Small Victories By Adrian Harte

Eight years on from its publication, Adrian Harte’s Small Victories: The True Story Of Faith No More remains the essential literary deep-dive into rock’s most gloriously difficult band.

There are bands whose stories can be summed up in a sentence.

Faith No More have never been one of them.

Try explaining them to somebody who wasn't there. A San Francisco outfit formed in the early ’80s. Punk, funk, metal, goth, hardcore, pop and whatever the hell else took their fancy. A revolving door of singers. A bassist who became the band's quiet architect. A guitarist who looked like he should be operating heavy machinery. A drummer who somehow remained the calm centre of the storm. A keyboard player whose musical imagination stretched far beyond the confines of a rock band.

Then came Mike Patton. Then came The Real Thing. Then came Angel Dust. And then absolutely everything went sideways.

For years, the Faith No More story existed largely as fragments: old interviews, magazine articles, bootlegs, whispered backstage tales and the memories of people who were actually there. There was of course the unfinished biography by Steffan Chirazi...Enter Adrian Harte.

Released in September 2018, Small Victories set out to connect those dots. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and years of research, Harte constructed a detailed history of a band whose greatest defining characteristic was perhaps its refusal to be defined at all.

And critics noticed. Classic Rock called Harte's attention to detail and analysis exceptional, praising his “breezy prose style” and saying the book ultimately belonged in the category marked “Essential."

Planet Rock similarly praised Harte's insight into the band's punk attitude and “thrillingly eclectic, forward-thinking music”, arguing that the book did a genuine service to Faith No More's legacy.

Even Record Collector got suitably poetic, describing Harte's investigation as probing “every cranny and crevice”, while highlighting the book's combination of musical insight and backstage conflict.

That is precisely what makes Small Victories work. It isn't merely a list of albums, dates and line-ups. It's the story of how a group of musicians somehow kept making increasingly ambitious music while repeatedly threatening to tear themselves apart.

The early years receive particularly exhaustive treatment. The pre-Faith No More days. The formation. The early singers. Chuck Mosley. We Care A Lot. Introduce Yourself. The arrival of Jim Martin. The decision to recruit an unknown kid from California called Mike Patton. Harte doesn't simply rush towards The Real Thing because that's where the famous story begins. He makes you understand why the band were already extraordinary before the rest of the world caught up.

And then there's the stuff that makes Faith No More's story feel less like a biography and more like a particularly unhinged road movie. Guns N' Roses. Metallica. Hotel rooms. Arguments. Record-company politics. The strange relationship between commercial success and artistic credibility.

The book doesn't sanitise the band's history. Nor does it pretend that every decision they made was brilliant. This isn't some perfectly polished Hollywood-approved version of the Faith No More story. There are gaps. There are competing memories. There are stories that still don't quite add up. And with Faith No More, that's almost appropriate.

But perhaps the most revealing endorsement came from somewhere much closer to home. Bill Gould. After all, if anybody had reason to be suspicious of a book attempting to document Faith No More's tangled history, it was one of the people who had actually lived it. Instead, Gould reportedly praised Harte's research for producing “more than a few revelations” - despite the fact that he was in the band.

And that really is the magic of Small Victories. You can know the records. You can know the videos. You can know who replaced whom. You can know that Angel Dust was commercially bonkers and artistically brilliant. You can know every word to Epic.

You can even know the stories. Then you read this book and suddenly the pieces start fitting together. You understand the personalities behind the music. The friendships. The rivalries. The compromises. The stubbornness. The ambition. The sheer bloody-mindedness required to keep pushing forward when every sensible career decision suggested doing the opposite.

Faith No More were never supposed to become one of the most influential alternative bands of their generation. They certainly weren't supposed to survive everything they survived. And yet they did. That's the real victory.

Not the platinum records. Not MTV. Not the sold-out arenas. The victory was simply getting the band from one bizarre chapter to the next.

Eight years later, Adrian Harte's book remains a fitting monument to a band that spent its entire existence making the complicated look effortless.

Faith No More never made much sense.

Thankfully, neither does their story.

And that's exactly why we keep coming back for more.