FAITH NO MORE | May 1995 | Q Magazine


Singer Mike Patton has occasionally made a meal of it. He's crapped all over the place. He's chewed on a Tampax. He's tasted a turd. And he's not afraid to make a tit of himself. Now, the newly mature Faith No More are about to tour the world, and elsewhere. "We're talking cockroach," they tell Phil Sutcliffe.

"I'm a fucked up individual," says Roddy Bottum, FNM's keyboard player, reviewing recent difficult times. He grins, sort of. He's sitting in the spartan basement lounge of the San Francisco studio where he's rushing to finish an album with his other band, punk-inclined popsters Star 69, in the three days before he has to start an 18-month, maybe 400-gig tour with FNM.

He has a cold and he says he's been up for a week. He doesn't look too bad considering his laconic observation: "I don't hang out with a real healthy crowd." But full-on hilarity is hardly within his emotional range just now because of what's happened to him over the past couple years.

He got addicted to heroin. He came out about being gay. He split with his boyfriend of eight years. His father died. So did several of his good friends, all within a few months of last year. He cleaned up.

Pretty damn useful then, you'd think, that FNM is a band of friends. The founder members go back a long way. Bottum and bass player Billy Gould, both 31 now, grew up together in Hancock Park, a prosperous Hollywood enclave, with much in common. They were sons of successful lawyers, Catholic, classmates at a boys' high school. From the age of nine, they rode their pedal bikes around the neighborhood making mischief -- bomb threats to supermarkets a rather avant-naughty specialty.

When they were 18, they left home together for university in San Francisco. Shared rooms, shared a spirit of rebellion against what Bottum calls "fructose sugar-coated sappy candyland horrific '70s Los Angeles." By 1981, with drummer Mike "Puffy" Bordin, they had formed FNM.



Then, on his addiction, he says, he was "outed" by his bandmates without being consulted, again in an interview. He bitterly resented the intrusion.



You can't press Billy and the others to respond?


So FNM is a total communication breakdown then, a lost cause. Except for the commitment that's held the three founders together for 14 years and which Bottum will suddenly turn to proclaiming without reservation: "We showed admirable stamina when things were really shitty, when we were traveling all over America in a little van with no money, whining and bitching. It's this thing I've brought up with my friends and I feel really strongly about it. Just because it's a lot bigger and out of control, it doesn't make it any less personal to me now. I can't see leaving FNM even though there's a lot of shit to deal with."

Ah, shit. Well, it's a tough topic to keep away from around FNM, largely because of the scatological tendencies of singer Mike Patton. By common consent, he's a strange fellow. A dish, scientifically proven. One glimpse of him in flesh or photo and women sigh in that certain way. But it's his public words and deeds, on stage, record, and through the prints, that have landed him in trouble by, let's not be coy, the shitload and lent a peculiar aroma to FNM's reputation.

Notoriously, Patton has crapped in orange-juice cartons, defecated in hotel hairdryers and dumped on the bench outside Charles and Di's official residence. He's munched on a tampon left on stage by a member of L7 and then peed in his own boot and drunk the contents on stage. He's flaunted on-the-road impedimenta including S&M masks, picture books of embalmed corpses, a voodoo doll of unsavory provenance called Toodles, and a pickled human foetus in a jar. He's spoken up for coprophiliac pornography -- "Sometimes a shit-eating video is so much cooler than watching two people kissing".

His lyrics are hardly less calculated to agitate the excrement. Vivid, and for the most part, skillfully crafted, they have dealt with murder in Underwater Love, The Morning After , Surprise You're Dead and Crack Hitler ("Bodies float up/ from the bottom of the river/ Like bubbles in fine champagne"), with masturbation in Jizzlobber and, of course, with eating turds in the terrifyingly self-disgusted Cuckoo for Caca on FNM's fifth and latest studio album King for a Day, Fool For a Lifetime.


Yes, he knows he invited the question by writing Cuckoo for Caca, but now he's seen it in black and white, he hates it. "It makes you feel stupid," he says. "Interviews just become a pissing contest."


"You think, 'Aaaah! My God, I've never been fucked like this before.' There's a new position every day," says Patton and they both cackle merrily.


It's a reminder of how different he was when he came to FNM. Having fired their first regular singer Chuck Mosley -- an eccentric performer who once touchingly confessed, "I've never been able to conceptualize how to hit the right note" -- the band were hot for Patton's vocal power and variety. But they quickly realized they had acquired a true innocent, 21 and young for his age, whose inevitable rush towards experience could well prove unsettling.

Patton grew up in a village, population 30, near Eureka in northern California, and he admits he was naive. "It's more or less true, yeah," he says. "I hadn't traveled much, I was in school studying English, had a job. Lived with my parents, been in Mr. Bungle since I was 15 (they're still active as his 'other band'). Pretty happy. Pretty ignorant."

And what was it, then, about this apparently soporific background that led to the outburst of murder, mayhem and sexual misdemeanor in his lyrics for the Real Thing?

He snorts his scorn. He's not to be suckerpunched today.



They often seem like a fucked-up band. On the other hand, throughout the 90s they have grown and prospered commercially -- their last album Angel Dust went to number 2 in Britain, number 10 in America and the post-ironic Lionel Ritchie cover I'm Easy was a huge hit. Further, critics have widely applauded their beyond-metal adventures in funk or country, and now, on KFAD, even Latino smooch (Coralho Voador) and big band swing (Star AD). They couldn't have come so far without some kind of solid foundation and it can only be the backbeat team of Bordin and Gould: drums, bass and solid bottom-line characters.


He once recalled the moment when he realized how much music could mean to him: "All of a sudden you get it and you think, Shit, I'm finally whole, when you didn't even know you were half before." He's particularly intense about FNM maintaining a sense of proportion: "We've got to always remember why the fuck we're here, which is to make music, not to build statues of ourselves, not to start thinking our shit doesn't stink, not to lose ourselves so that it's only vanity that gets our knob moving."



Unbidden, he suddenly takes a sharp left to explain how FNM's jaggedly diverse sounds come about: "You know, the way we write is visual. We start by describing a scene to one another. Say there's a guy in a beat-up Cadillac with ripped upholstery. Empty Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes and malt liquor bottles in the back. And there's a baby seat. In fact, that image because Edge of the World. Mutated a little on the way (Patton's lyric is about a child molester)."





"I only see the *work*," says Gould, not undaunted. "I'd like to have fun, eat good food, go out on a drinking spree for three days. But, fuck, have too much fun and the work will kill you; it'll fuckin' mow you down. I don't think I have the genetic propensity towards womanizing and consuming tons of LSD."

Could this be the onset of "maturity"?


Bottum views the coming months cautiously. "I haven't given it a lot of thought. I'm gonna try to just jump right in. If I think about it, it's gonna make me miserable. I wanna get on the plane, no suitcase. I don't want to be carrying a lot of stuff around Europe, just go with a couple shirts and see what happens. Wouldn't that be cool?"


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