0.9.1 - It's a Midlife Crisis
I've taken a lot of swings at answering this question over the years, and while I'm certain I don't always get it right, there is one shirt I own which has attracted unprompted praise from people at venues more than once; including from people working the merch stands while I am buying the shirt from the band I am seeing. And while it is not quite 25 years old like my Nine Inch Nails shirt (though I think my Pretty Hate Machine NIN shirt is actually even older), it's amongst my most treasured items in my shirt collection.
Here it is:-
If you're not conversant, this is a riff/straight up steal from the opening credits of inconceivably popular British London-based soap opera 'Eastenders'. I'm not sure what the financial viability is of a shirt run for two dates in July 2012 at the end of a tour that has been running on and off since 2009, and I suspect there was some finger-crossing going on about BBC lawyers being in attendance, but in terms of limited edition concert merch which also happens to be a clean and well executed joke, this is the holy grail for me.
So when I did my article on T-shirts and bands a couple of weeks ago, I came across this shirt, and thought it would make a good jumping off point to talk about a band that I genuinely love, are impossible to categorise, have a turbulent history and unfairly shoulder the blame in some circles for the rise of Nu-metal even though it's definitely not their fault.
There's a lyric in the Ben Fold's 5 song Army that goes:-
"citing artistic differences // the band broke up in May // and in June reformed without me // but they've got a different name"
With the exception of the different name part, this is functionally what happened to original Faith No More frontman Chuck Mosley, who appears only on Introduce Yourself, the 1987 debut album. By all accounts, Chuck was a terrible person to be around; picking fistfights with band members onstage, being unreliably absent when required, and insisting on wild changes of musical direction to suit his capricious tastes. Having already split from their very first vocalist, drummer Mike Bourdin, bass player Billy Gould and keyboard player Roddy Bottum played with several singers before forming Faith No More 'officially' with Mosley.
Full disclosure, I'm no fan of Introduce Yourself and I rarely listen to it. It's a very sophomoric college rock record and Mosley's weird condescending sneer throughout just makes in an unpleasant experience. As someone who became a fan of FNM post the Mosley years, to me this is Faith No More literally in name only. The completionist in me compelled me to listen to it again, and I enjoyed it no more this time. We Care A Lot exists as both the best song on there, and the kind of proto-formative blueprint of some of what was to come with the later albums, but even that to my mind is tarnished by association with this whole album. Better to pretend this one does not exist.
I don't know which Faith No More song I heard first; I am 95% sure Angel Dust was the first Faith No More album I owned, the original copy I bought back in the very early 90's still in my grubby little mitts above (my copy of King For A Day... is somewhere also, but I can only hold so many CDs in one hand). But Epic was a big song in the early 90's which would have coincided with the start of my underage drinking and hanging out in sweaty basement clubs playing rock and metal music and not asking too many questions about the average age of their clientele. My age-addled brain also thinks Midlife Crisis might have been on some kind of compilation album, but some quick research shows that From Out Of Nowhere was on Now That's What I Call Music 17 (that track listing is schizophrenic, who bought those albums?) but I can't find any evidence of Midlife Crisis scattered somewhere unexpectedly in my path.
However it happened, back in the carefree days of my late teens, when I was making poor financial decisions backed with credit cards it would take me years and years to settle, I would go into Chesterfield town center on a Saturday and buy CDs; we had a tiny HMV store in middle of the market, but the majority of my purchases came from Hudson's independent music store, a musical oasis in the cultural desert which was the small town I grew up in. Hudson's was the kind of place where you could see an obscure Industrial metal band do Hey Man Nice Shot on a Channel 4 music show at 2am on a Saturday, go in on Sunday and say "Do you have a copy of an album by a band called Filter?" and they would have both the record you were looking for, and an obscure early EP just tucked away somewhere. One hundred percent of the CDs above I guarantee came from Hudson's, and its absence (and the absence of independent music shops in general) is another significant loss in the general degradation of society we're all currently enjoying.
Hudson's was also where, in the days before the Internet, I would go to buy my gig tickets. Looking back on it now, it remains the thing that has changed the most from when I was a teen. I bought a weekend camping ticket for a music festival by going into a shop in my town and giving them £87; something now which is a highly contested affair of coordinated internet queuing and Dynamic Ticket pricing. Tickets now are available everywhere, to everyone - but in my day, you had to know, and care, that someone you loved was on tour and then go to your local music store, or call a box office in another city to get to see them live.
And so it was with Faith No More. I'd worn grooves in the plastic of my copies of The Real Thing and Angel Dust by the time their fourth album (3rd really) came out in 1995, and with it came a tour announcement. I'd just reached the point where I was comfortable trying to organise going to gigs without parental support, and this was an opportunity not to be missed. A friend and I went to Hudson's, asked about Faith No More tickets. A serious young man checked a book, took our money, handed us tickets. I don't remember for where - probably Manchester? But I was excited. I had the new album, and even more so than the previous two King For A Day...Fool For A Lifetime rendered Faith No More's sound impossible to pigeonhole.
The broad assumption by the uninitiated is that they are an alternative rock band, but I think that's just because the more 'alternative rock' songs on the albums were the most radio-friendly, so they got put in a certain box. But listen to Woodpecker From Mars, or RV or Evidence or Stripsearch, or their propensity to do unconventional covers of seventies and eighties swing and soul songs (The Bee Gees I Started A Joke, putting Theme from Midnight Cowboy on Angel Dust, along with a cover of Easy by The Commodores) it becomes harder to find a comfortable box to put them in. Are there more alternative rock songs than not? Sure, but the range is what makes them fascinating. Well, that and their now established replacement for Chuck Mosley, mister Mike Patton.
In case previous articles has made you think all of my musical interest has been motivated by how much of a crush I had on their lead singer, I'm here to tell you that was not gender-exclusive, and mid 90's Mike Patton made me feel some very thought-provoking feelings about him and myself as a young man. He's also an unbelievably talented singer with an incredible six-octave vocal range - if you want a fun YouTube rabbit hole to go down, I recommend looking up reaction videos to voice coaches watching Mike Patton clips (I'm partial to The Charismatic Voice myself, other channels are available).
So, I'm an established avid fan of the Mike Patton era band, I've listened to two albums to death, and I'm experiencing the highly eclectic King For A Day... with a ticket to see them live in hand. Then, the tour gets cancelled. Word is, the band hate the new album. Mike Patton hates the new album. Mike Patton had a breakdown during the US leg of the tour. Its the mid 90's and information is scarce; all I really know is that, with ticket in hand, my opportunity to see them live is gone. I am crushed.
There is hope still. Word that they are back in the studio appears in the pages of Kerrang! A new album gets announced, and I buy Album Of The Year on release date, and it sounds like a fusion of Angel Dust and King For A Day... in the best ways. I love Ashes to Ashes (not a Bowie cover, just the same title), and Last Cup Of Sorrow and Stripsearch and I'm waiting, waiting for a tour announcement.
Faith No More break up less than six months later.
And I'm haunted, haunted by the lost opportunity to see a band I loved which was snatched from between my fingers. They're gone, consigned to a long list of bands I will never see live but for whom I own their entire discography. Of course, you know from the start of this article that this story comes with a happy ending.
For reasons I haven't looked into, but I assume involved some financial incentive, Faith No More reformed in 2009 and commenced an on-and-off again multi-continental, eighty-one show tour which started in London, and three years later, looked to end in London. The same friend with which I had tickets back in 1996 heard the news; the plan was on, we would fulfil our long-denied dream and finally see the show we paid for in Hudsons 18 years prior. And we did; and at that show, on their merch stand, was a T-shirt that would commemorate that journey and invite complements from strangers for twenty years to follow.
You'll not be surprised, readers, to hear it ranks amongst my favourite live shows of all time. It was incredible and weird in the best ways, and felt like a full circle moment, a chance to close the book on this band that I loved, and celebrate what they were and always would be.
Then, two years later, and 18 years after Album of the Year, they released Sol Invictus.
In some ways, it exists as the perfect bookend to their discography only in that I don't really consider it a Faith No More album, in the same way I don't Introduce Yourself;. The physical components are there, and there's echoes, shades of what came before, but I struggled to find a place in my heart for this postscript in extremis. I've been unfair to it, I know, but the enthusiasm isn't there to embrace what it is. That 2012 show will always be all the farewell I needed to close the book on my relationship with this band, and so it sits unloved, looking through the window, forever left out in the cold.
But inside that four-album run that makes up their core/real discography, there exists a band that did wild and unusual things, never found mainstream success despite several massive radio hits big enough to drive weird punk/prog rock into the Top 40, who broke my heart and mended it again. They'll always exist as a band I wish I could recommend to more people - in my head I tell myself that their sound is too varied, too deliberately challenging in places, to unconventional to be an easy recommendation for anyone; in my heart, I think it's that I just want to keep them all to myself.
