Sunburn acoustic live in HMV Bristol 1999 beloved

Local Muse town crier. Main: @aeolianblues. Also yes my icon is how I museblog this is so silly

[sunburnacoustic]

Muse performing Sunburn as part of a 3-song acoustic set also comprising Cave and Muscle Museum in HMV in Bristol in 1999 before their debut album tour for Showbiz supporting Skunk Anansie kicked off.

This was part of many in-store signing sessions the band did for Showbiz (it blows my mind what a dedicated fanbase they had built up just from touring the south of England playing live, and the few EPs that were out at the time). They were an extremely hard-working band when it came to touring: they played a stupid amount of gigs that year. I remember an interview from the summer of 2000 where an interviewer mentioned that they had played over 45 festival dates that year, "that's 30 gigs too many", the interviewer opined (cannot remember which interview this was). An insane amount of touring, which really solidified support for the band before Origin of Symmetry came out and Muse inevitably exploded over the mainland and UK. (British media were still lukewarm but that's a different story.)

The day they played this signing session in Bristol, they also crossed over into Wales to do a second session in an HMV in Cardiff. The same day. Absolute beasts and madmen of live playing, no wonder they became who they became: one of the finest live bands on earth. Unfortunately no one recorded the Cardiff set!

This performance just lives permanently in my brain (and in my iPod. Don't ask me what I got out of it on a 4 cm screen but I remember trying to work out Matt's playing on it. Unbelievable what we made do with back in the day!) hence the URL!

[psychedelicflyingshark]

[sunburnacoustic]

Hey Muse fans, Lammo’s on 6Music tonight and he’s doing a 2003 throwback (listening to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever To Tell in full) but he’s also bringing back sessions from his time on air, including Franz Ferdinand’s and Muse’s! Live right now (I’ll try and tape it)

[sunburnacoustic]

Apparently from Lammo’s time on Radio 1, he’s found an interview with Matt from just before the release of Time Is Running Out, and he got to first premier the song to the world! I’ll try and get it

[sunburnacoustic]

Visit Original Link

Rebroadcast today, this clip is from the BBC Radio 1 archives, back from when Steve Lamacq used to host Lamacq Live on Monday nights. Matt dropped by Radio 1 to talk to Lammo about Absolution ahead of its release, on 21 July 2003, and this was the radio debut of Time Is Running Out.

Matt talked about the themes on the album Absolution, about how the album was written, in a studio on a break, in contrast to Origin of Symmetry which was written largely on the road, and about their plans for upping their game at upcoming live shows: discussions of props, plans denied by Health and Safety, paramotors, balloons ('Didn't the Flaming Lips do the balloons at Reading? Aah, they're all cashing in on it now')

Matt on the meaning of the title Absolution, and particularly Sing For Absolution: 'That song is talking about wanting to change yourself, a little bit of guilt about the past; in the chorus I'm saying that for me the act of actually making music is itself an absolution, a way of finding meaning in life, if you like.'

Matt described the album as 'half a best of, half the future of' Muse, pointing to songs like Endlessly, Butterflies and Hurricanes and Blackout.

A fan wrote in (on the BBC Radio 1 messageboards, what a moment in time!) asking if the album would be (as Matt had apparently said before) in three parts: rock, prog rock and some experimentation, which Matt called fair but added, 'I'm not sure of the "prog rock" bit, I think Mars Volta do a better job of that area than us'.

Time Is Running Out: 'this one is influenced by 'Billie Jean' by Michael Jackson.'

Playing in the background is Stockholm Syndrome, which had already been out for a week at this point after being released in the UK on iTunes download only as a digital single.

(song cut to keep the clip under 10 MB and uploadable to Tumblr)

[alt-rock-confessions]

You know, sometimes I wonder how well Matt Bellamy is aware of how fandom culture works. I mean, the guy manifests his bandmates take their shirts off once in a while and pokes fun at the fact he's shipped with his best mate, amongst many examples.

What if he spent hours on going through lots of music discussion message boards back in the 90s and discovered lots of anons being horny for the likes of Tom Morello or Kurt Cobain. What if he experienced it all first-hand, 'cause it would explain SO much.

Oh, I can actually answer this one.

I don't think he was particularly aware of the writing slash side of fandom culture until after this (2007, Triple J mag) interview. Apart from that, he's got the internet. He was in the trenches. He was [email protected], if you remember those days. He liked the fact that social media meant he could connect with fans directly without needing the press (in the early days of course, when that was manageable and possible. First 15 years).

Is he aware of the side of fandom culture that leans towards groupies and sex with fans? Absolutely, he's well-versed. That done over the internet? Yup. Musewiki has a list of his fetishes on his biography page with archived receipts, ffs. And Matt was never averse to wandering down strange internet rabbitholes, so I wouldn't count that out.

Also, I've always said of him that he's very understanding of what fans go through when they meet him and is very kind to them, because he's been a fan first. I can't say how much he's tumbled down other fandoms, you'd have to check what fan pages of other bands he has followed on various social media sites over the years. I don't think he does much of that anymore though, he's a dad of three, he's writing an album and I think he's stopped venturing into fan spaces. He grew up!

But he's also got his wife who was legit a Muse fan before she met him. She's a bit younger than the band, so while Muse themselves may have already got too big to be trawling fandom repositories the likes of AO3 or Live Journal or whatever else by the time they came into existence, I reckon Elle knows about them. And back in the day, various Muse fansites used to host Q&As, webchats and such, and some of the fansites and messageboards also allowed slash and fan fic. They can't have somehow gone 20 years of being fairly attractive rockstars and not known that fans were lusting after them. The press did it often enough in barely concealed ways whenever they wrote about them or talked to them.

Around the first interviews for Drones in 2015, Matt started joking that Dom wanted to show off his muscles for the fans, and how they'd achieved a sleeveless Dom and he was ready to put down money to make a shirtless member of Muse happen on stage, preferably one not called Matt Bellamy (X-Posure John Kennedy interview, BBC Radio 1 Grimmy interview). Guy must know what fan service is. Then the time around the Simulation Theory era that the Muse account captioned a clip of Matt and Dom playing as 'Belldom'. They know, and I reckon the band's team or Elle or someone else may eventually have told them if they didn't already know. Now Matt does it all the time. God knows if he just had time on his hands like all of us during lockdown, because 2020 is when his famous '#Belldom reunited' post was.

Off the top of my head, that's all I know, but I'm sure if I've missed anything, another Muser will add on to this! Maybe @1-ufo or @dombell might know more.

[takeunobow]

Signal Incoming...

[sunburnacoustic]

Still thinking about Michelle's photos. AAAAGGHHHHH. AUUUUGGHHHHHH. Can I print and eat them or something

[goryholedotjpg]

Matt laughing. Bb that's a woman.

[mattmurdocksstarlight]

I feel like this photo has meme potential…

[earlymusearchives]

1999

[sunburnacoustic]

”3 guys, 6 strings”

MY LIFE IS COMPLETE

Bonus (because there are such delights to life): Matt caught the Nine Inch Nails-Boys Noize collab set and loved it.

[domfuckinghoward]

Happy Birthday, Dominic Howard!

[dominichoward]

guys not EVERY muse song can have whimsy.

[dominichoward]

unless...

[earlymusearchives]

[sunburnacoustic]

For any Muse fans who might get frustrated about how the fandom seems to always be throwing a tantrum about new Muse songs and how much they dislike Muse's 'new directions', just a gentle assurance that the fandom has always been like this.

They were really not fond of Black Holes and Revelations when it came out, some of them didn't even believe Supermassive Black Hole was a real song. They thought it was a joke. Muse, their beloved metal-leaning hard rock band, going glitz, glam and electro? Ignoring the fact that their main man just built a whole synthesizer into his electric guitars (the XY Kaoss pad), Muse and electronic? Ignoring the arp synth on Bliss, Muse and electronic?

Supermassive Black Hole was the first single on BHAR, and the old fans were aghast. Hated it. Then when Twilight used the song and brought Muse to the attention of... well. Teenage girls, essentially, it again split the fandom into the old heads (the real, gritty rock fans, you hear me) and the airheaded dumb teenage girls that only knew them through Twilight and silly romance novels. (I hope you understand these aren't my words. It's just... fucking 2006. The 00s were horrible like that.)

They also hated Take A Bow. Despite the fact that Muse had been using the opening synth progression as an intro to Space Dementia live throughout the Absolution tour, they disliked the synths on it. They hated Invincible.

And just to balance things out, Muse in the meanwhile were having a blast: Matt doing his alien schtick in interviews, jetsetting across Europe from headline gigs and festivals to award shows, they occasionally got to take charter flights and stuff, and they were in an interesting place musically where their sound was expanding, taking inspiration from nightclub indie music like LCD Soundsystem and bussing with the Strokes (they've said Starlight was inspired by them), working up to playing some of the biggest arena and even stadium gigs of their lives. 2006 Reading Festival, their first Reading headline. Huge moment for Muse. 2007, two sold out nights at the 90,000 capacity new Wembley. All this is to say, if Muse hadn't made Black Holes the album they did, there's no way they'd be nearly as successful as they are today. So don't doubt it and don't feel bad for them! But the Muse fandom is passionate, and so you maybe heard the naysayers louder than you would with most band fandoms.

But were there detractors before Black Holes? Might surprise you, but yes! And I'm not talking about Pitchfork and the rest of the press!

This will make no sense in 2025's musical landscape and understanding of rock and guitar music, but fans hated Time Is Running Out. I've seen those old Muse messageboard threads, they did Not hold back. TIRO was a 'pop song', and so it was Bad. It was Muse selling out. Fans had heard quite a few of these songs well before release, and Muse were threatening to go 'more prog' on their third album, and it threw their OOS-loving fans a little. (Check out this interview from the archives with then-BBC Radio 1's Steve Lamacq for a sense of what was going on).

So don't worry about who hates Thought Contagion or whether fans inexplicably dislike Will Of The People, an album so classically Muse that I am forced to wonder whether the fans that dislike it and I are actually thinking about the same band when refer to them. It's been like this on The Resistance (god, they hated the symphonic bits, strings used to really rile up the anti-sentimental rock fandom. Riffs and RIFFS ONLY you hear me?), The 2nd Law got So Much Hate for Muse embracing electronic music (again, not new....) and working with Skrillex, it was the whole reason the 'back to basics, back to our rock roots' idea even popped into the band's head when going in to make Drones. Matt's talked about the well, fan pressure to sound a certain way on the song Pressure, and Simulation Theory itself got a lot of agitated fan responses.

The interesting thing with Muse is that despite it all, the reason why they are still such a widely loved band is that people come around to their albums. At the end of the day, it is fantastic music. Well written, incredibly forward-thinking and genre-blending. Fans' love for Muse keeps them giving the newer albums another chance, and you will often see this in most Muse Youtube comment sections (or other places), there are many comments about how their songs grew on fans. They like them after a few listens. It's just about trusting the band to be good at their job and make incredible music, and I can't give up on Musers despite all my above qualms because they do still have that love and trust. Don't worry about it.

Also, about BHAR specifically (and this is me citing some sources), someone asked about it on the Muse reddit a little while ago and it'll basically confirm what I just told you. Very interesting insight into the place rock music occupied in popular music at the time (in opposition to other genres, the rebellion genre if you will, as opposed to Just Another Popular Genre. That's a whole post in itself). Don't worry about it.

[sunburnacoustic]

Hello Musers! New album cycle so it's time to reblog this post... again! Have fun, enjoy your music and don't mind the Redditors. They're the spiritual successors to the Muse messageboard grumps.

[sitthefuckdown]

Imma be honest, I hate reading comments on Muse posts on any website other than tumblr. It’s all hate filled and rude, insulting the band about their change of of music and how they dont want Muse to go down the creative path they’re taking. It’s stupid how many people go and start insulting the hard work this band is putting into this album. I mean jesus, they’ve pushed these singles out to make us happy. They want to chill and calm down but they push songs out for us, and everyone just trashes their efforts with insults.

If they want to go back to their old music, they will. But right now, they’re making these great songs with their own twists in it. Something human is a great song, and honestly up there with my favorites as of now, along with thought contagion etc etc etc.

People need to give Muse a break tbh. Let them rest, and give them time. They’re trying their best to make an album and have fun doing that.

And helpful tip, dont read facebook comments on Muse. People suck.

[sunburnacoustic]

Again to any new fans: some things never change lmao

[aeolianblues]

Verona's live version is stuck in my head. I don't think I can normally listen to it again. Not for a while. The studio recording won't cut it. Every time it plays in my head, there are choruses of off-key Montrealers singing in my ear, Matt's guitar reverb is echoing around the stadium, I can feel the drums in my bones, Matt's eyes are closed and he's lost in the guitar line. Matt's guitar is looping and he's running down the catwalk, singing with all of us. There's a swishing noise and I'm drowned in confetti and streamers. Hands are in the air. There are blue lights everywhere. It's the best feeling in the world. Regular Verona simply won't cut it for a while. I need to experience Verona live and live only right now.

[aeolianblues]

#damn this is how mercy and dig down were for me #the studio versions just don't hit the way the live versions do

@ghost-proof exactly, you're so right! I missed the Drones tour so I didn't see Mercy live, but this is exactly what people have told me about the experience. And with the balloons and streamers? What a vibe!

It was a similar thing with Dig Down live: three members of Muse huddled in the round with the spotlights shining down, phone flashlights in the air, singing along, the "gospel" pianos, this intimate moment in a massive stadium: it's a live experience, Muse are a live band, and I guess what we sometimes forget is that some of their songs are literally made to be experienced live! Unforgettable.

[punkrock-bottom]

[sunburnacoustic]

Can we kiss contagion on our lips??!