From Out Of Nowhere Was Released 37 years ago
How Faith No More turned a Frankenstein song into one of their defining anthems
On October 30, 1989, Faith No More unleashed From Out Of Nowhere, the first single from The Real Thing and, more importantly, the first official taste of the band with their new singer, Mike Patton.
At the time, nobody quite knew what the hell to make of Faith No More. They were too weird for metal, too heavy for pop and far too unpredictable to sit comfortably alongside the student-radio indie crowd. But From Out Of Nowhere suggested they might have stumbled upon something brilliant.
“Without a doubt this kicks everything, apart from Wreck, into perspective,” declared RAW in 1989. “Faith No More are climbing up to the heady heights of the music biz.”
Kerrang! was equally enthused, describing the band as a welcome antidote to the “staleness creeping into many new bands”, praising their willingness to take risks and calling their music “some of the most exciting and invigorating rock of the decade.”
The song was something of a Frankenstein creation. One section dated back to 1983 and had originally been known as Mike’s Disco, while the rest developed years later from ideas by Roddy Bottum, Billy Gould and Mike Bordin.
“Billy, Mike Bordin and I wrote that song together at our rehearsal space in Hunter’s Point,” Bottum recalled. “It was among the first batch of songs that we wrote after Chuck left the band.”
The basic structure came together before Jim Martin added his guitar, but Bottum was already thinking beyond the conventional rock template.
“It was about controlling the development of the song, not only just with the actual melodic structure, but you can also use rhythm to break things up,” he explained. “It was the opposite of that, and I’m sure that made it challenging for someone like Mike where it was already written. But that also shows his inspiration and brilliance, and the willingness to just fucking go for it.”
Gould remembers the song being very much Bottum’s baby.
“That song came from Roddy. That’s completely Roddy’s melody, so maybe it was deliberately pop,” he said. “But it was originally called ‘The Cult Song’, because it reminded me of The Cult.”
Then came Patton. The music was already written when the 20-year-old singer arrived, but he was handed the songs and given a couple of weeks to figure out what the hell he was going to do with them.
He didn’t exactly struggle. “[Patton] came in and did the melody and the lyrics,” Bottum recalled. “He sat with the songs for a couple weeks and wrote all his vocal parts. Really fast.”
Gould remembers the moment the band realised they might have something special.
“We tracked a cassette demo in the rehearsal room. Mike Patton took it home and worked on the melody and lyrics, then he would come to my house and we’d put the parts down on four-track to hone them down. The majority of the lyrics and singing melody was from him.”
And when Gould finally heard Patton’s voice properly, the effect was immediate.
“Within 30 seconds of hearing his contribution, it almost freaked me out on how well it worked.”
Patton himself later admitted the song was one of his earliest attempts at writing lyrics.
“That song is one of the first lyrics I wrote, in a day I think,” he told BAM in 1990. “It’s what I thought rock music should be at the time.”
Beneath the turbocharged guitars and pogo-inducing rhythm, though, there was something surprisingly vulnerable going on. Patton’s lyrics dealt with obsession, dependency and unrequited love.
“From Out Of Nowhere is more about people who are obsessive and feel the need to fill up on somebody else,” he explained.
The song was among the first tracks recorded at Sausalito’s Studio D in late 1988, during what Bottum remembers as a strange period of adjustment.
“It was a weird, ‘getting to know each other’ time with Mike Patton,” he recalled. “We all got along and worked together pretty easily. Everyone was pretty proactive in the studio. Jim Martin was becoming very particular about his guitar sound, I remember that.”
Then came the video - and, well, things went spectacularly sideways. The exact filming date remains unclear, but it was almost certainly shot around Patton’s first Faith No More show at San Francisco’s I-Beam on November 4, 1988. That gig was already a complete car crash before the cameras started rolling.
Bill had wrecked his neck at rehearsal and was surviving on massages and codeine.
“My neck completely froze when they were filming the video,” he recalled. “If you watch it, I’m barely moving. That was a horrible experience.”
Patton wasn’t exactly having a great night either. His trademark onstage lunacy resulted in a broken tooth and a badly gashed hand after he came into contact with jagged glass from smashed bottles. Thankfully, Mike Bordin’s dad was in the building.
“My dad was there at that show,” Bordin recalled. “He said, ‘Dude, come on, let’s go,’ and he took him to the hospital.”
The resulting video, directed by Doug Freel - whose CV included hair-metal giants such as Def Leppard and Poison - wasn’t exactly what Faith No More had in mind.
“He was the director that the label got in. He was giving the label what he thought we wanted,” said Gould. “I saw it and I didn’t dig it. I didn’t want to be in that kind of band.”
Bordin was even more brutal.
“The video was bad; we were represented as something we weren’t. We had no control over the content. I’m not surprised it did nothing to enhance our career.”
And commercially, From Out Of Nowhere initially went nowhere. Released four months after The Real Thing, it failed to crack the UK singles chart. Faith No More were still regarded as eccentric hippy weirdos, their genre-bending assault largely confined to student radio. Even touring with Metallica - and receiving heavyweight praise from the likes of Kirk Hammett and Slash - couldn’t immediately convince the wider world that these lunatics were onto something. Then Epic happened.
Suddenly Faith No More weren’t weird outsiders anymore. They were one of the biggest bands on the planet.
So, on April 2, 1990, From Out Of Nowhere was dragged back out of the cupboard and given another shot. This time it reached No.23 in the UK, with an extended mix appearing on picture-disc vinyl adorned with Ross Halfin’s now-infamous underwear-clad band portrait.
And the song finally got the audience it deserved. More importantly, it became a live monster. For years, From Out Of Nowhere was a Faith No More setlist staple, regularly used to kick shows into gear.
“Most of our stuff was mid-tempo, so the set was always in danger of dragging,” Gould explained. “With that one we could at least start things on a high note.”
It remained a live opener for years - until, inevitably, the band grew to hate the bloody thing.
“We stuck with it as an opener until we hated it so much we scrapped it from the set altogether.”
Such is the fate of a song that refuses to die. From an ancient 1983 riff called Mike’s Disco, through Roddy Bottum’s pop instincts, Jim Martin’s guitar, Billy Gould’s bass, Mike Bordin’s seismic drumming and one young Mike Patton’s first great vocal performance, From Out Of Nowhere was assembled from mismatched parts and somehow emerged as a monster.
A Frankenstein song, perhaps. But one that fucking worked.
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