Interview with Chris Wolstenholme

by James
Bass Guitar Magazine
Issue 2 - 2002

You'd be forgiven for thinking that with the seemingly bottomless pit of television programmes dedicated to creating the next music industry hit, that your only hope of making it on stage is to perfect your TV pout and be ready to be told what to do when it comes to making music. Thankfully, for those of use that prefer a little more originality and excitement in our listening tastes, there are bands like Muse. Formed from the most humble of origins in a sleepy southwest seaside town, Muse have quite rightly been hailed as the saviours of British Rock. Where manufactured pop demands neat and clean cut, Muse create new sonic territories, defying belief that such walls of sound could come from a trio. Whilst everyone else is content to keep it pure and simple, Muse demand energy and excitement. Whilst most of the coverage of the band has focused on front man, guitarist, songwriter, and lead singer, Matthew Bellamy, there's no doubt that one of rock's new driving rhythm sections is the combined force of drummer Dominic Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme. As Bellamy leaps between keyboard and guitar duties, often treating each number to a good dose of his high tech custom guitar sound effects, the tune is often carried by the driving and melodic bass lines of the twenty three year old bassist. With their first album, Showbiz, reaching sales of over a million world wide, and the follow up Origin of Symmetry charting at No. 3 in the UK charts, success must have seemed a long way away from the bands early days when fate would bring together two school groups that chose to rehearse at the same time.
Chris managed to find time between a hectic touring schedule and album promotion to drop in to the offices of Bass Guitar Magazine and chat to the editor about Muse's early days and beyond.
"The band got together when we were 15. I was actually in two bands before Muse. There were two main bands at school, Gothic Plague and Fixed Penalty. We would play at Teignmouth High School, where we were all at, and used the boxing ring as the stage so we could stash all the booze at the back of it and get drunk whilst we were playing! Then all those bands split up. That's when people started getting into skate boarding and lost interest in playing in bands. Soon there were only three of us left. I think we were getting fed up of playing covers, so we said 'let's do something a bit more original' and starting doing our own stuff. Prior to that we were covering stuff like the Senseless Things and trying to be a bit Goth Rock!"
Like so many bassists, Chris found himself assigned to four string duties when guitarist Matthew Bellamy and drummer Dominic Howard, carried on Gothic Plague with Bellamy recording bass lines on his six string guitar.
"I only picked up the bass about two days before I joined Muse actually. I started off on the guitar but I was a drummer for about three years. I'd played drums in the band I was in before Muse. Matt and Dom were already starting to record some stuff at school. They were rehearsing in one room and I was rehearsing in another with my band. They wanted a bass player who could do backing vocals. I was drumming and doing backing vocals so when they knew I could play the guitar they asked if I wanted to try playing bass and do some backing vocals, I said I'd give it a go and that's how it all started."
And of course he was well prepared for his duties apart from one thing...
"Well, I didn't actually have a bass at the time. I had a mate who was in the band I was in before who had some crappy old bass, which I borrowed for a while until some girl who Matt knew said she was selling a bass for fifty quid. I think it was called a Mustang and it was really scruffy. I had it for about a year and a half. It looked really bad. It was totally black so I got a sander and just left a black stripe down the middle where the strings were! Eventually I swapped it with my mate who was in the previous band as he had a PA head. It's a shame really, because you should always keep your first bass."
With the band members equipped and ready, and after a brief spell playing under the guise Rocket BabyDolls, the teenage Muse were preparing their master plan.
"We began playing locally at the Exeter Cavern Club and our home town of Teignmouth but we had this idea of doing a tape and sending it to different places and going round and playing every single pub in Devon. We booked all these gigs but we never got asked back because they were expecting a covers band and we would go and play a full on punk set which is what we were doing when we started. Not surprisingly, one by one we were losing all the venues. When we started we were doing a gig every week and when we got signed we were doing a gig about once every two or three months!"
Fortunately, Muse chose not to take the easier route by adding covers into the set and became more determined to play their own music.
"Yeah, we'd done the covers thing previously and it was annoying to get people coming up to us telling us we had to do covers because we wouldn't get anywhere if we didn't. I tried to explain to them that Nirvana didn't go around playing 60's covers and that you don't need to do that if you want to make your own music."
In the face of ever decreasing gig opportunities, gritty determination paid off when Dennis Smith (owner of Sawmills Studio when had seen artists such as Supergrass and Oasis record in its secluded setting) started to take an interest in the band.
"He'd come to a few gigs previously, round about 1995. He said we had promise but it wasn't until about 1997 that he approached us with an offer of free studio time. We did our first 4-track EP at his studio. Two months later we did the Muscle Museum EP although as far as we were concerned the CD was only to sell at gigs."
Dennis Smith was convinced enough to take on the role of manager and pushed the band to greater reaches by setting up showcases in the USA. Together with an enthusiastic fan that just happened to be the co-owner of Maverick Records, all the ingredients were in the right place.
"Maverick bought the first EP from the Internet, liked it, and bought the second one as well assuming we were a signed band. When we went to America to play for Columbia they heard we were in town and made us stay an extra night to do a showcase - they signed us before we'd done two numbers. The showcase was Guy from Maverick, Steve Jones (guitarist from the Sex Pistols) and two lawyers! Jones had come along as a friend of Guy and became a fan of the band, coming to see our gigs. Walking down Sunset Blvd we would hear this cockney accent yelling, "Do you want a lift mate!" and it would be Steve Jones in his car!!"
To an outsider, it was as if the band had appeared from nowhere and was now poised to make the jump into the big time, yet Chris feels that the success has come more gradually.
"It's always felt like it's carried on really, it's never felt like it's suddenly gone crazy. There has been the odd moment where it's felt like we've gone from here, (mimics opint on the ground) to here (points to ceiling), but most of the time it felt the same playing-wise. Your personal life changes because what you're doing. You're going away and stuff but I think a lot of bands get over excited and suddenly expect to be playing to two thousand people at their next gig. For us it wasn't really a big deal, we had a bottle of champagne at Christmas and celebrated a bit more than usual, but that was also because my son Alfie was due to be born, so it was just like a quiet celebration at Christmas before we actually went off and started touring as a signed band. Our first tour was playing at small venues sometimes to just 30 or 40 people."
This was to be the case even as a signed band because that first tour only had the Muscle Museum EP as commerically available material. Without an album or single to promote Muse took to the studios pretty pronto. The resulting album was Showbiz, which featured the production talents of John Leckie who had previously worked with Radiohead and the Stone Roses. Showbiz hailed the entry of the big time for Muse with TV appearances and four singles, which showed the talent that was being unleashed. From the quirky and indefinable "Muscle Museum" to the sensitivities of "Unintended" the band knew they had a hit on their hands. I asked Chris how that album felt now.

"Yes, I'm pleased with it. It seems weird listening to it now. Everything seems really slow and not very heavy on it but I think it was good for the time. I think because we play so much live, the way the band plays together now and the whole tightness of the band is just miles ahead of what it was when we did the Showbiz album. I think the energy levels are a lot higher now. With Origin of Symmetry it sounds more like how we perform live. It's a lot heavier, and I think it's little things like having the right equipment, which, as you know, we went through a lot of gear trying to find what we wanted. We've finally now settled on the sort of instruments we like and the amps we like and know exactly how they're supposed to sound and we can make sure everything fits well together. Take for example Dom's drumming. He's a a lot harder and a lot more energetic than he was. There's just a lot more energy on it; it's louder and more energetic. There is some experimental stuff as well, the sort of mellower stuff but not mellow in the sense of tepid mellow! There isn't really anything you could call a ballad on there. There's this one track, "Megalomania" where we went into this church in Bath, when we were at Realy World recording studioes, (owned by Peter Gabriel - Ed.) to see if we could use a church organ. Well, I ended up paying £300 to this guy to use the church organ! We put it down onto John's computer and then recorded through the computer and put it onto tape. There's also a bit of harpsichord somewhere in there. We were at some guy's house who hires out harpsichords, he's got this showroom with about seven harpsichords most of which he builds himself, so we had one of those for the day. We just had some weird instruments. For a lot of the mellower stuff we used this massive bass, I don't know if John got it from somewhere, it looks like an acoustic bass but it was about four times the size and you had to play it like an upright. I used this on about two or three tracks, the mellower ones. Dom had this really old beaten up drum kit that was hired in. I think John got all this stuff from some sort of theatre group or something. You know the sort of drum kits that you're likely to see up at school or somewhere and its been chucked out in the stock room looking old; but it sounded really good. It was like an old bass drum, snare drum and some really knackered cymbals, that was cool."
Chris' enthusiasm with Origin of Symmetry was revealed as he detailed the way the band experimented in the studio without too many worries as to recreating the tracks live.
"I think on a lot of the heavier stuff, the main part of the sound comes from the three of us, more so than on the first album. But I think that in the songs where we do the experimental stuff we're not afraid to consider, how are we going to play this live, there's only three of us? I think studios are always a place to experiment. With "Unintended" for instance, it took us about four versions before we settled on one that we like playing live and in the end it ended up being the mnost stripped down one, because we had keyboards and Matt had the Roland VG-8 (guitar synthesizer - Ed.) doing all sorts of stuff, double bass was going on and all kinds of things. Then we just ended up doing it with two acoustic guitars and some Moog Taurus pedals - that was it. It worked really well then. I'm sure wel'll have the same problem again but it's always nice to change stuff when playing live anyway, I can't imagine playing the same song exactly the same every night. God knows how long, how many years that some bands do that. I think it's always good to change it and do different versions otherwise we'd just get stale."
Although the album credits Matthew Bellamy as the songwriter, the actual song creating process is more democratic.
"On some of the songs all the basslines are what Matt has done, sometimes it's purely what I've done, or it may be a bit of both. Songs like "Sunburn" and "Overdue" and a lot of the newer stuff as well, have my own lines on them. The way it's always worked it we've always sat down and Matt brings an idea in. He can usually get the vibe of us pretty quick, whether we think we're crap without us even saying it! We'll sit down, arange together, and do whatever it takes. We'll just play it and change it until there's some sort of workable thing there. Sometimes it works in different ways. I mean there's been some songs where we've gone in and Matt has just a riff and the band will play and that's it, the song's finished. Songs like "Agitated", a B-side limited edition that's really punky; it's quite a few years old but that was like twenty minutes and - done! Then there's one song we did on Origin which literally took us about, well, I think we started working on it just after we finished Showbiz and just got it ready for Origin. Also there's the material where every time we rehearsed, we'd play it, change it, and do this and do that but couldn't find what we needed, then all of a sudden it happened but it ended up being eight minutes long! Yeah, it's different ways for us, it's different all the time how it works really."
Listening to the bands two albums it's clear that Chris has chosen a trade-mark sound that combines a hard-hitting bass tone with a combination of edgy or downright over the top nasty distorted tones running alongside. The comprehensive gear listing section gives the full history and details of how that sound has evolved. After lots of experimentation it seems he is now settled into a set up that suits him well.
"I've been using Marshall DBS stuff now for some time. I've got 1x15 and 4x10 cabs and I've also got a Marshall B150 which I use for distortions and basically all my effects. I go from my bass into an octaver, and then into an Electro Harmonix Big Muff so those pedals can sort of go over everything. That signal inputs into an AB box, which splits to the B150 where I've got a couple of different distortions and bass synths. So the main signal going to the Marshall stays completely clean to keep lots of bottom end and then I just sort of an an edge through the combo."
Hang on; that means you can go into a distortion and then with the AB box you can add more distortion or effects?
"Yeah, I do sometimes every now and again! The Big Muff is the only distortion pedal that doesn't lose bottom end with a bass; you can have full distortion and stil get great bass. It's the green Russian one, but we found it in Japan and paid about 80 quid for it. There's also a Boss Turbo Overdrive that I occasionally use. I recently found a distortion pedal in Japan that insted of the usual red LED, it has a blue one so I always know when it's on! I've also started using Line 6 PODs in the studio and live. We went to Japan and Australia as part of our last tour and found the hire situation quite difficult. In parts of Australia all the back line was Ampeg and sometimes you'd plug in and have smoke coming out of the back because it was so old! When we went to Japan, just as an experiment we tried using line 6 POD's. We found that the main sound was almost as good as the real thing; the difference was so small that you'd barely notice it in a live situation. They're so good that you can model your sound as to how your main rig is anyway because there is so much control on them."
After trading his customised Fender Mustang bass Chris began to seek out an instrument that would cope with extensive touring duties. As anyone who saw the band's early shows can attest, those duties often included some major stage abuse as the band's energy often over spilled into an orgy of gear destruction with guitars being ensnared in various cables and smashed onto the stage like some cowboy lassoing his steer! Now with some more expensive equipment on stage the band seem to have quelled their old habits although a recent application of matt black paint to his main stage bass suggests he's not yet finished in his bass customising career.
"My two main basses now for recording and live use, are two Pedulla Raptures, the single pickup models (RB-4's - Ed.). I used the twin pickup model for a while but I prefer the sound of the single pickup model. I also have a green Bass Collection on stage (this recently was the victim of flood damage - Ed.). When we were in Japan, the Bass Collection factory invited me to try out and choose a few basses and I was given a model that I have never seen before. I mainly keep this at home as so many of my basses get spread around everywhere. On our first tours to promote Showbiz, I also used an electric upright bass called a Clifton. I don't use that so much these days because of the gear we have to carry. What we started doing at the end of the last tour was instead of doing a full-on rock set, we would start of with 5 or 6 acoustic songs. This meant I was either using an acoustic guitar or the Moog Taurus pedals or playing acoustic bass. I had to keep swapping between instruments. I've also got a couple of electro-acoustic basses, an Ibanez and one I picked up in Australia, which I have no idea what it is. We had to buy one because I couldn't hire one!"
Technique-wise, Chris is a fan of straight fingerstyle although that hasn't always been the case.
"Yes, I play fingerstyle all the time but when I first started playing, I used a pick for about a year and then gradually changed my technique and just used the pick for the odd song. Now I can't play with a pick at all. Sometimes you might want to use a pick for a more twangy sound but I have found recently that I just can't do it."
Following their most successful tour to date promoting Origin of Symmetry, the band have taken a well-earned rest and are putting the final touches to a new live DVD filmed in Paris. With plans for an assault on the US there will be fewer live appearances in the UK this year but there is a treat in store for fans on the new DVD.
"Right now we're going into the studio again to fine tune two new songs which will be on the new DVD. So far they've only been performed live so we're going to include them as part of the DVD package. Then we are off for a tour of Scandinavia."
Talking of tours, I ask Chris about his tour bus cocktail making status...
"Oh it was much more a case of we got a juicer on the tour bus and I just threw in any fruit that we had lying around and then started throwing in Vodka and anything else I though should go in!"
With son Alfie demanding a little more attention during our photo shoot, it was time to wind things down by asking Chris what it was like playing in a band like Muse and at this point a new emotion seemed to emerge from the bassist.
"When you get people together and the chemistry really works, when you're on stage and there's something there that pulls you together, when that happens, and it pretty much started with Muse from the early days, even when we weren't that good, then there's something special happening, almost like a magical force. There is something about the three of us together more so than there was with any of our previous bands and I think that's grown now, especially with the live shows. Towards the end of the touring period last year it just got better and better. For a while our live shows weren't that exciting because we'd got so used to playing to nobody we became very introvert. We were just playing for ourselves and not bothering to put on a show for anyone and it wasn't until we played with the Chili Peppers that we came out of ourselves a bit. We were playing in front of 15-20,000 people so we couldn't just stand there, just watching the Chili Peppers perform taught us to come out a bit more on stage."