BIOGRAFI CHRIS WOLSTENHOLME

The Band Member Biography (Chris Wolstenholme)

Christopher Wolstenholme

Background information
Birth name
Christopher Tony Wolstenholme
Born
December 2, 1978 (1978-12-02)Rotherham, England
Genre(s)
Alternative rockNew Prog
Occupation(s)
Musician
Instrument(s)
Bass Guitar, Guitar, Keyboards,Vocals
Years active
1992 - present
Label(s)
Warner Bros. RecordsEastwest RecordsAtlantic RecordsHelium 3
Associatedacts
Muse

Christopher Tony Wolstenholme, better known as Chris Wolstenholme (born 2 December 1978, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England) is the bassist for the rock band Muse. He also sings backing vocals to some of the band's songs, and sometimes plays guitar instead of bass. He also plays keyboard on occasions, but rarely and only at live shows.

Biography
Wolstenholme grew up in Rotherham before moving to Teignmouth,Devon in 1989. While living there, he played drums for a post-punkband, while Matthew Bellamy and Dominic Howard played in another. After two years of failed bassists in Bellamy and Howard's band, Wolstenholme gave up the drums and joined with them as bassist to create The Rocket Baby Dolls (later renamed Muse).
He currently lives in Teignmouth with his wife Kelly and their three children Alfie, Frankie and Ava-Jo.

Musical equipmentWolstenholme has used many different basses since the start of Muse's career, starting out with Warwick and Bass Collection basses, alongside an electric double bass for use in the song Unintended. He favoured the Ampeg SVT amps, with 1x18, 2x10 and 2x6 cabs.
Part of Muse's distinctive sound is produced by Wolstenholme's use of distortion. Favouring the Electro Harmonix Big Muff distortion / sustainer, this was used alongside a BOSS Bass overdrive and other effects.
In the Origin of Symmetry era, Wolstenholme had many Pedullabasses. Only using the Pedulla Rapture SB4 basses with a single humbucking pickup, the JB4 bass with two jazz pickups shown in thePlug In Baby video was sold on eBay to a lucky fan. Wolstenholme also changed to use two Marshall amplifiers (3 cabs in total counting his combo amp), he had two separate channels, one for clean bassand one for distorted bass. Chris has also been known to use his Marshall Bass State b150 which he drives to the edge because "it distorts nicely". His effects rig also expanded to include some Line6effects and more BOSS effects.
For Muse's third album, Absolution, Wolstenholme kept the Pedulla basses but also recorded using Warwick basses (his old ones) and others. He also added a Fender Jazz Bass into his lineup for Sing for Absolution and a Zon Sonus Studio 4. For live performances ofStockholm Syndrome Wolstenholme used a beat up Pedulla Rapture SB5 - so beaten up that a tuning peg has been lost and it is only used as a four-string bass now. No surprise that Wolstenholme threw it onto the stage from the audience, then into Dominic Howard's bass drum at the UK's biggest festival, Glastonbury.
He still kept his Marshall amps, and also included more rackmount effects in the form of Line6 Bass Pods and filter modelers, and more. His effects rig became so big that Rocktron All Access MIDI controllers are used both on and off stage to control everything. Also adding in an Akai Deep Impact synth pedal for the hit single Time Is Running Out and a Digitech Synth Wah alongside more effects.
For the latest album, Black Holes and Revelations, Wolstenholme has changed his rig nearly completely. Now favouring Rickenbacker 4003 basses and Fender Jazz Basses for new and old songs alike, he also uses a pick on a few new songs, including Assassin, the beginning of Map of the Problematique, the beginning of Invincible, and the beginning and middle of Knights of Cydonia, according to Muse's August 26, 2006, performance at the Reading Festival. He also plays an upright bass in Soldier's Poem. The Electro Harmonix Big Muff is used more often in this album, nearly in every track, and his vocals are sometimes sung through a vocoder, most noticeably inSupermassive Black Hole.

BIOGRAFI DOMINIC HOWARD

Dominic Howard

Background information
Birth name
Dominic James Howard
Born
December 7, 1977 (1977-12-07) (age 29)Stockport, England
Genre(s)
Alternative Rock
Occupation(s)
Musician
Instrument(s)
Drums
Years active
1988 - present
Associatedacts Muse
Dominic James Howard, better known as Dom Howard (born 7 December 1977 in Stockport,England), is the drummer for the British band Muse.

Biography
Dominic was born in Stockport, not far from Manchester, in England. When he was around 8 years old he moved with his family toTeignmouth, a small town in Devon. He began playing drums at about the age of 11, when he was inspired by a jazz band performing at school.
Dom's first band was named 'Carnage Mayhem', which he was in at school. Meanwhile, he befriended Matt Bellamy, who played guitar but didn't have a stable band. Not long after, Matt was faced with the chance of entering Dom's band. After two years of drop-outs, only Dom and Matt remained. Chris Wolstenholme then entered the scene, who played drums in Fixed Penalty, and with a great "spirit of sacrifice" he began to play bass.
In the first months of 1994 Gothic Plague were born, followed by Rocket Baby Dolls and then finally Muse. From then on, things got more serious for Dominic and the others.
In 2004, Dominic's father William came to watch Muse's performance at Glastonbury 2004, a concert which Matt Bellamy described as "the best gig of our lives" Just after their performance finished, William Howard collapsed from a heart attack. This pushed the band to the verge of breakup, but through support from his family and fellow band members, Dominic recovered, and Muse managed to continue their tour.

StyleDominic is inspired by drummers like Stewart Copeland, Roger Taylor,Buddy Rich, Nick Mason, Tre Cool, Tim Alexander, Dave Grohl, and many more. Grohl can be outlined as a significant influence to Dominic. He has a wide taste in music - he is known to like Jimi Hendrix, Pavement, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen,dEUS, The Smashing Pumpkins, Primus, Rage Against the Machine,Green Day, and Nine Inch Nails. He is also left-handed, so his drumset is "reverse", arranged for his left-handedness.

Equipment

Drum kits
Dom has an exclusivity contract with Tama. He has had several kits, many of which have been destroyed during performances. More recently he has famously used one of their transparent drum kits made from acrylic shells. Some of these drum sets include:
British racing green Starclassic Maple kit with chrome hardware.
Brown fade Starclassic Maple kit with chrome hardware.
Blue sparkle Starclassic Maple kit with chrome hardware (destroyed at the conclusion of the 2001 Origin of Symmetry / Dead Star/In Your World EP support tour, as seen on "Hullabaloo" DVD).
Grey kit (unknown composition) with chrome hardware (as seen on the "Top Of the Pops" live performance and recording of Origin Of Symmetry). Its fate is unknown.
Blue sparkle Starclassic Maple kit with chrome hardware (used during 2002 tour and Absolution recording). Its fate is unknown. At least one rack tom survived until 2003 as it was used at the Grouse Lodge sessions of the Absolution recordings.
Silver sparkle Starclassic maple kit with chrome hardware (as seen inmusic videos for Hyper Music, Feeling Good, Plug In Baby and Dead Star).
Custom chrome finished Starclassic Maple kit with black nickel hardware (as seen on the Absolution Tour DVD). At least four different instances of this kit have been acquired and subsequently destroyed by the band at the end of live shows, at the conclusion of the Earls Court 2004 performance, at the 2004 Glastonbury Festivaland on two other occasions.
Crystal ice (transparent) Starclassic Mirage kit with white nickel hardware. This kit is still in use.
He has also played a Starclassic Bubinga kit supporting MCR in Williamsburg USA.
For recording he has used a blue DW kit.
During 3 songs (Soldier's Poem, Unintended, Blackout) at the band's performance at Wembley Stadium he used a Vintage Gretsch Jazz Kit in a Champagne Sparkle Finish.

Drum sizes
He previously used a 22x16" bass drum, 12x10" rack tom and 14x14" and 16x16" floor toms.
His new chrome kits have a 22x18 bass drum, 12x8 rack tom, 14x12 and 16x13 floor toms with the last being a custom size.
His newer still acrylic kits have a 24"x18" bass drum, 12"x8" rack tom, 14"x12" and 16"x14" floor toms. Also he uses a matching 14"x6" snare, sometimes a 14"x6.5" Tama power metal snare, a 20"x14" gong bass drum. The rack tom, and bass drum are custom sizes.

Snare drums
As well as alternating between using mainly Tama Starclassic Maple 14x6.5", to match his chrome kit and Ludwig LB417 Black Beauty 14x6.5" snare drums, he has a number of less prominent snares used for recording and video clips (for example the shallow snare used for recording Fury, the Starclassic Maple 14x5.5" that matched his silver sparkle kit used for the recording of Ruled By Secrecy, the brass snare in the Time Is Running Out video clip).

Cymbals
Dom uses a selection of Zildjian cymbals. Over the years his tastes in cymbals have changed - for example, on the Hullabaloo DVD he uses 13" A Custom Projection hi-hats, 8" A Custom splash, 11" FX Oriental "Trash" Splash, 18" and 19" A Custom Crashes, 18" FX Oriental China Trash and a 22" K Custom Ride, whereas more recent performances have seen the addition of a 20" FX Oriental Crash of Doom, hung above his hi-hats, and 14" K Custom Special Dry Hi-Hats replace - and contrast - the A Customs. Lately the A Custom splash has been changed out in favour of an 8" A Splash. He has discontinued using the Crash Of Doom as of the Black Holes period, and now uses a 22" K Custom Medium Ride in live situations (and for recording).
For recording he uses darker K or K Custom crashes while he often retains the brighter A Customs in live performances for their increased "cut" (Ks were used at Live 8).

HardwareHe uses Tama Roadpro hardware.
His drum stool is a Tama First Chair with back-rest.
Sticks
He has used Zildjian Dennis Chambers signature series drumsticks, Shaw 5BN drumsticks and Promark 5BNs, as well as many others. Currently, he uses Vater's New Orleans Jazz sticks.

Drum heads
As with most of his equipment Dom rarely sticks with any particular brand of drum head for very long. At Hullabaloo his toms have clear Remo Emperor batter heads while the Black Beauty snare has an Aquarian Hi-energy batter. His Ayotte kick has a Remo Powerstroke 3 batter and the Starclassic snare usually has either coated Emperor or coated Controlled Sound heads.

BIOGRAFI MATT BELLAMY

Biography

Childhood of Matthew

Matthew Bellamy was born in Cambridge (09/06/1978). His mother Marilyn, came from Belfast and met his father, George, a cab driver at the time, as soon as she got off the boat to England. The Bellamys moved to Devon when Matt was five, and despite the fact that his father had a musical background – as a guitar player with ‘60’s group “The Tornadoes”, whose single ‘Telstar’ was the first US Number One by a British band – their son didn’t begin playing an instrument, the piano, until he ."George Bellamy, Matts Father"

was 10 years old.

But musical ability purred through him from a young age.

As a small child, his first piano piece was not “Chopsticks”, but the work of Ray Charles – something the young Bellamy worked out by ear. His old brother, Paul, would ask his sibling to decipher the melodies to songs by The Smiths and The Wedding Present, also on the piano. Bellamy didn’t think too much about these requests at the time and doesn’t seem to think too much about the precocity he displayed back then, even now.

Teignmouth

At the age of 13, George and Marilyn divorced; his father moved to Exeter and Matt stayed with his mother and his brother. It was at about this time that Bellamy began the learning curve of fundamental life interests that still fascinate and fuel him today. The first of these was the obvious process of weeding out and the course which led him to music. The choice was, he says, between people who “got pissed on cider and got into fights down by the sea”, and those who did something else. In hiring an industrial estate youth club called Broad Meadow for “three or four pounds an hour” and staging concerts there, Bellamy and his friends’ young bands – which by this point had begun to include the future members of Muse – did something else. And Bellamy set in the train the very thing that he’s still doing today?

Behind the Bellamy’s door , life was bubbling in unusual – or at least unconventional – ways. At the age of nine, Matt has wandered downstairs late one evening, and discovered his mum, dad and brother focused around a Ouija Board. Instead of shrieking at her son to get out of the room, Marilyn instead chose to sit Matt down and explain what it was his family were doing. She also explained to him that this was nothing to be afraid of, no matter what anyone might think or say. Soon Matt was rushing to school with stories from the Ouija Board to tell to a young and wide-eyed audience.

“It was exciting to go to school and to tell 10-year-old kids all about it, as they found it all quite scary and I was quite impressed that I was doing something that was scary to other people but that wasn’t to me”. He says “I did get quite into that”.

After the divorce of his parents, Marilyn, Paul and Matt were joined on the Ouija Board committee by Paul’s girlfriend, with Matt having the job of translating the letters as they were spelled out by the marker. These messages would come from dead family members other close friends, with sentimental and sentences that were “unspeakably” real, intimate and personal details the authenticity of which was “undoubted”. Once correspondent predicted the Gulf War a full calendar year before the hostilities actually began.

“My beliefs in the whole thing changed”, he says “I now believe that you’re contacting something in your subconscious, which is quiet different. Something that you might not have known was already there. That’s probably more realistic than thinking you’re contacting somebody who’s already dead. And I do practice that.

The town where Matt, Chris and Dom grew up was terrible "The only time the town came to life was during the summer when it turned into a vacation spot for visiting Londoners. When the summer ended they left and took all the life with them. I felt so trapped there. My friends were either getting into drugs or music, but I gravitated towards the latter and eventually learned how to play. That became my escape. If it weren't for the band, I would probably have turned to drugs myself."

In a publicity biography of Muse, Teignmouth is described as a typical seaside town — "barely breathing in summer, stone cold dead in the winter. "If you were aged between 13 and 18, a living hell the whole year round." Mr Fusco, the mayor of Teignmouth fumed: "To say I am upset and disappointed is an understatement. Teignmouth is no worse than anywhere else as far as drugs are concerned, and a darn sight better than many.” When Showbiz was released, the mayor published a picture in a local paper with him throwing Showbiz into a garbage can.

"To start being rude about their hometown, where a lot of people helped them with their music, now they are about to break into the big time shows a lot of ingratitude. There are far, far worse places to grow up in and a lot of places do not have anything like our facilities. It does not do our image much good when this sort of tripe gets dished out in the national media, but for all that I still wish the lads well and hope they reach the top!" Local councillor and youth worker Mary Kennedy took a more laid back view of the outburst. "We shouldn't over-react a lot of young people go through a phase of being unhappy at where they live. It is all part of the growing up process and is quite normal. But it is surprising how many want to come back after they have travelled around a bit and seen other parts of the country. I think we should listen to what young people say about the town and try and make it more appealing for them, rather than constantly criticising them as some senior figures in Teignmouth do."

It seems like Showbiz is a bit about their life in Teignmouth. “Falling Down” describes the 15000 citizens of the town, and how they never gave Muse a chance (you would never hear me sing). You can also hear this in “Muscle Museum”, where Teignmouth still wanted to convince Muse they were doing wrong (to prove I’ve made a big mistake).

Origin Of Muse

At the age of 13 Matt and his pals were doing in music and formed bands. In 1994 (16 y) they were doing a contest named “battle of the bands” in their school. Muse were named “Rocket Baby Dolls”. However the other bands were technically much better than Muse was, Muse wan the contest. A few weeks later they called themselves Muse. “I have always been stimulated by the idea of making a lot of money, in some easy and fast way. For this reason there was a lot of ferment. Everyday a new band came out. There was even a weird legend that said all that energy had come like a "muse", descended from the sky; that's were we got our name from.”

Moving

At the age of 18, Bellamy left home and moved to Exeter, where he lived and worked with a firend as a painter and decorator. This, in keeping with much of the converstation, is an unlikely story told in the tones of a likeable storyteller. It sounds like no big deal. But Bellamy’s friend was a drug dealer, someone who started dealing to friends, turned this enterprise into something more serious and eventually landed himself in prison. The pair of them used to live above a pornographic bookshop. This was in a part of town where all the right stuff was available to all the wrong people. Bellamy’s flat was, he says, “like a scene from Trainspotting, white powders and mirrors everywhere”. “The effect those days had on me, is that I son’t dabble in those kinds of drugs. I don’t touch the cocaine and the heroin. I’ve seen what it does to people. Now Matt only has a bi-annual binge: Magic Mushrooms.

Acceleration

Hooking up with Taste Media (a joint venture between Sawmills, a West Country recording studio and SJP Producer Management), Muse suddenly found themselves at the 1998 In The City. At the same time, a couple of American labels began to show interest, and in November of the same year, the band flew out to New York to play CMJ. After a dazzling show at the Mercury Lounge, they found that US interest was now reaching fever pitch. Two weeks later, they were flown to the States again, this time to LA, where they played a showcase on the Santa Monica Pier. As others deliberated, Madonna's label Maverick took the opportunity to move in and sign them on the spot. The deal was clinched on Christmas Eve, and was rapidly followed by them signing to Motor in Germany, Naïve in France, and finally Mushroom Records in the UK. After five years hard slog the band had gone from 0 to 4 record deals in a couple of months. Their first two limited edition EP's Muse and Muscle Museum emerged on Sawmill's own Dangerous Records label and both quickly sold out. All this setting the blueprint for what was to follow: a tidal wave of serrated guitar noises and seething lyrical anger; it reveals a band determined to match and surpass their mentors. It was enough to ensure that when they started to record their debut album a few weeks later, John Leckie (producer or Radiohead's The Bends) was only too happy to join them. Muse's sheer energy and passion impressed him, like everyone else who's heard them. Matt: "I don't think many bands feel that strongly about their music. It's sad but I think Nirvana were the last band who had that. Music should be an outlet for your emotions. If it wasn't for Muse, I think I'd probably be a nasty violent person. It's definitely a release, and that's the way it should be." Their first proper single, the brilliant Uno, was released following the successful Steve Lamacq's Evening Session Tour, alongside Three Colours Red and The Donnas and a series of dates with Feeder. The single cracked the Top 75.

Next their first album "Showbiz" was released in 1999. A half million copies world wide were sold (and still be sold). The singles Sunburn, Cave, Unintented and Muscle Museum followed up.

In june 2001 Origin Of Symmetry were released, and the live dvd-cd “Hullabaloo” in july 2002.

Muse is now back in the Sawmills studios recording a new album. Some songs are already played on festivals like Emergency and The Smallprint.