Matthew Bellamy

Born Matthew James Bellamy, June 9 1978, in Cambridge, England. He is the frontman and lead singer, guitarist and pianist for the British rock band Muse.

Bellamy’s father, George, was the rhythm guitarist in the 1960s English rock group The Tornados, who were the first English band to have a U.S. number one, with “Telstar”.
Bellamy’s mother, Marilyn, was born in Belfast, and migrated to England in the 1970s. On her first day in England she met George Bellamy, who was at that time working as a taxi driver in London. They moved to Cambridge, where Bellamy’s older brother Paul was born, followed a couple of years later by Matthew himself.

In the mid-1980s they moved to Teignmouth, Devon, where Matthew was educated at Teignmouth Community College.

Bellamy’s piano style has been inspired by the works of Romantic pianists such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Franz Liszt, and has resulted in a fusion of Romantic style with rock in many of Muse’s songs. In particular, many of his compositions contain elements of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, such as “Space Dementia”, “Megalomania” and “Ruled by Secrecy”, and of the third movement in the cadenza in “Butterflies and Hurricanes”. In live performances Bellamy often breaks into lengthy Romantic piano solos, such as the performance of Prelude in C-sharp minor in the opening of “Screenager” on the live half of the Hullabaloo album. On Black Holes and Revelations, a reference can be heard to the Russian Romantic composer Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, during the song “Hoodoo”, where, towards the end, a quote of the beginning chords of the concerto, played in the minor key, can be heard before the rest of the band comes in.