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10:51 · 1,647 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- Muse describe Knights of Cydonia themselves as 40 years of rock history inside six minutes, built from spaghetti westerns, surf rock and British experimental music.
▶ 00:00:22
- It started on a tour bus crossing Arizona, with Matt Bellamy repeating a jerky riff while the desert went past the window.
▶ 00:00:59
- The British thread runs through the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, founded in 1958, whose tape manipulation and effects work fed the Beach Boys, the Beatles and Pink Floyd.
▶ 00:01:41
- The 1963 Doctor Who theme used no real instruments at all, assembled from electrical sound generators recorded to tape and physically altered, and the song's intro of galloping horses and lasers is a direct descendant.
▶ 00:02:00
- Joe Meek turned his apartment into a studio, used compressors in ways nobody had, and sampled when sampling was not a thing.
▶ 00:02:42
- The family connection is the best fact in the video: Meek's band The Tornados made Telstar, the first British single to reach number one in America, and Bellamy's father played rhythm guitar in that band, so the instrumental turn is deliberate homage.
▶ 00:03:07
- Ennio Morricone's style came from a budget. Spaghetti westerns could not afford the sprawling orchestras of American productions, so he built drama from a galloping rhythm, an electric guitar and whip cracks, gunshots, horns and whistles.
▶ 00:04:14
- Dick Dale reached a similar guitar tone from the other direction, combining twelve-bar blues with Middle Eastern and Jewish music using rapid percussive picking through heavy reverb.
▶ 00:05:22
- Storm Thorgerson's cover recast the four horsemen as modern evils, paranoia, intolerance, narcissism and greed, and seated them in Cydonia, the region of Mars behind the face and lost-civilisation theories.
▶ 00:06:40
- Bellamy has said the song targets no particular leader but all of them, and the chorus turns from the collapse to what an individual owes themselves rather than to gods, kings and politicians.
▶ 00:08:01