Chuck Mosley and Friends 10 years
- Faith No More Followers
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Faith No More have always thrived on chaos. Split-ups. Comebacks. Frontmen. Guitarists. Feuds. Somehow, though, one of the most unbelievable chapters in their history came more than three decades after it all began, when the band reunited with the late, great Chuck Mosley for one last glorious blast of beautiful insanity.
On June 2, 2016, Faith No More announced they were dragging their past kicking and screaming back into the spotlight with a deluxe edition of their 1985 debut, We Care A Lot. After Billy Gould unearthed the original master tapes gathering dust in his attic, he and Matt Wallace painstakingly remixed and remastered the album that first taught the underground how weird rock music could really get.
Most bands repackage the past because they’ve run out of ideas.
Faith No More did it because they’d earned the right.
Only a year earlier they’d wrapped up the Sol Invictus campaign, instead of chasing the next chapter, they decided to celebrate the first one. And that meant Chuck.
The bridges had already been rebuilt. Chuck had made emotional guest appearances during the Second Coming Tour in 2010 and again on the Sol Invictus run in 2015. Every time he walked onstage, fans weren’t just watching a guest vocalist - they were watching Faith No More’s origins slip back into place.
“ I went up and blew out one of the hardest songs they asked me to sing… I always get nervous. That was even more nerve wracking because it’s been a long time since I played with those guys. But it was fun. It’s always fun.” - Chuck 2016
For casual fans, it was a cool reunion. For the faithful, it was spine-tingling. This was the Faith No More that existed before stadiums, before MTV, before Epic swallowed the planet. The scrappy, sarcastic, punk-fuelled lunatics who couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be a hardcore band, a funk band, an art project or groundbreaking pioneers.
Turns out they were all four. When talk inevitably turned to more shows with Chuck, Bill couldn’t quite contain himself.
“We have a couple ideas but nothing we want to talk about just yet. But Chuck is totally into the project and we’ve been talking a lot with him about it.”
Then everything escalated. Worldwide listening parties. Long-lost stories from the band’s earliest days. Unearthed live footage from 1986. Suddenly, We Care A Lot wasn’t just a reissue, it had become an event. A celebration of the gloriously unhinged version of Faith No More that nearly got forgotten beneath the platinum records.
Then came the sucker punch.
On August 16, just three days before the album hit the shelves, Faith No More made a huge announcement. The original line-up - Mosley, Gould, Bottum and Bordin, with Jon Hudson filling Jim Martin’s shoes - would reunite for two club shows. Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. The Troubadour in Los Angeles.
No arenas.
No festival headline slots.
Just sweat, feedback and history.
Roddy Bottum announced it in the only way he could:
“This is happening people and I’m fucking serious. Get to CA!!!!!!!!!!”
Cue absolute pandemonium.
Tickets vanished. Fans booked flights. Message boards exploded. For a couple of magical days it felt like 1986 all over again. Chuck admitted afterwards:
“It was a blast. I mean it was brutal. Yeah, I was worried about falling over or fucking up but I didn’t do either. So, it was really good.”
If Roddy Bottum’s Instagram post lit the fuse, the gigs themselves blew the doors off.
The Great American Music Hall and The Troubadour weren’t packed with celebrity hangers-on or industry suits. They were packed with believers. The fans who’d worn out copies of We Care A Lot and Introduce Yourself. The fans who knew that before FNM conquered MTV, Chuck was the voice that gave Faith No More their identity.
Then the reviews started pouring in.
The consensus? This wasn’t some cynical nostalgia grab. This was history.
Fans across Faith No More forums, Facebook and the band’s long-running Gig Database described the atmosphere as “electric”, “emotional” and “surreal”. Many admitted they’d never believed they’d see Chuck fronting the band again. Others called it the missing chapter in the Faith No More story finally being written. The setlist dug almost exclusively into the Mosley era, dusting off forgotten gems like The Jungle, Greed, Spirit, Mark Bowen and Anne’s Song - songs many thought they’d never hear performed by their original singer again.
Fans celebrated the charisma, the humour, the grit and the unmistakable chemistry that had made the original Faith No More so compelling in the first place.
Even Mike Patton turned up to watch. That single image said everything.
Faith No More’s history has often been told as a tale of replacement, of one frontman eclipsing another. But for two unforgettable nights in August 2016, there were no competing eras. No “better” version of the band. Just five old friends celebrating the music that started it all while the man who carried Faith No More to worldwide fame stood in the crowd applauding the band that existed before him.
Looking back now, the emotion feels almost overwhelming. These weren’t just intimate club shows to launch a deluxe reissue. They became Chuck’s final performances with Faith No More before his heart-breaking passing in November 2017. They also remain the last public performances by any incarnation of Faith No More together.
Sometimes rock history isn’t written in stadiums. Sometimes it happens in a 500-capacity club, with sweat dripping from the ceiling, forgotten songs roaring back to life, and a room full of fans quietly realising they’re watching the end of an era before they even know it’s over.
Looking back now, those nights hit differently. Nobody knew it then, but those two club gigs would become the final time Faith No More ever shared a stage together.
More painfully still, they would also be Chuck Mosley’s last performances with the band he helped drag out of the San Francisco underground and into rock history.
No fireworks.
No farewell tour.
Just two unforgettable nights where everything came full circle. Sometimes the greatest encores aren’t planned.
They just happen.
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