Total Guitar - Matt on songwriting

Songwriting, Spanish guitars and why guitar solos are 'uncool' unless they're played by Tom Morello. Hellen Dalley meets the UK's latest rising guitar band. Life has become something of whirlwind for Muse since TG last spoke to frontman Matt: they've been on the cover of magazines, rode up the Top 40, won NME's best new band award and toured everywhere from Manchester to Tokyo. Like Travis, Muse are a band who've made it on the back of their music: not hype. Matt's songs are a beautiful thing: deep, meaningfull, moving, dramatic: his love for classical music such as Chopin, Berlioz and Rachmaninov perhaps partly responsible. Amazingly, these carefully crafted songs come straight from memory: "I dont't write anything down, not even the words." says Matt, simply, "I think, if you forget it, it can't be that good" He gains a lot of pleasure from the songwriting process and still writes all the songs, but as well as being a thoughtful and considered songsmith, Matt can also lay claim to being one of the more interesting new players on the block. But he's worked hard for it. "I really wanted to be a guitar player, so I spent hours playing. I think I was at my best when I was about 18, pureply a nylon-string guitarist." he remembers. "I got caught up in playing Spanish guitar, and nearly went in that direction totally." I was very technical, and my right hand was really good. - picking and all that stuff. it was a challenge - technically, it's the most difficult kind of guitar playing." In the band, however Matt likes to keep it simple. "I've never done anything that complicated in muse and think it's because I'm singing at the same time," he jokes. "Although I've never been into doing guitar solos. "It's an area he plans to avoid. "There's something very uncool about them." Unless it's Tom Morello, of course..."He does amazing guitar solos. No-one else is doing what he's doing - he's probably the best guitarist around at the moment so he's probably made the guitar solo cool again."Matt's own homage to Tom is his use of a whammy pedal on 'Showbiz' and also plans using the toggle switch more. A cursory listen to their debut, and you can't help but notice the band's fondness for piano, the instrument Matt writes most of his songs on. "I don't really write stuff on the guitar, It's easier on a piano to play multiple harmonies, or assimilate a bass guitar." He's quick to point out, however, that he does consider himself very much a guitarist. "That's the instrument I feel closest to. This time last year, I probably wouldn't have said that. But since January I've become a lot more comfortable and competent with it." He got quite excited on a recent tour to Japan where he found a guitar for all occasions. "I bought a guitar with speakers built in it, just because it's portable. The neck is still the same length and it's got a clean and distortion sound; you can get feedback from the distortion which is funny when you're gueueing up for a plane, or walking around," he laughs. As well as guitars with speakers, Matt's also taken with the idea of tunings...particularly as his VG-8 [pitchshifting device] makes it such easy work for him. "On a couple of the songs, I detune down to D: with the VG-8, you can shift each string individually. There's a few songs where I've just got one guitar, a normal six-string and another guitar very unusually tuned." You could never accuse Matt of not being open-minded: he namechecks everything from Rage Against The Machine to Rachmaninov and all such influences, he promises, will be evident on the new album. "We're working on a lot of new stuff at the moment, playing a couple of songs every gig; they seem to be going down really well." But there's no makor shift of direction: "On Showbiz there's a lot of variation, and the songs are very different in feel to each other. There'll be the same sort of contrasts, maybe some of the variations will be different. Different elements of music I've been listening to. But generally, i haven't changed much." We can't wait to hear it. Helen Dalley

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