Muse, Jack White and the Strokes are all celebrating new album releases this year, but for Muse’s Matt Bellamy, the biggest moment came backstage at Coachella, where he found himself reflecting on just how rare their longevity has become.
Standing with White and Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., Bellamy had what he described as a “pinch me” moment.
“I was backstage chatting to them, and I went, ‘Fuck, we’re still here!’” Bellamy tells NME. “We were like, ‘We’re the guitarists from the 2000s! We did it!’ It was so cool.”
The conversation prompted Bellamy to look back on the early days of Muse, when the band emerged as outsiders during a rapidly shifting rock landscape.
“Three things were going on back then,” he says. “The end of Britpop, nu-metal in America, and then the new exciting thing was the Strokes, the White Stripes — that retro rock and roll thing.”
Muse, he says, “didn’t fit in with any of those things.”
Even so, Bellamy believes White helped reshape rock guitar at a time when lead playing had largely fallen out of favor, doing so with some left-field retro gear choices, including budget electric guitars and amps.
“He’s a real lead guitarist,” Bellamy says of the White Stripes founder. “In every song, he’s doing pretty busy solos.
“Solos were something I was trying to push down a little bit. I feel like when we first came up, the guitar solo was already an embarrassing thing to do. If anything, I would say that Jack White brought it back.”
Bellamy’s admiration for White’s playing was underscored when he was asked whether he’d ever consider joining White and Hammond in a modern-day, guitar-heavy answer to the Traveling Wilburys.
His answer suggested he’d rather leave the blues to White.
“They would embarrass me with how good they are,” he says. “There might be a couple of things that I can do, but if it comes to blues, then he’s going to kill me!”
