The Royal We - A treat For Faith No More Fans

I am not sure what I expected before sitting down with The Royal We. Reading the Substack tales from Roddy Bottum were indeed a clue. However, as a feverish Faith No More fan starved of any word from the band for sometime now I hoped for a history of my favourite artists from their perspective.

It’s not exactly what I got, and knowing my favourite keyboardist like I do, I was actually quite foolish to hope for it.

The Royal We is a weird and wonderful journey, it is the dialogue of a true artist who has travelled that weird and wonderful journey. He has endured its hardships and enjoyed its benefits (maybe that’s the other way around). The fine details that embellish Roddy's text with such poetic romanticism and dark drama could be mistaken for fiction - but of course The Royal We is not.

The author travels back and forth to his childhood and teenage years in LA. Roddy describes his struggles with honesty about his sexuality and having no gay role models. Yet he succeeds to find love and passion in the seediest of places. The author tells us of his family - how he looked up to his father, how he bonded over music with his mother and how mischief brought him close to his three sisters.

He takes us to San Francisco during the early days of Faith No More and the development of their unmistakable sound. He includes those stories that any respectable FNM should know - Milli Vanilli, the Guns and the Roses (as Roddy refers to them), touring We Care A Lot in a '66 Dodge, the Metroplex and the vats, coming out via the music press, writing Introduce Yourself and Angel Dust.

There are no dates, not all of the names, in some parts just hazy memories, there is even the odd venue or city that Roddy gets wrong (in his defence he does say heroin was there to help him forget the details). There are emotions and out of focus scenes played out on the page like the movie version of Roddy's life.

Roddy invites us to celebrate Chuck Mosley, Bill Gould, Mike Bordin, Jim Martin and Mike Patton with love and respect. He shares with us how he bonded with each member of FNM and the oddities of their personalities. This is what the obsessed fanboy part of me came to find. In one chapter Roddy describes how his keys were a haunting beauty 'in the midst of all the pummel of thunder and power and macho'.

But, there is much more that Roddy reveals about his own journey, his relationships, Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, and how he becomes a millionaire!

Courtney is a constant supporting character throughout the book, and privy to some of the most heartbreaking chapters of Roddy’s life. Losing his father, losing Kurt and getting clean.

A recurring theme is death - friends, family, pets. Roddy spent his youth hiding things, his sexuality, his drug habit. The drugs and the drugs and the drugs. He does not spend much time glamourising his addiction to heroin, he instead describes the sickness it provokes and how it almost killed him.

The memoir draws to its conclusion in 1996 with the release of Imperial Teen’s debut record, Seasick. The Royal We feels like the beginning, so much happens but as fans we know there is so much left to say. Can we expect a follow up?

Faith No More have always been a cooking pot of very different ingredients. Strange opposites attactracting to create something new and fantastic. Roddy's is one unique, glamorous and filthy story. Reading it made me want to next experience the memoirs of Bill, Mike B, Jim, Chuck and Patton. To complete the puzzle.

If you want a history of the band stick to Adrian Harte or Steffan Chirazi. Roddy's memoirs, just like Faith No More’s music are brave, entertaining and unconventional.

[The book would make a great Oliver Stone film.]