The Muse Connection

Indeed, The Road to Wembley started with the incredible Muse Gig at Southside Festival 2006, the first time the band performed their new songs from "Black Holes and Revelations" to a festival audience, with a huge light and effect show that blew everyone away.
We stood at the Sky Lounge opposite to the main stage, thanks to the fact that i won the access to that, waiting for the band to perform. A really young lad appeared and started a talk with us - he told us that this was his first festival ever, and we felt kind of old but wise the same time. Well, he was very enthusiastic about Muse, and we nodded and thought "Yeah, you're right, but WE know them since the very fucking beginning". He introduced himself to us as "Tobse", and he was such an angle-faces boy that we almost immediately fell in love with the way his innocent love for music glimpsed through his words. While we watched Muse playing themselves and us in Rock'n'Roll heaven, the boy diappeared - and we weren't sure if he ever has been there for real. Maybe he was just the reflection of the perfection Muse's music brought to us that very night. After the last chords of "Knights of Cydonia" we simply weren't able to speak. We left the festival ground in silence, both in our own sci fi-world, falling in our tent and had the greatest sleep at a festival EVER.

But the whole story for me started a lot earlier, in 1999, with Muse's first music video on heavy rotation on the faboulous German music channel Viva 2: "Muscle Museum". Never heard anything like that before. Combined with a really strange video with crying people. I loved it!
Muse were confirmed as support act for my personal post grunge heroes Bush in early 2000, and that was actually the first time I saw them playing live. The one thing I remember very clearly (except the strange and very boyish haircuts they had) was that they didn't seem to fit in a fucking small and ugly venue as the Offenbacher Stadthalle. They treated their instruments like they wanted to train them to make sounds no one ever made them before. In German there's the word "Gniedeln" that hits it perfectly. Muse left the crowd stunning, but also a bit uncertain about what that was. Genius? Madness? Something in between, definitely.
A month later I bought "Showbiz" at HMV in London on a trip to my parents friends there. Being back in Germany, I made me listening to the entire album only once. I can't say why, but it simply didn't connected to me. I remeber that I was really disappointed by that. Maybe I should have taken some more time, but as a reflex to my disappointment I gave the CD away to a friend. And it actually needed half a decade until "Knights..." made me feel connected with Muse again. But this time deeply inside.