Behind the Bass: Chris Wolstenholme

Chris Wolstenholme

Doing some reaseach about muse daily actually has it benefits. I stumbled apon a website that actually had an interview from MUSE's bassist, Chris Wolstenholme. It is known to many musers that he doesnt really like to partake in interviws of the band. I am not quite sure why he isn't fond of interviews, but i did happen to find one with just him in it. Below is thus interview;

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You guys are really big in Australia now, but has that always been the case? The first time we played in Australia we played in a RSL. That was in 1999. We played to maybe 50 or 60 people. We did a couple of tours in Australia on our first album, and then we didn’t come here at all for the second album. And then it wasn’t until Absolution where we did the Big Day Out. Things didn’t really seem to be moving forward in Australia at all. And all of a sudden it all went crazy. And since then we’ve kept coming back.

When in Sydney, where do you go? We like Harry’s. We were sitting there eating pies looking down at the mudflats [it was lowtide], and it was covered in rats. It was weird eating and watching rats. It didn’t work.

What was going through your mind before that Wembley gig? I think I was pretty much as terrified as I’ve ever been for a gig. But not just that day – I was nervous for the entire week. Any normal gig, even big arenas, you only really get nervous maybe half an hour before the show. The difference between an arena and a stadium is obvious. Sixty-something thousand people, that’s a different story.

How much planning went into the show? That gig was booked nine months before we actually did it. There was so much planning. And it was always there in the back of our minds – we have a huge show on June 16 and 17 at Wembley Stadium. The week leading up to it was where everyone was getting extremely nervous, and then the day before the gig, I felt sick. It was that bad. Obviously excited as well, but I felt sick. And not just because of the amount of people – just the fact we’d never really played a stadium before and we were unsure as to whether our music would work in a stadium. But once we got out there, it was great.

Did anything go wrong? It was quite emotional really. A couple of times I almost felt choked up because it made me think a lot of where we came from – playing in little clubs to 20 or 30 people, when mates from college used to come and watch us play, and that doesn’t seem like that long ago: seven, eight or nine years ago. To then be up at this level playing Wembley Stadium, it was quite emotional.