Faith No More rockers find renewed belief in themselves
Band that reunited in 2009 for a world tour decided they'd better write some new songs if they were going to stay together
When Faith No More took to the stage in Los Angeles for the first of three concerts last month, they didn't warm up the crowd with old hits. Instead, the reunited hard-rock band opened with a new song from an album yet to come out; what's more, the tune featured keyboardist Roddy Bottum on vocals rather than frontman Mike Patton.
Oh, and the song's title - well, it isn't printable here. "The choice was a bit unorthodox but I think it set a tone," Bottum says. A slow-building dirge about smallpox blankets and a cup made of bones, the song - also the first track released from Sol Invictus, Faith No More's first album since 1997 - indeed underscored that this famously antagonistic outfit hadn't lost their contrarian streak. (Ditto the band's stage set-up, where they performed amid elaborate floral arrangements that were hardly in keeping with hard-rock aesthetics.)
Twenty-five years ago, that taste for provocation made unlikely MTV stars out of Patton and his bandmates, beginning with Epic, the left-field 1990 hit with the music video featuring a flopping fish out of water and an exploding piano. Faith No More went on to record a deranged prog-metal masterpiece in 1992's Angel Dust only to follow that with a straight-faced cover of the Commodores' velvety R&B hit Easy - proudly unpredictable moves that influenced young acts such as System of a Down and Deftones.
But if the group are still tweaking expectations today, the world around it has changed significantly. Where Faith No More once defined itself in opposition to a rock mainstream it viewed as a kind of macho wasteland, that mainstream has now all but disappeared. And the rock bands that do matter - Muse, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age - originated on the same fringes Faith No More did.
For a group of self-styled misfits, then, what does it mean to no longer look like rebels? "It means we're just us now," says bassist Bill Gould. "And that's a good thing. It means we can do anything we want."