Muse have revealed that progress is still being made on putting together their anticipated ‘Origin Of’ vinyl box set of early material.

Earlier this year, the band revealed that ‘Origin Of Muse’ would bring together songs, demos, photos, videos and unheard material from their formation through to their first two albums, ‘Showbiz’ and ‘Origin Of Symmetry’.

Now, speaking to Matt Wilkinson for his Beats 1 show, the band have said that the project is still “in a rabbit hole”, “still in progress”.


“There’s some really early versions of some of the ‘Showbiz’ tracks and a really early version of ‘Plug In Baby’ which is actually quite an old song and it didn’t make the first album,” said drummer Dom Howard, before Bellamy added that the song was very similar to the final product apart from the now iconic riff.

Howard added: “It’s just the chords and we did a couple of different versions of that. So we’ve got those recordings and there was some really old live recordings that we found as well from the early days. We’re still just debating whether they’re actually listenable or not! I think it will happen eventually. The whole point of doing it was kind of to track the musical progress and process from when we started when we were like 16 to ‘Origin of Symmetry’ basically so it’s a big old wormhole of old footage and music and cuttings and ridiculous pictures of us at school and stuff.”

Asked about existing unreleased tracks in the vault, Bellamy replied: “There’s a track called ‘Soaked’ we did that was going to be on the ‘Absolution’ album but it felt like an Elton John tune, it was like piano and strings and stuff, really sort of soft and lovely. Like late 80s Elton. Everyone sort of agreed that even though it was a good song it wasn’t really right for Muse. We recorded it. That’s buried somewhere. And that geezer Adam Lambert ended up recording it for one of his albums. He did his own version of it but our version is still buried in the vaults somewhere.”

This week also saw Muse unveil the meaning and origin of ‘Plug In Baby’ – and it might surprise you.


Meanwhile, Muse released new single ‘Thought Contagion’ last week, and also picked up the award for Best Festival Headliner at the VO5 NME Awards 2018 – where they also spoke us about their future.

“We’re going to do the biggest tour and just blow people’s minds with stuff they’ve never seen before,” Bellamy told NME.

“We’re going to come up with something that no one’s ever seen before. We’re always interested in the latest technology and what’s cutting edge, so we’re always thinking of the new thing that nobody’s ever used before in a concert. And we found something and we’re going to use that.”

“We’ve been working on a lot of new music,” Bellamy added, “we’re going to release more new songs this year, working towards an album which will come out some time soon.”