Muse bass player Chris Wolstenholme has been speaking out about his ongoing battle with alcoholism. His problem, according to Wolstenholme himself, was so all-encompassing around the time of Muse's 2009 record The Resistance that his bandmates Matt Bellamy and Dom Howard sometimes had to work on the material without their bass player.
Wolstenholme said to NME in an interview: "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. "
He also spoke candidly about the psychological impacts of his alcoholism, saying: "you've got anxiety 24 hours a day, you feel your fucking life is about to end, you're very scared but you don't know what you're scared of. 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."
Two songs on the new Muse album are about Wolstenholme's struggle with alcohol, 'Save Me' and 'Liquid State'.
Speaking about the tracks, Wolstenholme said: "Both of those lyrics were written at 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."
Muse's new album The 2nd Law is set for a 14th September release.
