Faith No More Maquinaria Festival 15 Years ago!

November 12, 2011. Club Hípico, Santiago, Chile. Faith No More were back, and by now their relationship with the Chilean faithful was becoming something approaching a religious experience. This was their fourth visit to the country in three years, and if the locals had thought they'd seen everything the band had to offer, they were about to receive another sizeable dose of musical insanity.

The Maquinaria Festival had assembled a formidable bill, with Alice In Chains, Chris Cornell, Megadeth and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club among the attractions. But as the evening progressed, an increasingly impatient crowd began gathering in front of the Claro Sony Ericsson Stage. They weren't there for a nostalgia trip. They wanted Faith No More.

And Faith No More, naturally, had other ideas. Rather than simply wheel out the familiar greatest hits, the band had devised something altogether more interesting: a complete performance of King For A Day… Fool For A Lifetime, their wonderfully schizophrenic 1995 album. Even better, they had invited original album guitarist Trey Spruance back into the fold. For fans, this was an opportunity to witness a particularly unusual chapter of the band's history being brought back to life.

The anticipation was almost unbearable. The show was delayed by more than 15 minutes, with impatient fans resorting to whistles and jeers to hurry things along. When the band finally appeared at 10.17pm, they did so dressed entirely in white, against a similarly white stage decorated with colourful floral arrangements. It was less heavy metal concert, more deranged garden party.

Humo Negro described the atmosphere as the perfect ingredients for a historic evening, with the band arriving onstage to an ovation from the assembled faithful.

There was no grand introduction. No unnecessary theatrics. Just Get Out, launched straight into the crowd with all the subtlety of a brick through a greenhouse. Roddy Bottum joined the proceedings as Ricochet kicked in, and the band immediately settled into the album's original running order. It was at this point that the audience realised that this was an album playthrough and the jubilation for each song grew.

Then came Evidence, delivered in its Spanish/English incarnation, with Patton introducing it as a particularly "flaite" song - Chilean slang for something rough around the edges. The audience responded accordingly.

It was a relationship that Patton clearly enjoyed exploiting. His Spanish-language banter was a constant source of amusement, dropping local expressions into conversations with the crowd and generally behaving like a particularly obnoxious tourist who'd decided he owned the place.

The Chilean press captured the peculiar atmosphere rather beautifully. One contemporary review described the encounter as "una extraña mezcla de euforia, nostalgia y saliva" - a strange mixture of euphoria, nostalgia and saliva. Given the amount of spitting directed towards Patton throughout the evening, it was an exceptionally accurate assessment.

Trey's return was undoubtedly one of the evening's major attractions. His presence brought an extra authenticity to the King For A Day material, and the guitarist looked entirely at home alongside Bill Gould, Mike Bordin, Bottum and Patton. The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies restored the band's more aggressive instincts, before Star A.D. received its elaborate live treatment with four additional horn players. Patton christened them his "trompetas calientes", and their contribution gave the track an appropriately extravagant, big-band swagger.

Then came Cuckoo For Caca, with Patton unleashing some particularly vicious vocal gymnastics, complete with screams and manic interaction with his effects equipment. The contrast with the gentle Brazilian sway of Caralho Voador was typically ridiculous. One minute you're being assaulted by a human foghorn; the next you're drifting through a bizarre tropical cocktail lounge.

Ugly In The Morning and Digging The Grave kept the momentum moving, before the evening took another unexpected turn. For Take This Bottle, Spruance temporarily stepped aside and Jon Hudson took over guitar duties. The opportunity for a little inter-band mischief proved irresistible, with Patton taking the opportunity to tease Hudson about his age and bald head.

The two-guitar arrangement continued into King For A Day and the ferocious What A Day, giving the latter an extra dimension of muscularity. It was an unusual configuration for Faith No More, but one that worked wonderfully.

The band were also enjoying themselves enormously. Patton continued his Spanish lessons with the audience, dropping in expressions such as "cachai", "la raja" and "bakán". He even took the opportunity to tell the crowd not to request songs by Chilean singer Myriam Hernández - a cheeky reference to the band's infamous appearance at the Viña del Mar Festival back in 1991.

EMOL reported that Patton was also playing games with the band's supposed farewell appearances, announcing: "Es el último concierto también hoy, como la última vez" - it's the last concert again today, just like last time. A couple of seconds later, he undermined the whole charade by admitting: "la verdad es que cada año estamos acá, wey" - the truth is, we're here every year.

As The Last To Know brought the main album performance towards its conclusion, Roddy announced the final number. Just A Man arrived accompanied by a choir of 20 singers dressed in colourful robes, transforming the stage into something resembling a particularly eccentric gospel ceremony. It was an impressive finale to the album, and one that perfectly captured the theatrical eccentricity of Faith No More at their most adventurous.

The band disappeared behind the amplifiers, leaving the crowd wondering whether the evening was over. It wasn't.

When they returned, Patton and Bottum were carrying a Chilean flag bearing the words "educación", showing their support for the country's student movement and its campaign for free education. In a festival where political statements had been conspicuously absent, Faith No More were among the few performers to acknowledge the issue.

The encore began with an unidentified new composition, Matador previously performed in Buenos Aires on November 8. Roddy dedicated the song to Felipe Herrera, a member of Chilean Faith No More tribute band Please No More, who had recently passed away. For fans desperate to hear new material, it was another tantalising glimpse of what might lie ahead.

From there, the band returned to familiar territory with Caffeine and Ashes To Ashes, before bringing Spruance back for the final number. Patton encouraged him to speak Spanish, while Billy joked about whether the band sounded Mexican. Patton responded that when he visited Mexico, people told him he sounded Chilean. The audience duly erupted.

The closing choice was Absolute Zero, played for the first and last time, and a particularly inspired way to finish a night devoted to the album. It was the sort of deep cut that separated the casual festival-goers from the obsessives who had followed the band for decades.

The crowd wanted more, but this time the departure was final. As roadies dressed in white began dismantling the equipment, fireworks illuminated the sky above Club Hípico, providing an appropriately grand send-off.

EMOL described the evening as a celebration of Faith No More's enduring reunion with their "tierra prometida" - promised land. Humo Negro went even further, praising the performance as "una presentación que prácticamente no tuvo puntos bajos" - a show that practically had no weak points.

There was something wonderfully appropriate about Faith No More choosing King For A Day… Fool For A Lifetime as the centrepiece of their Chilean return. It's an album that refuses to sit still, jumping between aggression, soul, funk, bossa nova and theatrical excess with the sort of reckless confidence that most bands wouldn't dare attempt. Having Spruance back onstage only added to the occasion.

More than anything, however, the evening demonstrated just how special the relationship between Faith No More and their Chilean audience had become. This wasn't simply another stop on a reunion tour. It was a celebration between a band and a country that had embraced them long before the rest of the world fully understood what they were about.

One Chilean publication summed up the occasion with the wonderfully blunt phrase: "Ser rey por un día, y hueón de por vida" - be king for a day and a bastard for life.

For Faith No More, that sounded about right.