the Nordoff Robbins music therapy charity. The buyer was their own booking agent.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.