Who Cares A Lot? The Greatest Hits Was Released 28 Years Ago
The have been quite a few Faith No More greatest hits compilations released in the last three decades. Some more worthwhile than others, including rare unreleased music.
Released in 1998 by Slash and London Records in the UK and Europe on November 24, with Reprise handling the North American release on 8 December, Who Cares A Lot? was the first major FNM compilation and, crucially, the only one assembled with the band’s involvement during their Slash/Warner years.
This was not a routine compilation assembled solely around the band’s most familiar songs. Disc Two explored the group’s archives, including previously unreleased material such as The World Is Yours, an Angel Dust outtake that Faith No More had performed live as early as 1991.
When the record company decided to put together a retrospective following the band's split, Bill Gould wasn't about to simply hand over the keys.
“I thought that would be a good idea because I wanted just to make sure that it was done in a way that we would approve of,” he explained in 1998.
Bill wanted the songs presented chronologically, not because Faith No More were particularly interested in rewriting their own history, but because the transformation was part of the story.
“I think that through our career, our music has changed a lot and our sound has changed a lot,” he said. “It's good to hear things in that way.”
Faith No More's career isn't just a collection of great songs - it's the sound of a band continually refusing to become comfortable. From the raw, twitching weirdness of We Care A Lot to the genre demolition of The Real Thing, the warped brilliance of Angel Dust, the crushing alternative barks of King For A Day... Fool For A Lifetime and the darker territory of Album Of The Year, the only predictable thing about Faith No More was that they would change.
Bill also wanted to dig beneath the obvious hits. He had unearthed tapes from his basement containing material that few people had ever heard.
“They're not perfect and they would never be singles,” he admitted, “but they're also another side of the band that maybe people haven't heard.”
They wanted the weird stuff in there, too. Because, as the bassist pointed out, the whole idea of a compilation was slightly ridiculous to begin with.
“I mean, a compilation is like, okay, who cares, right?”
Bill even suggested that Faith No More could have produced completely different compilations: a metal collection, a pop collection, perhaps even a soul compilation. There were enough different sides to the band to make all three possible.
“I can’t really figure out exactly what we were and what we did anyway,” Gould admitted. “We kind of did a lot on intuition and what we were feeling at the time.”
Even the artwork was gloriously deranged. The European edition featured a 1955 photograph of comedian Benny Hill auditioning chorus girls for his new show, Benny’s Merry-Go-Round.
Rhino and Slash eventually reissued the compilation in 2021, but the original arrived at exactly the right moment: Faith No More were gone and the fans were heart-broken.
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