The Muse bassist speaks of his struggles with alcoholism in a new interview and how he has finally managed to beat his addiction.

 

Wolstenholme, 33, tells NME: “Drinking all day every day is pretty bad. It's when you start getting to that point where you realise you can't function without it, where you wake up in the morning shaking and the first thing you do is go to the fridge and down a bottle of wine. That's how bad it was. I was incredibly unhealthy, overweight, a mess."

 

“You've got anxiety 24 hours a day, you feel your f**king life's about to end, you're very scared but you don't know what you're scared of.”

 

He went on to say that during the recording of the 2009 Muse album ‘The Resistance’, his band members would often have to work on the music alone. 

 

Wolstenholme managed to overcome his addiction because he had previous experience with alcoholism. He said: “There was only two ways to go: die in a few years or stop. The same happened to my dad, he was 40 when he died. I'd just turned 30 and it was that realisation that if I go the same way I could be dead in ten years. Ten years is not a long time.”

 

He also wrote two songs for the new album ‘The 2nd Law’ about his experience. ‘Save Me’ and ‘Liquid State’ are both written about Wolstenholme’s struggles with alcohol.

 

Wolstenholme finished by saying: “Both of those lyrics were written at that time when I'd stopped drinking. 'Liquid State' was written about the person you become when you're intoxicated and how the two of them are having this fight inside of you and it tears you apart. 

 

“'Save Me' was about having the family, the wife and kids and, despite all that crap that I've put them through, at the end of it you realise they're still there and they're the ones who pulled you through.”

 

Frontman Matt Bellamy also spoke to NME about the influence of family on the new album, admitting that he has used his son’s heartbeat as a sample. The song ‘Follow Me’ opens with the sound of one year old Bingham’s heartbeat.