Muse bassist waged epic battle with bottle

There’s an old saying that’s repeated, mantra-like, by those who love a good stiff one, preferably every day around 5 p.m. It goes something like this: “I could never be an alcoholic because I like drinking too much.”

As every professional boozehound knows, the key to ensuring a daily buzz-on is to make sure things don’t get out of hand. Unfortunately, for some, however, the party never stops.

Muse bassist Chris Wolstenholme is evidently one of those people. In a new interview with the U.K.’s NME, the English rock star reveals that he was completely out of control by the time the platinum-shifting trio got around to working on its 2009 hit The Resistance. Wolstenholme admits that his drinking was bad that his bandmates—singer-guitarist Matt Bellamy and drummer Dom Howard—often ended up working on the album alone.

“Drinking all day every day is pretty bad,” Wolstenholme told NME. “It’s when you start getting to that point where you realize 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.”

The 33-year-old also added that his steady drinking left him anxiety ridden, partly because he came to realize he was headed down the same road as his father, who had drank himself to death by age 40.

On the bright side, Wolstenholme has not only managed to beat his addiction with the help of a therapist, but also turned his experiences into two songs­— “Save Me” and “Liquid State”—on the new Muse album, The 2nd Law. Other positives to come out of this? That’s easy: more alcohol for the rest of us.