Muse - "Space dementia"

Matt Bellamy (singer): “Space dementia is the term NASA uses for what happens if you’re left out in space for a long time, because if you truly conceptualise the situation of being there and looking back on earth, it can drive you mad. The song is about a person whose quite important in my life and who gives me space dementia when I look at them. It’s about being intensely engrossed so that you become obsessive and almost nasty”.

The first word of the song is not “height”, as it is written in the lyric-book of the album (Origin of Symetry), but it’s “H8”. H8 is a microcomputer. Matt: “Using a microcomputer (Hitachi H8 / 3048F) which can be built into the industrial machines, you can learn and understand the inputs/outputs of the microcomputer as a basis of robot control”.

Matt: “Space Dementia was supposed to be the big ending to the album. If you stick it on really loud speakers, it reaches the absolute limit of what is the sub and what is the height of your ear. So it hits the extreme of what our hearing range is. We were going to secretly increase the dB to the point where it was illegal”.

“It didn't work at the end of the album, so we put it further to the front, and had a big argument whether to have this big ending or not to the song. We actually recorded the first section of the song in the earlier session, and then we recorded the ending as a completely different thing. We had the song playing and then we came in playing as it finished, with a different instrument set up and everything”.

“It was supposed to be a shock thing because up until then it was all piano, and then go all dirty guitars and death”.

Available on the album "Origin of Symmetry"