Muse are the greatest
British rock heretics of the new century. formed in Teignmouth,
Devon in 1994. It has three members; Matthew Bellamy (singer,
guitarist and keyboardist), Chris Wolstenholme (bassist) and Dominic
Howard (drummer and percussionist). Bellamy is the principal
songwriter and creative influence in the band, although some of the
band's more recent material has also been credited to Wolstenholme
and Howard.
When they first cast strange and exhilarating shadows over the
musical landscape at the tail end of the 90s, the cultural orthodoxy
was not looking for an audacious, ambitious, heavy neo-classical
metalcorepunk hyper-rock band, with a precocious, vocally soaring,
22 year old singer, apparently fallen from a distant galaxy. The
times were seeking familiar, dependable sounds. Muse were neither,
and yet by the time of their second album in 2001 they were playing
European arena shows to 20,000 astonished onlookers, destroying
extravagant amounts of equipment, filling the music press with tales
of debauchery and crashing the pop charts. They must have being
doing something contrarily right.