Faith No More Followers
May 15, 20212 min
Classic rare footage from 1984 of Faith No More with Courtney Love on vocals recently rediscovered.
In their early days Faith No More featured only three of the members present today - Billy Gould, Mike Bordin and Roddy Bottum. In 1984 Mark Bowen served as guitarist and the band would use varied singers from gig to gig. One of those singers was Courtney Love. Read More.
Love played with Faith No More for approximately four to five months in 1984. She told VH1, ‘It was the summer, I was eighteen in San Francisco. Faith No More were playing, and they had a crap singer. I had a wedding gown on, and I looked fucking cool and I knew it, and I demanded to be in their band. And then I broke a bottle over my head, or that is the legend.’
Love's punk attitude suited FNM, Billy Gould spoke of her time with the band in Adrian Harte's Small Victories the True Story of Faith No More, ‘She was really engaging with people, and she pissed a lot of people off. It’s the aesthetic we had. But when she was there, it was probably the first time it felt like a band, and she thought of us as her band. That’s the
most significant part of her involvement: that we started becoming a band at that point.’
Her last gig was on June 17th at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco but sometime before this, under the name Courtney Henley, a set was filmed as FNM's first television appearance and aired on a local public access channel.
‘She went to the flower mart early in the morning and brought bags and bags of flowers for the shoot,’ Roddy Bottum remembers. ‘We covered the stage with flowers and wore dashikis and burned incense. In the punk scene of San Francisco, this was completely audacious.’
The video footage of this show and FNM's first ever interview hasn't been available in nearly 40 years! Watch this glorious piece of FNM history with early versions of Why Do You Bother and Mark Bowen.