Recovering from a suicide attempt at his grandmother's house in 1990, a teenage Corey Taylor watched a five-piece from San Francisco play "Epic" at the MTV Video Music Awards and decided to write music again. The performance, the artist, and the band's name took up four lines of his interview with Loudwire twenty-five years later, and were enough, by his own account, to alter the rest of his life. The five-piece were Faith No More. The line that performed "Epic" that evening had existed for less than two years; the line that hovered behind it stretched back to 1979, included Courtney Love and one of Cliff Burton's pre-Metallica bandmates, and would, before its first formal split in 1998, be credited with inventing alternative metal.
Faith No More are the rare band whose biggest hit is the worst possible introduction to them. "Epic" is on every "best one-hit wonder" list of the last thirty years, which is the reverse of the truth: it sits on the third of seven studio albums, came out twenty years before the band's last record together, and is, on a generous afternoon, the seventh-most interesting song they ever wrote. The story of how Faith No More got from Sharp Young Men in a Mission District garage to a 2014 Hyde Park slot supporting Black Sabbath, with Grammy nominations, RIAA Platinum, an Australian number 1 album, the loudest break-up announcement in 1998 alternative rock, and an eleven-year split in between, is most of the alternative metal story compressed into one band.
Band facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Origin | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Formed | 1979 (as Sharp Young Men); renamed Faith. No Man. in 1983; Faith No More from September 1983 |
| Years active | 1979 to 1998; 2009 to 2021 (semi-permanent hiatus thereafter) |
| Original Faith No More lineup (Sept 1983) | Billy Gould, Mike Bordin, Roddy Bottum, with rotating singers and guitarists through 1984 |
| Classic lineup (1989 to 1993) | Mike Patton, Jim Martin, Roddy Bottum, Billy Gould, Mike Bordin |
| Final lineup (1996 to 2021) | Mike Patton, Jon Hudson, Roddy Bottum, Billy Gould, Mike Bordin |
| Notable past members | Chuck Mosley (vocals 1984 to 1988, died 2017), Jim Martin (guitar 1984 to 1993), Trey Spruance (guitar 1993 to 1995), Dean Menta (guitar 1995 to 1996); brief 1984 stints from Courtney Love and Paula Frazer |
| Labels | Mordam, Slash, Reprise, Reclamation!, Ipecac (live) |
| Genres | Alternative metal, funk metal, alternative rock, experimental rock, post-punk (early) |
| Studio albums | 7 (1985 to 2015) |
| Producer most associated with the band | Matt Wallace (We Care a Lot through King for a Day; the recurring outside ear from the Sharp Young Men garage demos onwards) |
| Sales scale | The Real Thing well above 4 million worldwide; Angel Dust around 3.1 million; King for a Day around 1.5 million; Album of the Year around 2 million |
| Major awards (won) | 1991 MTV VMA Best Visual Effects in a Video ("Falling to Pieces"); 2015 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Best Album (Sol Invictus); 2015 Metal Storm Best Alternative Metal Album (Sol Invictus); VH1 number 52 in 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock |
| Major awards (nominated) | Grammy 1990 (The Real Thing, Best Metal Performance); Grammy 1991 ("Epic", Best Hard Rock Performance); Grammy 1993 (Angel Dust, Best Hard Rock Performance); Brit Award 1991 International Group |
| Defining moment | The 1990 MTV Video Music Awards performance of "Epic", the song that made them a household name and the song the press has, unfairly, used to define them ever since |
Formation and the pre-history (1979 to 1984)
The genesis of Faith No More was a band called Sharp Young Men, formed in 1979 in San Francisco by vocalist and guitarist Mike Morris and keyboardist Wade Worthington. Worthington, a trained pianist who had originally wanted to start a Jimmy Smith-style jazz organ project, was talked into Sharp Young Men by Morris, who had recently fallen for post-punk acts like Killing Joke, Theatre of Hate and The Blackouts. Mike Bordin, a drummer playing in local San Francisco bands, joined them next. The bassist was harder to find; a 1980 newspaper ad eventually pulled in Billy Gould, who had moved up from Los Angeles to start his first year at UC Berkeley. Between March and August 1982 the four of them played a 12-show Bay Area club tour and cut a three-song demo cassette ("Alive", "Decay", "Life Is Tough for Me"), recorded in producer Matt Wallace's parents' garage. Wallace was running a recording studio out of that garage, and would, more or less continuously, produce or engineer Faith No More records from that demo through to 1995's King for a Day.
Morris proposed the name Faith In No Man in 1983; the band shortened it to Faith. No Man. (with two full stops) and released a 7-inch single, "Quiet in Heaven / Song of Liberty", on Ministry of Propaganda Records that year. The two A-side songs were two of the three tracks recorded in Wallace's garage. Worthington left soon after, replaced on keyboards by Roddy Bottum, who had grown up in Los Angeles with Billy Gould. In September 1983, Bottum, Gould and Bordin abruptly walked out of the band together, taking the rhythm section, the keyboardist and most of the post-punk repertoire with them. They renamed themselves Faith No More, on a suggestion from a friend, Will Carpmill, who liked that the new name flagged the fact that "The Man" (Morris) was, indeed, no more. By 2012, Morris had not spoken to Gould or Bottum in nearly thirty years.
Faith No More's first show in October 1983 had a borrowed singer (Joe Pop-O-Pie, a.k.a. Joe Callahan) and a borrowed guitarist (Jake Smith). Through 1984 they cycled through vocalists at a rate that even by Bay Area indie standards was unusual. Among them: alt-country songwriter Paula Frazer, who would later front the Warner-signed band Tarnation; and a 19-year-old Courtney Love, who fronted the band briefly in February to June 1984 while dating Bottum, recently relocated from Japan. Love and Bottum bonded, by Bottum's account, over their shared zodiac sign; she "talked her way into" the band. By June 1984 both Love and the second guitarist, Mark Bowen, were out, with Bottum citing a desire for more "male energy". Love subsequently said the band did not want to look like one with a "chick singer" any more. Around August 1984 the band finally settled, with Chuck Mosley arriving as singer and Jim Martin coming in on guitar.
Mosley had known Billy Gould since 1977; the two had played together in a Los Angeles new-wave band called The Animated. Jim Martin's pre-history is, in Bay Area metal terms, even more ridiculous: in the late 1970s he played in Mike Bordin's high-school band EZ Street with future Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and was briefly in a Burton thrash-metal side project called Vicious Hatred. By the time Burton joined Metallica in late 1982, Martin had not yet committed to Faith No More. The fact that there were essentially two bands in San Francisco around 1984 contesting Cliff Burton's sound (Metallica's, and the Faith No More lineup that finally cohered around Mosley and Martin) is a footnote that catches a generation of California heavy-music historians by surprise the first time they hear it.
The Mosley era: We Care a Lot and Introduce Yourself (1985 to 1988)
Faith No More started recording We Care a Lot on their own money. After the band pooled enough to track five songs they were picked up by Ruth Schwartz, who was setting up the independent label Mordam Records; the band finished the album with Mordam backing and the label released it in November 1985, a debut for both. The title track ran on commercial fast-forward through 1985 college radio and MTV's late-night rotation as a video that, more by accident than design, mocked the entire serious-music charity-single industry of "We Are the World" and Live Aid by name. Slash Records, run by L.A. industry lifer Anna Statman, signed Faith No More in late 1986. Slash had recently been bought into the Polygram subsidiary London Records, which gave the band the major-label distribution they had not had with Mordam.
Introduce Yourself, the band's second album and first for Slash, was released on 23 April 1987. A re-recorded version of the title track from the debut, "We Care a Lot", became a low-rotation MTV video and the band's first chart appearance (UK 53, Australia 40 for the song; the album peaked at AUS 57). The Mosley-era Faith No More toured Europe in 1988 in support, and on that tour Mosley's behaviour disintegrated. He allegedly punched Billy Gould on stage, fell asleep during the band's own album-release party, and one of his roadies brawled with Jim Martin at a European date. The band fired him on the way home, in their own preferred passive-aggressive style, by quitting the band themselves and reforming the next day without him.
"There was a certain point when I went to rehearsal, and Chuck wanted to do all acoustic guitar songs. It was just so far off the mark. The upshot was that I got up, walked out and quit the band. I just said: 'I'm done, I can't take this any longer. It's just so ridiculous.' The same day, I talked to Bordin, and he said: 'Well, I still want to play with you'. Bottum did the same thing. It was another one of these 'firing somebody without firing them' scenarios."
Billy Gould, on the firing of Chuck Mosley, Team Rock, 22 April 2014
Patton arrives: The Real Thing (1989 to 1991)
Mosley's replacement, in 1988, was Mike Patton. Jim Martin had heard the demo tape of Patton's high-school band Mr. Bungle (titled, with the Patton-era straight face, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny) and floated his name. Patton claimed he first met the band at a 1986 gig in a pizza parlour in his hometown of Eureka, California. Two weeks after joining, he had written every lyric and vocal melody for what would become The Real Thing, music that had largely been recorded already.
The Real Thing was released on 20 June 1989 on Slash and Reprise. Lead single "Epic" was issued in January 1990 and became Faith No More's defining commercial moment: US Billboard Hot 100 number 9, Australia number 1, New Zealand number 2, UK number 25, with a music video on MTV heavy rotation that was infamously condemned by animal-rights activists for the slow-motion fish-flopping shot at the end. The album reached US 11, AUS 2, UK 30, and was certified Platinum by the RIAA, ARIA (Australia) and Music Canada, Silver by the BPI in the UK, and Gold in New Zealand. Cumulative worldwide sales went well above four million copies, making The Real Thing the best-selling Faith No More record by a clear margin. Two more singles ("From Out of Nowhere", "Falling to Pieces") and a cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" rounded out the campaign. The band performed at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards (6 September 1990) and on episode 293 of Saturday Night Live (1 December 1990); Robert Plant told Rolling Stone in 1988 that the Mosley-era band was one of his favourites, and toured with them after The Real Thing broke. Their February 1991 live album Live at the Brixton Academy (also titled You Fat Bastards) hit UK 20.
The Real Thing also kicked off a Grammy nomination streak that would, in retrospect, undersell what the band actually achieved: the title track was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 1990 Grammys; "Epic" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 1991 Grammys; and Angel Dust would be nominated again in 1993. The band would never win a competitive Grammy, but their MTV VMA tally for "Falling to Pieces" (Best Visual Effects in a Video, 1991) and the Brit Awards 1991 nomination for International Group made them one of the most decorated alternative-metal bands of the early 1990s without a single American radio number-one hit to their name.
Angel Dust and the end of the classic lineup (1992 to 1994)
Angel Dust, released on 8 June 1992, was a deliberate left turn. One contemporary reviewer called it "one of the more complex and simply confounding records ever released by a major label", and the most quoted line about it (from Trouser Press's Ira Robbins) noted that "A Small Victory", with its strings and references that "seem to run Madame Butterfly through Metallica and Nile Rodgers", revealed "a developing facility for combining unlikely elements into startlingly original concoctions." The album went one place higher than The Real Thing on the Billboard 200 (US 10), reached number 2 in the UK, number 4 in Australia, number 8 in Germany, and was their biggest album in the Netherlands, France, Russia and the UK. US sales (665,000) were down on The Real Thing; everywhere else, particularly Europe, they were up. Worldwide sales settled around 3.1 million.
The 1992 touring cycle is one of the strangest tour stories of the alternative-metal era. Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose was on record telling Car Audio Electronics magazine in August 1990 that Faith No More were the only band he was "jealous of"; on the strength of that admiration, GnR took FNM and Soundgarden out on the European leg of the Use Your Illusion tour in 1992, and then onto the Guns N' Roses / Metallica Stadium Tour through North America that summer. Faith No More were at the 26 August 1992 Montreal show at Olympic Stadium where James Hetfield was burned by pyrotechnics during "Fade to Black" and where Axl Rose's late arrival and short set triggered a riot. Faith No More were fired from the tour in September 1992 after taking too many media jabs at GnR's behaviour. Bottum, characteristically, was unrepentant: "It was bananas. We just laughed at how fucking ridiculous they were."
The Angel Dust touring cycle also produced one of the most successful reverse-cover stories of the era. The album's second pressing tacked on Faith No More's hard-rock cover of the Commodores' "Easy", which was issued as a single in 1993 and went to AUS 1, UK 3, NZ 6 and Belgium and the Netherlands top tens. The cover was certified Platinum in Australia and New Zealand. In 1993 the band also collaborated with American Samoan rap group Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. on "Another Body Murdered" for the soundtrack to Judgment Night, the rap-rock soundtrack album that more or less invented an entire mid-1990s sound.
By the summer of 1993, Jim Martin was out of the band. The official line was that he left over musical differences (he later, famously, called Angel Dust "gay disco"); Bottum, characteristically, said Martin had been fired by fax. Martin maintained it was his decision. Both Justin Broadrick (Godflesh) and Geordie Walker (Killing Joke) were reportedly invited to fill the seat and declined. The job went to Mike Patton's Mr. Bungle bandmate Trey Spruance.
King for a Day, Album of the Year, and the slow break-up (1995 to 1998)
Faith No More's fifth album, King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime, was released on 28 March 1995 and was the band's deepest stylistic dive: punk, country, jazz, bossa nova, thrash metal, gospel and the band's own hard-rock songbook colliding song-to-song across sixty-odd minutes. Singles "Digging the Grave", "Ricochet" and "Evidence" all charted in the UK and Australia, and the album hit AUS 2, UK 5, NZ 3 and went Gold in Australia, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand on around 1.5 million copies. The drop in raw US sales relative to Angel Dust was steep (US 31). Trey Spruance, who plays on the entire record, left before the world tour to refocus on Mr. Bungle; the band's keyboard tech, Dean Menta, took over for the touring cycle.
Album of the Year followed on 3 June 1997, with yet another new guitarist (Jon Hudson, formerly Billy Gould's roommate). It debuted at AUS 1 (where it went Platinum), GER 2, NZ 1, UK 7, but reached only US 41. Singles included "Ashes to Ashes" (UK 15, AUS 8, ARIA Gold), "Last Cup of Sorrow" (with a Jennifer Jason Leigh-starring music video that pastiched Hitchcock's Vertigo), and "Stripsearch". Rolling Stone's June 1997 review of the album, in a now-infamous misjudgement, claimed the band were "floundering around desperately, groping for a sense of identity and direction in a decade that clearly finds them irrelevant"; Australian listeners, who had just sent the album to number 1, may have read that review with less than full agreement. Faith No More then toured with Limp Bizkit in 1997, whose Faith-No-More-influenced acolytes were frequently booed off stage by Faith No More's fans.
By early 1998 a Usenet rumour on alt.music.faith-no-more, claiming Patton had quit, started circulating. Faith No More played their last show of the original run in Lisbon, Portugal, on 7 April 1998. They cancelled the planned support tour for Aerosmith. On 20 April 1998, Billy Gould released a statement by email and fax. The decision, he wrote, "is mutual" and "the split will now enable each member to pursue his individual project(s) unhindered."
Hiatus, Mosley, and the 2009 reformation
Between 1998 and 2009, Faith No More remained inactive. A 2002 reunion-tour-festival offer reportedly involved Bush, Deftones, Incubus, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and Slipknot on a multi-million-dollar package, and went as far as a meeting between Patton, Gould and members of the participating bands; it did not happen. On 24 February 2009, after months of speculation, Faith No More announced a reunion with the Album of the Year-era lineup: Patton, Gould, Bordin, Bottum and Hudson. Original guitarist Jim Martin, by Bottum's later 2015 account, was their first call; the deal could not be made.
The reunion tour, billed as The Second Coming Tour, ran through 2009 and 2010 and took in Download in the UK, Hurricane and Southside in Germany, Greenfield in Switzerland, Hove in Norway and Roskilde in Denmark, then Soundwave in Australia and a long string of headlining and festival dates worldwide. After an eleven-month gap, the band played four South American shows in November 2011, including a Maquinaria Festival date in Chile that performed King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime in full with Trey Spruance back on guitar. By 2012 Patton had refocused on Tomahawk; the band entered another semi-pause. Drummer-side projects continued. In August 2016, the surviving original lineup of Mosley, Bordin, Gould, Hudson and Bottum played two shows as "Chuck Mosley & Friends" to mark the reissue of We Care a Lot; on 9 November 2017, Mosley died at the age of 57, the cause given as "the disease of addiction".
Sol Invictus, the COVID cancellation and the second hiatus (2014 to present)
On 4 July 2014 Faith No More played their first show in two years, supporting Black Sabbath at Hyde Park, London, and debuting two new songs ("Motherfucker" and "Superhero", initially known to fans as "Leader of Men"). On 2 September 2014 Bill Gould told Rolling Stone that the band had begun work on a new album. Sol Invictus was released on 19 May 2015 on the band's own Reclamation! Records, debuted at US 15 (their second-highest US chart position ever), AUS 2, FIN 1, UK 6, GER 4, and won 2015 Metal Hammer Golden God for Best Album and Metal Storm's Best Alternative Metal Album. The accompanying tour topped Australia's final Soundwave festival and a string of European headline dates.
The band re-emerged on 23 November 2019 with a coordinated countdown, announcing 2020 European festival dates including Sunstroke in Ireland, Hellfest in France and Tons of Rock in Norway, plus two Banc of California Stadium shows in Los Angeles with System of a Down, Helmet and Russian Circles. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the entire tour to 2021. In September 2021 the rescheduled dates were cancelled outright, with Patton citing mental health reasons; Korn replaced Faith No More on the SOAD California shows. In a 2022 interview with The Guardian about Dead Cross, Patton said he had not spoken to the rest of the band since the cancellations. By October 2024 Roddy Bottum was describing Faith No More as on a "semi-permanent hiatus". In April 2025 Mike Bordin told the Let There Be Talk podcast that Patton had "gone from being unable to play with Faith No More to being unwilling to do shows with us." In October 2025, Bottum reiterated the doubts:
"I don't think anyone's sort of up for it at this point. We had a bunch of shows that we were gonna play, and they got canceled, just for various reasons. But I don't think the course that we were on has fixed itself."
Roddy Bottum, Blabbermouth, 29 October 2025
Studio albums
| # | Album | Year | Label | Vocalist | Peak charts (US / UK / AUS) | Certifications |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | We Care a Lot | 1985 | Mordam | Chuck Mosley | Did not chart | |
| 2 | Introduce Yourself | 1987 | Slash | Chuck Mosley | UK did not chart / AUS 57 | |
| 3 | The Real Thing | 1989 | Slash / Reprise | Mike Patton | US 11 / UK 30 / AUS 2 | RIAA Platinum, ARIA Platinum, MC Platinum, BPI Silver, RMNZ Gold |
| 4 | Angel Dust | 1992 | Slash / Reprise | Mike Patton | US 10 / UK 2 / AUS 4 | RIAA Gold, BPI Gold, ARIA Gold, BVMI Gold, MC Platinum, RMNZ Gold |
| 5 | King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime | 1995 | Slash / Reprise | Mike Patton | US 31 / UK 5 / AUS 2 | ARIA Gold, BPI Gold, RMNZ Gold |
| 6 | Album of the Year | 1997 | Slash / Reprise | Mike Patton | US 41 / UK 7 / AUS 1 | ARIA Platinum |
| 7 | Sol Invictus | 2015 | Reclamation! | Mike Patton | US 15 / UK 6 / AUS 2 |
Vocalists, guitarists and the lineup timeline
| Member | Instrument | Years | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Bordin | Drums, percussion | 1979 to 1998, 2009 to 2021 | Founding member; only musician on every single Faith No More release; also Ozzy Osbourne's touring drummer from 1996 onwards. |
| Billy Gould | Bass, backing vocals | 1980 to 1998, 2009 to 2021 | Joined Sharp Young Men via newspaper ad while at UC Berkeley; designed the band's classic logo as a homage to the Symbol of Chaos. |
| Roddy Bottum | Keyboards, rhythm guitar, backing vocals | 1983 to 1998, 2009 to 2021 | Came out as gay in 1993, an unusual public step for a frontline member of an alt-metal act of the era; co-founder of Imperial Teen on the side. |
| Mike Patton | Lead vocals, lyrics | 1988 to 1998, 2009 to 2021 | Recruited from Mr. Bungle on Jim Martin's recommendation; wrote every The Real Thing lyric and vocal melody in two weeks; runs Ipecac Recordings. |
| Jon Hudson | Lead guitar, backing vocals | 1996 to 1998, 2009 to 2021 | Final Faith No More guitarist; previously Billy Gould's roommate. |
| Chuck Mosley | Lead vocals | 1984 to 1988 | The We Care a Lot and Introduce Yourself frontman; rejoined the band briefly in August 2016 for two shows; died on 9 November 2017, aged 57. |
| Jim Martin | Lead guitar, backing vocals | 1984 to 1993 | Played in EZ Street and Vicious Hatred with future Metallica bassist Cliff Burton; left or was fired by fax after Angel Dust; called the album "gay disco". |
| Trey Spruance | Lead guitar | 1993 to 1995 | Patton's Mr. Bungle bandmate; played on King for a Day but did not tour; returned for one 2011 Chile show. |
| Dean Menta | Lead guitar | 1995 to 1996 | Was the band's keyboard tech; promoted to handle the King for a Day touring cycle. |
| Courtney Love | Lead vocals (early) | February to June 1984 | Briefly fronted Faith No More while dating Roddy Bottum; out of the band before they signed to Mordam. |
| Paula Frazer | Lead vocals (early) | 1984 | Brief stint; later fronted Warner-signed alt-country band Tarnation. |
Disbandments, side projects and adjacencies
Faith No More's members have, between them, run more side projects than most bands manage in their main band. Mike Patton's Mr. Bungle preceded Faith No More; he founded Fantômas (with Slayer's Dave Lombardo and the Melvins' Buzz Osborne and Trevor Dunn) in 1998, Tomahawk (with Duane Denison) in 2000, Peeping Tom in 2006, General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners with the Beastie Boys' DJs that same year, and Dead Cross (with Lombardo) in 2017. He also co-founded Ipecac Recordings, the indie label that has released music by the Melvins, Isis, Dalek, Mike Patton himself, Tomahawk, Mr. Bungle and many more.
Roddy Bottum founded Imperial Teen in 1994; the indie-pop band has released six albums and was a fixture of late-1990s and early-2000s alternative cinema soundtracks (their song "Yoo Hoo" anchored the Jawbreaker soundtrack). Mike Bordin became Ozzy Osbourne's permanent touring drummer from 1996 onwards, including playing on Ozzfest, on Ozzy's own albums and on the Black Sabbath dates Reunion in the late 1990s; he also drummed for Korn on a 2003 tour after David Silveria was injured. Billy Gould runs Koolarrow Records and has produced and played bass on multiple international projects including Brujeria. Jim Martin's post-Faith career has been the smallest in scale; he is a noted prize pumpkin grower in California.
Mosley, after leaving Faith No More, fronted Cement and a reactivated version of his earlier band VUA before the brief 2016 reunion that ended the year before his death. The 2018 documentary Thanks. And Sorry: The Chuck Mosley Movie, directed by Drew Fortier and produced by Douglas Esper, narrated his post-Faith years.
Controversy: the GnR sacking, the Chili Peppers feud and the press
Faith No More's recurring public-image problem during the Patton era was a feud with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. After "Epic" broke, RHCP frontman Anthony Kiedis accused Patton of imitating his image and stage mannerisms, citing the "Epic" video as proof. The pair traded comments in Kerrang! through 1990; Kiedis, in a 1990 quote that took on a long afterlife, said his drummer (Chad Smith) wanted to "kidnap [Patton], shave his hair off and cut off one of his feet, just so he'll be forced to find a style of his own." Patton's response, also in Kerrang!, was that the two bands' music was "really a lot different" and that the press should "let sleeping dogs lie." The bands have, in interviews since, both denied the feud was anything more than press copy. At a 2014 Brooklyn show, RHCP played part of "We Care a Lot" live; in a 1996 interview Flea was characteristically blunt about the whole thing.
"There was never any fight between us, that was a bunch of bullshit created by the media. I mean I think they're a good band. Maybe there was some things said between Anthony and the singer [Patton], but it all means nothing to me. Those guys in the band are nice people and there's no fight, let's not fight."
Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers, M6 (France) interview, 1996
The 1992 Guns N' Roses / Metallica tour firing was the more substantive bit of public-image trouble. Faith No More were given the opening slot on a stadium tour they did not, by their own account, particularly want to be on. The 26 August 1992 Montreal show, where James Hetfield was burned by pyrotechnics during "Fade to Black" and where Axl Rose's late arrival and short set incited a riot, gave Faith No More a series of media opportunities to take humorous jabs at GnR's behaviour. By September 1992 they had been removed from the bill. The feud has not really cooled. Patton's 2022 Guardian interview about Dead Cross spent more lines on his mental-health collapse during the COVID period than on any reunion plans.
Riffology podcast episodes on Faith No More
Two of Faith No More's albums have a full Riffology podcast episode. The album posts both carry the embedded episode; follow the links to listen.
| Album | Year | Riffology episode |
|---|---|---|
| The Real Thing | 1989 | RIFF032: how Bay Area thrash met hip-hop and a song that should not have worked became "Epic", with Matt Wallace's garage-studio backstory and Patton's two-week lyric sprint. |
| Angel Dust | 1992 | RIFF040: the deliberate left turn that outsold The Real Thing in Europe but split US listeners, the Madame Butterfly-meets-Metallica strings on "A Small Victory", and the GnR / Metallica firing. |
Legacy and influence
The standard short summary of Faith No More's place in heavy music is that they invented alternative metal, and that summary, while accurate enough for most purposes, undersells what they actually did. They were the first band to fold rap, soul, easy-listening, jazz, gospel, country, samba and arena heavy metal into a single record (King for a Day...) without obvious caveat or condescension; they were the band a teenage Corey Taylor pointed at when asked, in 2015, why he was alive. Krist Novoselic of Nirvana, in a 2009 Digital Spy interview, said Faith No More "paved the way for Nirvana"; Slipknot's Corey Taylor, Stone Sour's same singer, has said he would not be playing music if not for the band's 1990 MTV VMAs performance of "Epic". Papa Roach's Jacoby Shaddix, in Songfacts, credited the way "the bass and the drums lock up" on Faith No More records as a direct influence on Korn's rhythm section. Korn, Deftones, System of a Down and Slipknot all signed up for a 2000 Warren Entner-curated tribute album that, in classic Faith No More style, never came out. A 2002 underground tribute (Tribute of the Year) compiled thirty cover versions of Faith No More songs and represents the closest thing to a definitive document of the band's pull on heavy underground music in their decade off.
The press has not, generally, kept up. Rolling Stone's 1997 dismissal of Album of the Year ("a decade that clearly finds them irrelevant") looks worse with each passing year that the band continues to influence the next generation of heavy bands. Ghost's Tobias Forge, on Australia's Rage television in 2019, gave the most accurate-by-default summary anyone has yet managed:
"In the 90s there were a few bands that I liked a lot, and still like to this day, that are consecutively hard to niche. One band is Faith No More. Who knows what they play? No one knows really. It's a synth band? No. Is it a heavy metal band? No, not really. It's just a really, really good rock band."
Tobias Forge of Ghost, Rage Midnight Show, 2019
Things you might not know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Courtney Love almost was Faith No More | A 19-year-old Courtney Love briefly fronted the band in February to June 1984 while dating Roddy Bottum; she was out before they signed to Mordam. |
| The Cliff Burton overlap | Jim Martin played in Mike Bordin's high-school band EZ Street alongside Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and was briefly in Burton's thrash side-project Vicious Hatred. |
| The garage-studio producer | Matt Wallace, who recorded Sharp Young Men in his parents' garage in 1982, would go on to produce or engineer every Faith No More album from We Care a Lot through King for a Day. |
| Patton wrote The Real Thing in two weeks | Two weeks after joining Faith No More in 1988, Mike Patton had written every lyric and vocal melody on the Grammy-nominated The Real Thing, which the band had largely already recorded. |
| Saved Corey Taylor's life | Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor, recovering from an attempted suicide at his grandmother's house, said it was Faith No More's 1990 MTV VMAs performance of "Epic" that pulled him back to writing music. |
| Robert Plant was an early fan | Robert Plant told Rolling Stone in March 1988 that the Mosley-era Faith No More were one of his favourite bands; the two acts toured together after The Real Thing. |
| "Easy" went bigger than "Epic" | Their hard-rock cover of the Commodores' "Easy" reached UK 3, AUS 1 and NZ 6, charting higher than "Epic" in three of the four largest English-language markets outside the United States. |
| Album of the Year went to number 1 in Australia | The same album Rolling Stone dismissed as "irrelevant" debuted at AUS 1 and went Platinum in Australia, GER 2 and NZ 1. |
| The Mosley reunion shows | In August 2016, the original lineup of Mosley, Bordin, Gould, Hudson and Bottum played two "Chuck Mosley & Friends" shows for the We Care a Lot reissue; Mosley died fifteen months later. |
| Jim Martin's pumpkins | After leaving in 1993, Jim Martin became a noted competitive prize-pumpkin grower in California, with successful giant-pumpkin entries at California state fairs. |
| Mike Bordin drummed for Ozzy | From 1996 onwards Mike Bordin has been Ozzy Osbourne's permanent touring drummer, on Ozzfest dates and on the late-1990s Black Sabbath Reunion tour. |
| Bottum's other band | Roddy Bottum founded Imperial Teen in 1994; their song "Yoo Hoo" was the title-sequence track on the 1999 black-comedy film Jawbreaker. |
| The MTV VMA the band actually won | "Epic" was nominated and lost; "Falling to Pieces" won Best Visual Effects in a Video at the 1991 MTV VMAs, the only competitive MTV statue the band has on the shelf. |
| Three Grammy nominations, no wins | The Real Thing (1990, Best Metal), "Epic" (1991, Best Hard Rock) and Angel Dust (1993, Best Hard Rock) were all Grammy-nominated; the band have never won a competitive Grammy. |
| The fax that killed Jim Martin's tenure | According to Roddy Bottum, the band fired long-time guitarist Jim Martin by fax after the Angel Dust touring cycle in 1993. |
Listen to Riffology
Riffology is the podcast where two long-time mates dig into the albums that shaped heavy music: the Bay Area scene that built Faith No More, the alt-metal generation they triggered (Korn, Deftones, System of a Down, Slipknot), the British hard-rock and grunge records that ran in parallel, and the producer chairs and studio rooms that connect them. Episodes are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts and every major platform. Two Faith No More albums have full episodes already: The Real Thing on RIFF032, and Angel Dust on RIFF040.
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