Six years since Mondo Cane last performed live, Mike Patton dusted off his Sunday best, polished his vocal chords and took his magnificent musical spectacle to Mexico for two nights of orchestral splendour on October 1 and 2. And, what treat it was. Photos by Yaphet For the past seven years, Patton’s vocal acrobatics have largely been channelled into the throat-shredding of Mr. Bungle 2.0, the twisted alternative melodies of Tomahawk and, more recently, the country-and-western crow calls of AVTT/PTTN. But Mondo Cane is a different beast altogether. Here, the man of a thousand voices swaps sonic savagery for the silky sophistication of a continental crooner, gliding effortlessly between Italian, Spanish and English. Three languages, one extraordinary voice, and enough vocal versatility to make most singers consider a career in plumbing. If you thought Patton had finally exhausted his supply of vocal tricks, think again. The man could probably sing the telephone directory in six different accents and make it sound like a lost Morricone soundtrack. Yet Mondo Cane is far more than a novelty act or an excuse for the world’s most unpredictable frontman to show off. It’s a beautifully realised celebration of vintage Italian pop, cinematic arrangements and the sort of musical craftsmanship that makes you wonder whether he has any weaknesses at all. The first of these shows took place on October 1 at Mexico City’s magnificent Palacio de Bellas Artes, before the project returned on October 3 for the opening of the 54th Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato. Both provided a welcome reminder that Patton’s musical appetite remains gloriously insatiable. The Mexico City performance took place in front of a sold-out crowd, with more than 30 musicians helping bring the material to life. Surrounded by an army of accomplished musicians, including Mr. Bungle touring percussionist William Winant, and under the direction of musical maestro Cheche Alara, Patton looked utterly at home. His mischievous grin and playful interaction with the ensemble suggested a man having the absolute time of his life. The orchestral arrangements were sumptuous, the performance beautifully controlled and the sound mixing a treat for the ears. Somebody, somewhere, please tell us this was recorded for a future Ipecac release. The setlist delivered plenty for devotees of the original Mondo Cane album, with highlights including Il cielo in una stanza, Che notte!, 20 km. al giorno, Deep Down and L’urlo negro. But it was the Mexican detour that really sent proceedings into another dimension. At the Mexico City show, Mariachi Gama 1000 joined the already crowded stage, helping transform the encore into a spectacular collision of musical worlds. Mr. Bungle’s Retrovertigo received a wonderfully unexpected mariachi makeover, while traditional Mexican song La Llorona, Álvaro Carrillo’s Luz de luna and Juan Gabriel’s Hasta que te conocí allowed Patton to demonstrate his Spanish. It was an inspired twist, one minute Patton is crooning vintage Italian pop with the elegance of a seasoned lounge singer; the next, he’s sharing the stage with a mariachi ensemble and breathing new life into one of Mr. Bungle’s most haunting compositions. These Mexican performances reaffirmed what anyone who has followed Patton’s career already knows: he remains one of the most versatile and outrageously talented performers on the planet. Whether he’s unleashing hell with Mr. Bungle, exploring the darker corners of alternative rock with Tomahawk or embracing the cinematic splendour of Mondo Cane, the man possesses an almost ridiculous ability to inhabit whatever musical world he chooses. More importantly, these weren’t simply technical demonstrations from a singer showing off his astonishing range. There was warmth, humour, genuine affection for the material and an infectious sense of joy throughout. And with Faith No More’s forthcoming shows on the horizon, these performances provide another tantalising glimpse of what makes Patton such a compelling frontman. The voice remains magnificent, the stage presence as magnetic as ever, and that mischievous twinkle in his eye suggests he’s still got plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Two dreamlike performances, a mariachi-assisted Mr. Bungle curveball and a timely reminder that Mike Patton is still operating on a completely different level. The man of a thousand voices is back in crooner mode, and frankly, the rest of us are just lucky enough to be listening.

Faith No More played their final show with Jim Martin at the Phoenix Festival on July 17, 1993. A few months later, after an increasingly frosty relationship with the rest of the band and several failed attempts to actually get hold of him , Martin was given the boot by fax. By January 1994, Jim was telling Kerrang! his side of the story. “Faith No More, as you know it, is no longer,” he declared, insisting that their musical differences had always been an integral part of the band. While Faith No More were getting Dean Menta up to speed, their second guitar played since Jim, Big Sick And Ugly Martin was already plotting his comeback. Demos were recorded at Jason Newsted’s home studio before Jim unveiled his new outfit in October 1994, initially dubbed the gloriously ridiculous Dick Picklefist Orchestra. A name change followed, then another, before they finally settled on The Behemoth. After a handful of US shows, a UK tour sponsored by Kerrang! was planned. Jim clearly knew what he was letting himself in for, noting that British crowds were rather fond of “having a few pints and shouting at the band that they’re fat bastards!” Sadly, the tour never happened. Legal complications arose because another band, Poland’s rising extreme-metal monsters Behemoth, already had dibs on the name. So the project continued under his own name. The resulting album, Milk And Blood, finally arrived through Steamhammer on October 6, 1997. Twelve tracks of chunky, riff-heavy weirdness included a cover of The Pogues’ Navigator and a re-recording of Faith No More’s Surprise! You’re Dead. Martin finally hit the UK stage that same month, although anyone expecting the glorious insanity of Faith No More was in for a rude awakening. Kerrang!, who had previously been so supportive, summed it up rather brutally: the riffs were there, but the eccentric Patton-era magic was missing - and Martin’s decision to handle vocals himself was described as about as sensible as asking a goldfish to front a metal band. And then, almost predictably, Jim disappeared again. For years he existed largely as a rumour, a bearded apparition occasionally emerging from the wilderness, before finally returning to the live stage with Infectious Grooves in 2013. Kerrang 1997 | JIM MARTIN Milk And Blood | DAVE EVERLEY KKKK IT'S BEEN a long, long wait. Three years, in fact, since James B Martin - Big, Sick, Ugly guitar behemoth and fabulous furry freak brother numero uno - lost the faith and left the platinum pastures of his former band for less suffocating climes. 'Milk And Blood' is Martin's first album since he was ousted from Faith No More at the tail-end of 1993. Big and stubborn, resolutely grouchy and absolutely insistent on going its own way, this is Jim Martin set to music. The first thing you notice is Jimbo's voice. It rasps, rumbles, whoops, screeches, and sounds just like you'd think the voice of a man with that sort of beard would sound. The second thing you notice is that guitar. Crashing across songs like Godzilla through downtown Tokyo, it tramples verses and reduces choruses to rubble. In Jim Martin's hands, the Flying V isn't so much an instrument as a hundred tons of TNT waiting for a detonator. ‘Milk And Blood' is an album that stops for no one. 'Disco Dust' throbs and thrashes around a riff that whomps straight for the solar plexus and doesn't quit until you crash to your knees. The seven-minute 'Loser' stumbles from tottering feeb-rock to bloodshot roar in a heartbeat. 'Fatso's World' - co-written and sung by Metallica's Jason Newsted - is a crank-metal meltdown that sees two grown men playing dumb while the rest of the world looks on bemused. The downside is a dead-end romp through The Pogues' 'Navigator', and a pointless dig at his erstwhile mates via a 'cover' of FNM’s 'Surprise! You're Dead', which is funny for about three seconds until you realise that the original sounded a dozen times better. But then he goes all ethereal on us with eight minutes of bonged-out ambience entitled 'Around The Sun' and all is right with the world once more. 'Milk And Blood' is no 'Real Thing'. It's not even an ‘Angel Dust'. But it's better than 'King For A Day...' and at least as good as ‘Album Of The Year'. Revenge doesn't come much sweeter than this. Fact File FORMED: Martin was given the push from Faith No More in 1993. PREVIOUS LPS: None as a solo artist, four with FNM. BIGGEST HIT: None. CURRENT LINE-UP: Martin (vocals/guitar), Brent Weeks (bass), Joe Cabral (drums), plus an appearance from Metallica's Jason Newsted. STUDIO VIBE: Lazy - the album took three years to record. COVER ARTWORK FOR LP: Hundreds of shop window dummies floating, over the surface of a red planet. SUBJECT MATTER FOR LP: All manner of Martin-esque weirdness. NEXT MOVE: Martin is playing the Camden Underworld on October 17.

1986. For Faith No More, it was the year everything started moving. Slash Records came calling, the band got its first real taste of life on the road venturing beyond California for the first time. Touring would eventually become the lifeblood of FNM, but in ’86 they were still discovering just how far this strange little band could go. They were also forging friendships and alliances with bands including Soundgarden and Frightwig, while back home, the death of Metallica bassist Cliff Burton would leave a profound mark on Mike Bordin and Jim Martin, forcing both to confront just how fragile life on the road could be. And then there was Mike Patton. Not yet the voice of Faith No More. Not even remotely. Just an 18-year-old kid standing in a crowd, watching the band that would eventually change his life. On October 4, 1986, Faith No More rolled into Humboldt State University in Arcata for a pre-Introduce Yourself show with Chuck Mosley still behind the mic. Somewhere in that small crowd were two teenagers from Eureka: Mike Patton and his Mr. Bungle bandmate Trey Spruance. After the show, Spruance got talking to Mike Bordin and handed him a cassette. The Raging Wrath Of The Easter Bunny the first Mr. Bungle demo. On said cassette Patton unleashes a torrent of screams, growls and guttural metal vocals across tracks such as ‘Spreading The Thighs Of Death’ and ‘Raping Your Mind’. For Jim Martin, who quickly became fascinated by the tape, the voice conjured an image of some enormous, terrifying bastard roaring into a microphone. The reality was rather different. 'He [Trey] gives me the tape and we play it later doing whatever we were doing, and Jim loves it, because it sounds like Slayer, it sounds like speed metal with death growls and all this crazy stuff. And I'll never forget it; Jim turns around and says to us, 'This guy has got to be this giant fat guy with all the power that he's got in his voice!' And time goes by, and then when we were looking for a new singer, Jim was like, 'Let's get that big fat guy from Mr. Bungle!' - Mike B 2015 "He didn't get the tape directly from my hands NO, God NO! It always kinda makes me wonder, because he likes maybe 5 or 6 bands in the whole world. So why would he like Mr Bungle ever in any form? It may well have been savage tape, but the world is filled with savage music so why would he like this one? I always wondered about that, right to this day. How does Mr Bungle fit in with Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the DUNE soundtrack, the PLATOON soundtrack and Celtic Folk music? I don't get it, although it was obviously some weird misfortune, a twist of fate. It shouldn't have happened that way, but he was the only member of the whole band who liked that tape." - Mike P 1993 The rest of Faith No More weren’t quite as convinced. Patton’s vocals on Easter Bunny were ferocious, but they were also comparatively one-dimensional. The band were looking for something more versatile. Still, Martin kept the tape. The two bands met again on December 28, 1987, when members of Mr. Bungle travelled to San Francisco to watch the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More at the Fillmore. Once again, Spruance and Patton crossed paths with Bordin, this time handing over a new demo: Bowel Of Chiley. The difference was immediate. Bordin was blown away by how much the band had developed. This wasn’t simply the same teenage metal assault with a new coat of paint. Mr. Bungle were becoming something stranger, smarter and far more musically unpredictable. Fast forward to the autumn of 1988, Faith No More desperately needed a new singer following the ugly split with Chuck Mosley. Patton was studying English. He was working in a record store. He certainly wasn’t sitting around waiting to become the frontman of one of America’s most unpredictable rock bands. Then the phone started ringing. Jim Martin had already heard Easter Bunny and had been trying to track Patton down, leaving messages that effectively amounted to: Easter Bunny good. Bowel Of Chiley bad. Faith No More producer Matt Wallace had independently heard a Bungle demo, too. Eventually Bordin called Patton and invited him to San Francisco to audition. Patton hesitated. Then Trey Spruance convinced him to go. He loved We Care A Lot, and Patton finally agreed. So the 18-year-old packed his bags and embarked on the 10-hour journey south with Spruance and Trevor Dunn. His destination was Bill Gould’s home - an abandoned animal hospital. It was hardly the conventional beginning of a major rock-star career. Fresh-faced Patton had never been on a plane and was unadjusted to the raw sights of San Francisco, while Gould was stunned by just how young the prospective singer actually was. Then came the audition. Faith No More didn’t ask Patton to sing one of their established songs. Instead, they started playing their new material. Patton responded immediately. It wasn’t an instant, jaws-on-the-floor revelation. The band auditioned several other singers afterwards, with Chris Cornell among those who would jam with them. But something about Patton was beginning to make sense. Then Gould and Martin disappeared for a weekend at the Martin family cabin in the woods - the same place where Martin had previously jammed with Cliff Burton. They took the Bungle tape with them. Away from the rehearsal room, the penny finally dropped. Patton understood the music. The band discussed his potential with management. But, in a typically MTV generation move they demanded a photograph rather than listen to a demo. Photographer Mark Leialoha shot the band, producing what Gould would later describe as a “great horrible band photo”. It was sent down to management, and Entner and Vasiliou travelled up from Los Angeles to witness the second audition. They were impressed. More importantly, the rest of Faith No More were beginning to realise that Patton spoke their musical language. In October, he returned to San Francisco, this time staying with Bordin and spending time in the makeshift studio Gould had constructed inside a former surgical room at his bizarre pet-hospital home. Patton had already begun working on ideas for six songs. These weren’t tentative sketches. They were rapidly becoming the songs that would define the next chapter of Faith No More. From Out Of Nowhere. Patton didn’t just sing it. He nailed it. From that moment on, Faith No More would never be the same. The teenager who had once seemed an unlikely candidate to replace Chuck Mosley was suddenly standing at the centre of the band’s future, armed with a voice that could go from a whisper to a howl and a brain seemingly wired to turn every musical rule inside out. Patton wasn’t simply stepping into someone else’s shoes - he was about to help create an entirely new pair. Within months, Faith No More would begin recording The Real Thing, and the strange little meeting sparked by a battered Mr. Bungle cassette would set in motion one of the most remarkable reinventions in alternative metal history.

Faith No More have announced their first European tour dates in June 2027. The band kick things off in the Czech Republic on Thursday, June 3, headlining Rock For People - their first appearance there since 2015. Then it’s straight into Germany for two massive festivals: Rock im Park on Friday, June 4, followed by Rock am Ring on Saturday, June 5. Faith No More were last on those stages in 1995. Next up is Poland’s Mystik Festival, where the band will make their headlining debut between June 10 and 12. The final stop is Austria’s Nova Rock on Friday, June 11 - a return to familiar territory after their last appearance there in 2009.

In October 1993 the movie Judgment Night arrived in theatres. Despite it’s star-studded cast of Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr and Stephen Dorff it was a flop. However a month earlier on September 14, 1993, Judgment Night – Music From The Motion Picture arrived with a gloriously combustible idea: throw some of the coolest alternative bands of the day together with hip-hop’s biggest names and see what happens when guitars and beats collide. By the early ’90s, the music press was labelling anything that mixed heavy guitars with hip-hop ‘funk-metal’ or ‘rap-metal’. The idea was hardly new. Aerosmith and Run-DMC had turned Walk This Way into a global smash in 1986, while Anthrax and Public Enemy had united their worlds on Bring The Noise the following year. But Judgment Night took the concept further, pairing alternative and metal bands with hip-hop artists to create a whole album of amazing collaborations. The man behind the project was Happy Walters, then president of Immortal Records and manager of acts including House Of Pain and Cypress Hill. Recognising that alternative musicians were increasingly fascinated by hip-hop, and vice versa, Walters saw an opportunity to bring the scenes together. Getting the idea off the ground, however, proved more complicated than making a few phone calls. The project took six months of negotiations involving managers, record labels, publishers and artists around the world. Walters supplied musicians with scenes from the film for inspiration, while music supervisor Karen Rachnian handled the business of deciding where the resulting tracks would appear. “Sonic Youth, Helmet, their managers were super supportive,” Walters recalled. “Helmet was super into it. Faith No More was really into it. Those three, I think, were the first ones to come on board, which were all credible and cool at the time, which helped with others. It was a lot of work, because you had to get the artists, the managers, the labels and the publishers all on board. It took about six months to put the whole thing together.” Faith No More were paired with Samoan hip-hop crew Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., and the timing was just right. The band had just completed a gruelling two-year tour behind Angel Dust, which had pushed their experimental instincts further than ever, while guitarist Jim Martin had become increasingly alienated by the group’s direction. Mike Patton, Bill Gould, Roddy Bottum and Mike Bordin therefore headed into an LA studio without Martin to meet Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. for the first time. “We didn’t know the Boo-Yaa guys before we did the collaboration… in fact, we met at the studio,” Bill later recalled. “They were all great musicians in their own right, and what was surprising is that we clicked immediately on a musical level. There was no awkwardness or anything. We just started playing and it felt really natural.” The original plan nearly went in another direction. Bill had travelled to Samoa to record singers and became fascinated by the island’s a cappella traditions, eventually working up a version of the Samoan national anthem with Patton and the others. When they played it to Boo-Yaa, however, the response wasn’t enthusiastic. “The Samoan national anthem is actually really, really cool,” Patton recalled. “So we worked up a version of the Samoan national anthem. I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s not do rock-rap, let’s do something else!’ We worked the whole thing up and we played it for ’em and they just, like, laughed. They literally laughed in our faces. They thought it was the funniest thing in the world. They were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” Boo-Yaa had a simpler suggestion: bring in the instruments and make some noise. “They were like, ‘No, no, no, bring the instruments in,’” Patton remembered. “So we brought the instruments in and just started jamming. That was really the beginning of it.” What followed was a half-hour jam that Bill remembers as “insane”, with the two camps clicking immediately. Unfortunately, the engineers assumed they were soundchecking and hadn’t pressed record. They did it again, producing another half-hour of material, only to discover that nobody had recorded that either. “We played for about half an hour and it was insane,” Gould recalled. “Then we stopped and somebody said, ‘Did you get that?’ And the engineer was like, ‘No, we thought you were just soundchecking.’ So we did it again. We played for another half an hour and they didn’t record that either. It was unbelievable.” After lunch they returned for a third attempt. That take became Another Body Murdered. “We went out for Thai food, came back and did it a third time,” Gould said. “That’s the one that ended up being used. It was probably the least interesting of the three, which is kind of funny, because the first two were never recorded. But by then we knew what we were doing and we just went for it.” The session was as colourful as you’d expect from Faith No More meeting a group of Samoan gangsta rappers. Bill remembers guns being left around the mixing console, while Boo-Yaa’s Vincent “Rook” Devoux - around six-foot-six and 380 pounds - apparently carried an enormous handgun. “He had this gun that dwarfed his hand,” Bill remembered. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was just sitting there, and I remember thinking, ‘Okay, this is a different kind of recording session.’” Despite the intimidating surroundings, the musicians quickly became friends, and the collaboration proved natural. “For as mean as they look, they were super sweet,” Patton added. “They were really nice guys. They were very respectful, and they were funny. It wasn’t like we were walking into some dangerous situation. It was just a bunch of musicians who wanted to make something cool.” Another Body Murdered, written by Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. with Gould on guitar, was produced by the two bands alongside Ghetto Guerillas and selected as the second promotional single from Judgment Night. Marcus Raboy directed the video, later returning to work with Faith No More on Digging The Grave. For Boo-Yaa leader Ted “The Godfather” Devoux, who died in 2018 following an extended illness, the collaboration offered a chance to push his group further into rock. “Hopefully, this will open up more opportunities for groups like mine to tour with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses,” he said in 1993. “And it gives us a little edge on the rap scene. We’ve always wanted to be accepted by both sides, because we come from both sides. We’re not just a rap group. We’re musicians, and we like heavy music.” A Faith No More/Boo-Yaa tour never materialised, although the idea was discussed. “We hit it off so well [on] a musical level,” Gould said. “At the end of it, we were like really close friends. We were tight! I think that we talked about [touring together] and it didn’t work out. It would have been great, though. I think the shows would have been pretty wild.” That perhaps explains why Another Body Murdered still works. It wasn’t a record-company masterplan to invent ‘rap-metal’ or a desperate attempt to cash in on a trend. It was two very different groups discovering, almost by accident, that they could make a hell of a racket together - even if someone did forget to press record twice.

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.

On September 1st 1992 Faith No More released an EP featuring remixes of A Small Victory by Martin Glover, AKA Youth. The R-evolution 23 (Full Moon) Mix and Sundown Mix were re-imaginings of the original song produced by Youth, bass player with Killing Joke. This was the first Faith No More song to be produced and engineered by someone other than Matt Wallace and the band, plus their first fully fledged exploration into electro dance music. The remix was highly endorsed by the band, with the possible exception of Jim Martin who at the time had professed a dislike of 'techno' music. Patton wants to print up a t-shirt featuring Jim in familiar thumbs up pose, bearing the legend, 'Jim Martin says Techno's OK', There's not much the guitarist hates more than Techno. The band have just heard the Youth mixes of their new single, 'A Small Victory', and they're happy as pigs in shite, Roddy is even planning to record a Techno track with Anne Magnusson and the Freds' Richard Fairbrass. "Now that we've found Youth, he can make us what we've always wanted ho be. I know everyone, repeat everyone, will be really into it." He fixes Jim with a beaming smile. The guitarist ignores him. - Melody Maker | August 1992

On August 20, 1990, Faith No More released Live At The Brixton Academy: You Fat Bastards - the band’s only officially released, professionally filmed live show on VHS. Recorded at London’s Brixton Academy on April 28, 1990, the footage was shot by William Shapland, directed by John Booth and mixed by producer Matt Wallace. Released to satisfy growing fan demand, it captured Faith No More at the peak of their The Real Thing explosion. The concert ran to 18 songs but the VHS contained only 11. Still, what made the cut was enough to bottle the glorious chaos of FNM in full flight. And the title? That came directly from the crowd, with the band encouraging the chant. “We felt a certain warmth,” Jim Martin recalled in 1990. “A feeling of affection.” Only Faith No More could turn an insult into a souvenir. Mike Patton dominates the screen, bouncing, stomping and contorting while Jim Martin lurks menacingly with his Flying V. Behind them, Mike Bordin, Bill Gould and Roddy Bottum create the muscular, eccentric backdrop that made FNM such a compelling live act. The set rips through songs from The Real Thing and Introduce Yourself with a monstrous version of War Pigs, while Patton’s skull mask and assorted props add another layer of mischief. That’s the enduring appeal of You Fat Bastards. It’s incomplete, rough around the edges and hardly a definitive record of the Brixton set. But it captures something far more valuable: Faith No More at the exact moment their bizarre chemistry was exploding into the mainstream. Patton is manic. Martin is stoic. Gould, Bordin and Bottum provide the unpredictable machinery underneath. No polish. No safety net. Just eleven songs of glorious live mayhem. Thirty-six years later, the bastard still sounds fucking brilliant.

WE STILL CARE A LOT! Ten years on, Faith No More’s We Care A Lot: Deluxe Band Edition remains one of music's greatest resurrection jobs. Forgotten master tapes, Chuck Mosley’s triumphant return and a reminder that Faith No More were changing the rules long before Mike Patton arrived… In 2016, while most legacy bands were busy flogging another greatest hits package, Faith No More did something far more interesting. They dug into their own DNA. Hidden away in bassist Bill Gould’s basement were the original master tapes for We Care A Lot - the scrappy, fearless, genre-wrecking 1985 debut that had been out of print for two decades. What followed wasn’t just another remaster. It was a full-scale reclamation of the album that introduced the world to the gloriously dysfunctional chemistry of Chuck Mosley, Roddy Bottum, Jim Martin, Mike Bordin and Bill Gould. Ten years later, We Care A Lot: Deluxe Band Edition stands as one of the finest archival releases ever assembled. Not because it polished history, but because it embraced every rough edge. “This was an album that started as a demo, before any label had any interest in us,” explained Bill Gould when the reissue was announced. “When cleaning out my basement, I discovered the original master reels, and we all thought resurrecting this from the original tapes would be a great way to reintroduce We Care A Lot into the world.” Gould also stressed that the project reflected the band’s original DIY spirit: “We are releasing this in the same way as we recorded it… getting our hands deep into the nuts and bolts.” (NME) That attitude runs through every second of the Deluxe Band Edition. Rather than simply remastering the original ten tracks, longtime producer Matt Wallace returned to remix key songs including We Care A Lot, Pills For Breakfast and As The Worm Turns, giving them greater punch without sanding off the glorious weirdness. Four original demos, two feral live recordings from San Francisco’s I-Beam in 1986 and extensive liner notes from Roddy Bottum completed a package that felt less like a reissue and more like opening a time capsule. (NME) For Wallace, revisiting those tapes was a chance to showcase just how inventive the young band already were before major labels came calling. The recordings captured five musicians who weren’t interested in fitting into punk, metal or funk - they wanted to smash them together. Chuck Mosley perhaps summed it up best. “With We Care A Lot, I always felt like I was part of something new and different than anything else out there at the time,” he reflected. “There was so much camaraderie… when the album was finished, it didn’t sound like anything else.” (Rebel Noise) Looking back on the songwriting, Mosley described it as “a lot of collaboration”, crediting Gould, Bordin and Bottum as the driving musical forces while explaining that everybody’s fingerprints ended up on the songs. And they really did. Long before “alternative metal” existed as a marketing buzzword, Faith No More were already throwing together post-punk gloom, Sabbath riffs, funk basslines, no-wave keyboards, hardcore energy and absurdist humour. The title track became a college-radio anthem, while deeper cuts like Why Do You Bother?, The Jungle and Arabian Disco hinted at just how unpredictable the band would become. Critics recognised just how important the package was. Metal Hammer praised it as proof that Faith No More had been “inveterate genre-benders” from day one, calling it an essential document for tracing the band’s wonderfully scattershot evolution. (Louder) Punk Rock Theory scored the release 8/10, celebrating the rediscovered demos, remixes and live material while encouraging fans who only knew the Mike Patton years to finally explore where the madness began. (Punk Rock Theory) mxdwn argued that the remaster highlighted just how innovative the Chuck Mosley era really was, describing the album as a remarkably fresh blend of punk, post-punk and alternative metal whose influence had often been overshadowed by the Patton years. (mxdwn Music) Even among fans, the reassessment has only grown stronger over the past decade. Discussions across the Faith No More community regularly describe the Deluxe Band Edition as transformative, with many listeners arguing that hearing the remastered album completely changed their opinion of the band’s earliest work. Others have hailed We Care A Lot as an overlooked alternative masterpiece whose fearless collision of goth, punk, funk, industrial textures and heavy metal still sounds decades ahead of its time. The biggest revelation of the reissue wasn’t that Faith No More eventually became one of the most influential bands in alternative music. It was that they were already becoming that band in 1985. Ten years after the Deluxe Band Edition gave We Care A Lot the resurrection it deserved, it remains the sound of five young outsiders refusing to colour inside anyone else’s lines. Before Mike Patton. Before nu-metal stole half their ideas. Faith No More already cared a lot. The rest of the world just needed another chance to catch up.

Faith No More have always thrived on chaos. Split-ups. Comebacks. Frontmen. Guitarists. Feuds. Somehow, though, one of the most unbelievable chapters in their history came more than three decades after it all began, when the band reunited with the late, great Chuck Mosley for one last glorious blast of beautiful insanity. On June 2, 2016, Faith No More announced they were dragging their past kicking and screaming back into the spotlight with a deluxe edition of their 1985 debut, We Care A Lot. After Billy Gould unearthed the original master tapes gathering dust in his attic, he and Matt Wallace painstakingly remixed and remastered the album that first taught the underground how weird rock music could really get. Most bands repackage the past because they’ve run out of ideas. Faith No More did it because they’d earned the right. Only a year earlier they’d wrapped up the Sol Invictus campaign, instead of chasing the next chapter, they decided to celebrate the first one. And that meant Chuck. The bridges had already been rebuilt. Chuck had made emotional guest appearances during the Second Coming Tour in 2010 and again on the Sol Invictus run in 2015. Every time he walked onstage, fans weren’t just watching a guest vocalist - they were watching Faith No More’s origins slip back into place. “ I went up and blew out one of the hardest songs they asked me to sing… I always get nervous. That was even more nerve wracking because it’s been a long time since I played with those guys. But it was fun. It’s always fun.” - Chuck 2016 For casual fans, it was a cool reunion. For the faithful, it was spine-tingling. This was the Faith No More that existed before stadiums, before MTV, before Epic swallowed the planet. The scrappy, sarcastic, punk-fuelled lunatics who couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be a hardcore band, a funk band, an art project or groundbreaking pioneers. Turns out they were all four. When talk inevitably turned to more shows with Chuck, Bill couldn’t quite contain himself. “We have a couple ideas but nothing we want to talk about just yet. But Chuck is totally into the project and we’ve been talking a lot with him about it.” Then everything escalated. Worldwide listening parties. Long-lost stories from the band’s earliest days. Unearthed live footage from 1986. Suddenly, We Care A Lot wasn’t just a reissue, it had become an event. A celebration of the gloriously unhinged version of Faith No More that nearly got forgotten beneath the platinum records. Then came the sucker punch. On August 16, just three days before the album hit the shelves, Faith No More made a huge announcement. The original line-up - Mosley, Gould, Bottum and Bordin, with Jon Hudson filling Jim Martin’s shoes - would reunite for two club shows. Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. The Troubadour in Los Angeles. No arenas. No festival headline slots. Just sweat, feedback and history. Roddy Bottum announced it in the only way he could: “This is happening people and I’m fucking serious. Get to CA!!!!!!!!!!” Cue absolute pandemonium. Tickets vanished. Fans booked flights. Message boards exploded. For a couple of magical days it felt like 1986 all over again. Chuck admitted afterwards: “It was a blast. I mean it was brutal. Yeah, I was worried about falling over or fucking up but I didn’t do either. So, it was really good.” If Roddy Bottum’s Instagram post lit the fuse, the gigs themselves blew the doors off. The Great American Music Hall and The Troubadour weren’t packed with celebrity hangers-on or industry suits. They were packed with believers. The fans who’d worn out copies of We Care A Lot and Introduce Yourself. The fans who knew that before FNM conquered MTV, Chuck was the voice that gave Faith No More their identity. Then the reviews started pouring in. The consensus? This wasn’t some cynical nostalgia grab. This was history. Fans across Faith No More forums, Facebook and the band’s long-running Gig Database described the atmosphere as “electric”, “emotional” and “surreal”. Many admitted they’d never believed they’d see Chuck fronting the band again. Others called it the missing chapter in the Faith No More story finally being written. The setlist dug almost exclusively into the Mosley era, dusting off forgotten gems like The Jungle, Greed, Spirit, Mark Bowen and Anne’s Song - songs many thought they’d never hear performed by their original singer again. Fans celebrated the charisma, the humour, the grit and the unmistakable chemistry that had made the original Faith No More so compelling in the first place. Even Mike Patton turned up to watch. That single image said everything. Faith No More’s history has often been told as a tale of replacement, of one frontman eclipsing another. But for two unforgettable nights in August 2016, there were no competing eras. No “better” version of the band. Just five old friends celebrating the music that started it all while the man who carried Faith No More to worldwide fame stood in the crowd applauding the band that existed before him. Looking back now, the emotion feels almost overwhelming. These weren’t just intimate club shows to launch a deluxe reissue. They became Chuck’s final performances with Faith No More before his heart-breaking passing in November 2017. They also remain the last public performances by any incarnation of Faith No More together. Sometimes rock history isn’t written in stadiums. Sometimes it happens in a 500-capacity club, with sweat dripping from the ceiling, forgotten songs roaring back to life, and a room full of fans quietly realising they’re watching the end of an era before they even know it’s over. Looking back now, those nights hit differently. Nobody knew it then, but those two club gigs would become the final time Faith No More ever shared a stage together. More painfully still, they would also be Chuck Mosley’s last performances with the band he helped drag out of the San Francisco underground and into rock history. No fireworks. No farewell tour. Just two unforgettable nights where everything came full circle. Sometimes the greatest encores aren’t planned. They just happen.

Some albums demand your attention. Others grab you by the throat, empty a bucket of circus sludge over your head and laugh as your brain melts out of your ears. Thirty-five years ago, Mr. Bungle unleashed their self-titled debut. Equal parts metal, funk, ska, jazz, carnival nightmare and full-blown musical psychosis, it was an album that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow became one of the most influential cult records ever released on a major label. Loved, loathed and still utterly impossible to categorise, Mr. Bungle remains a beautiful freak of nature. Three-and-a-half decades later, we’re diving headfirst back into the madness to celebrate the album that proved there was genius lurking inside complete and utter chaos. A is for My Ass Is On Fire For a band that treats its own catalogue like a playground, My Ass Is On Fire has proved remarkably untouchable. The seventh track from the record remains the only song to survive every chapter of the band's live history. Across more than three decades, the song has been torn apart, rebuilt, stretched, twisted and reimagined to fit whatever version of Mr. Bungle happened to be standing onstage. From the feverish funk-metal chaos of the early '90s to the genre-defying experiments of the Disco Volante and California years, and even into the band's thrash-fuelled reunion era, My Ass Is On Fire has continued to mutate. A low-budget video for My Ass Is on Fire was also put together by Steve Lederman, and several raw 1991 live performances document the band's unhinged early era. B is for Bubble Bath At selected retailers, fans who picked up the album were handed a miniature bottle of Mr. Bungle Bubble Bath - a weird and wonderfully pointless promotional freebie that perfectly captured the group’s off-the-wall sense of humour. A collectible and conversation piece, it was exactly the kind of surreal marketing stunt you’d expect from Mr. Bungle. C is for Cotton Candy Autopsy The album’s twisted cover artwork, along with several images scattered throughout the liner notes, were lifted from Issue 1 and Issue 13 of the cult comic series Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, illustrated by Dan Sweetman. Dark, grotesque and dripping with warped humour, the artwork perfectly mirrored the band’s disturbing and unpredictable sounds hidden inside. 'The Sweetman stuff was not really a collaboration. We were aware of his work and reached out to him for permission to use the images which he allowed to be colored and chopped up. We had previously asked Joel-Peter Witkin for use of some images….if I recall correctly one of a circus freakshow guy hammering a nail into his own nose and another of two bodiless heads kissing. We were denied usage. I also remember wanting to use the black and white clown (on the disc itself) to be used for the cover but I was out-voted by the other members. So be it. Another tidbit: We had asked the designers to make the sky red, not blue, to represent the fire the clown had lit, but “artistic freedom” prevented us from having our way.' - Trevor 2016 D is for Dead Goon A twisted tale of fatal autoerotic asphyxiation, the song is classic Mr. Bungle: dark, absurd and technically breathtaking. Trevor Dunn’s dizzying chromatic bass line has become legendary, although actually written by Danny Heifetz, while the band ricochet between warped carnival music, crushing metal, funk and jazz, punctuated by choking, gargling and the sinister creak of a tightening rope. 'One of those places was "The Chicken Coops" out in Manila which is a frightening little "beach town" of white-trash hillbillies. My dad used to work at a lumber mill out there. The place was literally an old, abandoned chicken coop with ceilings about 5 1/2 feet high. It was rented by a weird family who used to send their half-wit, stuttering son out to collect the "went money" from us. The song Dead Goon was conceived, almost in its entirety, from a free-form jam session one cold, damp night in those coops.' - Trevor E is for Eureka The band’s hometown roots remained firmly intact. While recording the album, Trevor was still living at his mum’s house in Eureka – a reminder that, for all Mr. Bungle’s growing notoriety, they were still just a bunch of small-town misfits on the verge of something far bigger. 'We'd go down to the railroad, hop the freight train to the next town, and then hitchhike home," Dunn recalls fondly. "We were kind of obsessed with it, actually. It was super fun on a summer night. We'd write songs based on the rhythms of the tracks—Mr. Bungle had a song called 'Freight Train' In fact, the first Mr. Bungle album has a 10 minute sequence of us on the freight train that I taped on my little handheld tape recorder.' - Trevor 2013 'You have, essentially, homeless, violent clowns that are breaking bottles over each other’s head, kind of stuff, so we found a guy who was sleeping on the ground in the middle of the night, and we just recorded him snoring. And then we walked down the street a little ways, and busted a window! [Laughing] I’m not real proud of these things, but that’s what we did. We were kind of living the ultraviolence. We didn’t kick the bum’s head in like Clockwork Orange or anything, but we did wake him up with a broken window about ten feet away from him, and that’s the beginning of the record.' - Trey 2016 F is for Face-masks Long before Slipknot turned masks into metal’s most terrifying trademark, Mr. Bungle were already disappearing behind rubber disguises. As their music spiralled further into glorious insanity, so did the masks. One night it was Pinhead. The next, a Native American, Madonna, or a leather-clad gimp. G is for Glaucoma Reflections of a bloated lie A life stored in your cloudy eye Now it's time to say goodbye Stubb a dub will never die Forget rock mythology – Stubb (A Dub) is inspired by something far more personal: guitarist Trey Spruance’s childhood dog. But in true Mr. Bungle fashion, what could’ve been a sentimental tribute is twisted into something equal parts heartbreaking, hilarious and deeply unsettling. According to bassist Trevor Dunn’s live introductions and long-standing Bungle folklore, the song chronicles Stubb’s final days as old age took its toll. Spruance later revealed that before joining his family, the dog had suffered horrific abuse, abandoned at the side of a road by a previous owner after having her tail cruelly cut off. Rather than telling the story straight, Mr. Bungle dive headfirst into madness. Mike Patton’s warped, experimental vocal performance is designed to sound like the fractured inner monologue of a senile dog, transforming a surprisingly touching farewell into one of the band’s strangest, most emotionally warped moments. H is for Dennis Hopper The band’s debut is packed with samples, but none more infamous than Dennis Hopper’s deranged Frank Booth from David Lynch’s 1986 cult classic Blue Velvet. I is for Influence Mr. Bungle’s unhinged debut didn’t just melt minds – it rewired heavy music’s DNA. Fusing metal, funk, ska, jazz, pop, carnival insanity and avant-garde experimentation into one delirious package, the album became a landmark for musicians who refused to be boxed in. Its influence echoed through an entire generation, with members of Incubus, Korn, Avenged Sevenfold and Slipknot all pointing to its fearless genre-smashing madness as a major inspiration. ‘Another one of our inspirations were a band called Mr. Bungle... They went up on the stage and they just went... put their masks on and they stood there for like ten minutes just like... Crowds start booing them, you know, and they wouldn't... nothing. They didn't even give a rip. They were so weird. And so we got heavily inspired by them.’ - Brian "Head" Welch J is for Jennifer and Kahli Two of the backing singers listed in the liner notes were dragged in off the street! 'I don't remember Jennifer by name, but yes, both girls who did that talking bit were strippers - we had them talk about Bär because in our minds he was the most qualified for them to focus their attention on did that make it onto the record? I don't remember, but I remember them saying "oh Bär, look at those muscles”’ - Trey 2026 K is for KFC One of the albums cheekiest samples appears in Slowly Growing Deaf, where Mr. Bungle sneak in an unauthorised outtake of Colonel Harland Sanders flubbing his lines during a KFC commercial. As the fast-food icon struggles with the phrase “most folks,” the band turn the blooper into another layer of their surreal sonic collage. Sanders also gets a lyrical nod in Squeeze Me Macaroni, namechecked alongside a barrage of food brands - because in Mr. Bungle’s warped world, even the Colonel isn’t safe. 'Did Colonel Sanders really have to demean himself to the point of crapping to two-inch? That must have been the low point of his career, post-KFC.' - Danny 2016 L is for Lunchroom Manners Long before Mike Patton and company turned the name into a cult phenomenon, Mr. Bungle was an ill-mannered puppet created for a 1959 educational film teaching American schoolchildren how not to behave in the cafeteria. The scruffy troublemaker became an unlikely cult icon after resurfacing on Pee-wee Herman‘s TV show in 1981, and it wasn’t lost on this gang of misfit teenagers. Naming their band after the gloriously obnoxious puppet, they completed the circle by weaving audio snippets from the original film into their self-titled debut. M is for Maximum Bob Maximum Bob is credited for backing vocals to the album. The connection carried over to the stage, too, with Bob’s band The Deli Creeps (featuring Bucket head) supporting Mr. Bungle throughout their 1991 tour. 'We were also friends with a band called The Deli Creeps whose guitar player went by the name of Buckethead. The singer, Maximum Bob, was a big guy who used to light his farts with matches. You can hear him chanting "over and over" at the end of My Ass Is On Fire. So, yeah, there were some weirdos hanging around.' - Trevor N is for Nintendo Mr. Bungle’s pop culture obsession extended beyond film and TV, with their self-titled debut packed with arcade and console samples, including Sega’s Altered Beast, Namco’s Scoreboard and Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. It didn’t stop in the studio either - throughout 1991, the band regularly broke into a warped Super Mario Bros. medley live. O is for OU818 OU818 marked the end of Mr. Bungle’s demo era and the start of the band’s classic line-up. Self-released on cassette on June 28, 1989, its title spoofed Van Halen’s OU812, showcasing the band’s early warped humour. Recorded and mixed in three days at Dancing Dog Recording Studio in Emeryville with producer David Bryson, it introduced Danny Heifetz and Clinton “Bär” McKinnon. Four tracks - Squeeze Me Macaroni, Slowly Growing Deaf, The Girls of Porn and Love Is a Fist - were later reworked for their debut album. P is for Platypus and other B-sides Alongside Mr Nice Guy and a gloriously twisted cover of Thunderball, Mr. Bungle also cut an early version of Platypus. It didn’t make the final tracklist, though, instead mutating into the version that finally surfaced on Disco Volante. Q is for Quote Unquote Before it became Quote Unquote, the album’s disturbing opening track was simply titled Travolta. But with fears of a legal clash over John Travolta’s ties to Scientology, Warner Bros. pushed the band into a last-minute name change. Around 20,000 album sleeves had already been printed before the switch, instantly creating one of the most sought-after early pressings in the band’s catalogue. Oddly enough in 1996 there was a John Travolta biography released as part of the Quote Unquote series. As if that wasn’t controversial enough, the song’s Kevin Kerslake-directed video was swiftly blacklisted by MTV. Featuring the band dangling from meat hooks in a grotesque carnival of surreal imagery, it was deemed too extreme for daytime television. 'Looking back… we very much identified with this tragically monstrous character, who in his extreme sensory isolation was effectively living outside of time and space.' - Trey 2016 R is for Raw Footage Leave it to Bill Gould to uncover one of Mr. Bungle’s strangest pop culture connections. It was the Faith No More bassist who alerted the band to the existence of Raw Footage, a gloriously sleazy 1977 adult film featuring a character named Mr. Bungle. Never ones to waste an obscure reference, the band lifted a snippet of dialogue from the movie and dropped it in just before Girls of Porn. S is for Sharkey’s Arcade Sharkey's was a popular hangout and arcade spot in Eureka, CA, during the 1980s when the band members were growing up. Trey walked around the arcade with a portable digital audio tape (DAT) recorder to capture ambient sounds, bleeps, and effects straight from pinball machines, some of which can be heard on song like Stubb a Dubb. T is for ... A Tractor in my balls again? Before Mr. Bungle had even released an album, Mike Patton was already running a marketing masterstroke. Whether onstage with Faith No More, in videos or on TV, he was rarely seen without a Mr. Bungle T-shirt. Soon, eagle-eyed FNM fans were all asking the same thing: “Why’s he got a tractor in his balls… again?” Confused, curious and impossible to ignore – exactly the reaction Patton wanted. U is for Uremia Uremia is a highly coveted, unofficial live bootleg 7-inch vinyl pressed in Italy in 1992. It was highly limited, with only 500 copies ever produced. The vinyl contains soundboard recordings from Mr. Bungle's concert at The Vic Theatre in Chicago on March 26, 1992, while they were touring their self-titled album. Also known as Mi Stroke Il Cigaretto the vinyl was eventually sold at the merch stall by the band on tour. V is for Vlad Drac Fresh from joining Faith No More, Patton was determined not to let Mr. Bungle be dismissed as simply his “other band.” Keen to avoid trading on his newfound fame, he was credited on the album as Vlad Drac – a suitably sinister alias that perfectly matched the bloodsucking vampire mask he stalked the stage in during the band’s early live shows. W is for Warner bros That wasn’t quite the game plan at Warner Bros. While Patton was doing everything he could to keep Faith No More and Mr. Bungle as separate entities, the label saw a golden marketing opportunity. Promotional ads shamelessly branded the album as “Mike Patton’s Other Band”, complete with the tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Why can’t a person be in two bands?” It was a clever sales pitch - but one that flew in the face of Patton’s determination to let Mr. Bungle stand on its own beautifully bizarre merits. 'Just the situation of being in two bands is cause for rumours. Being in two bands gives someone ammunition to write total bullshit about me. It's something for the press to pick up on, especially considering that was the case with Chuck, except we don't have fist-fights like they did. This is something else for the press; 'Oh, the singer's got another band, he's not completely loyal, he's cheating, he's committing adultery, the sonofabitch, brat, pig!' - Patton 1990 X is for Existential Blues and other covers Existential Blues is a gloriously bonkers 1979 novelty song by Tom “T-Bone” Stankus, mashing The Wizard of Oz‘s poppy field nightmare with an existential meltdown. Naturally, it was right up Mr. Bungle’s street. Touring their 1991 debut, Mr. Bungle turned every show into a musical car crash in the best possible way, peppering their sets with wildly unpredictable covers woven between their own songs. Bond themes, punk, jazz, film scores, TV tunes and video game music all collided in glorious chaos. The setlist regularly veered through Thunderball, Billy Squier’s The Stroke, Dead Kennedys’ Drug Me, Charlie Parker’s Yardbird Suite, Ennio Morricone’s Città violenta, and A Taste of Honey, popularised by Bobby Scott and Herb Alpert. With Mr. Bungle, absolutely nothing was sacred. Y is for Yeesus Krist Yeesus Krist aka Kristen Yee Mr. Bungle's manager in 1991 is credited for backing vocals also. Check out this interview from The Vinyl Guide. Z is for John Zorn Mr. Bungle didn’t just want a producer – they wanted a fellow musical anarchist. Enter John Zorn, whose late-‘80s sonic assaults Naked City, Spillane and Spy vs. Spy had already blown the band’s minds. Despite being signed to Warner Bros., Bungle had no interest in playing it safe, dragging Zorn in to steer the album even further into glorious chaos. He also unleashes a ferocious alto sax freak-out on Love Is A Fist. Better still, the sessions ignited a decades-long creative partnership, with Patton and Dunn becoming frequent Zorn collaborators. 'When he produced 'Mr Bungle', it was a really comfortable fit and we've been friends ever since. He was certainly one of the main people who have made a huge impact on my musical life, without a doubt. He put me in many compromising positions and held my hand, so to speak. That's the only way you can learn.' - Patton 2013

On August 5th 1997 Faith No More released Last Cup Of Sorrow as their second single from Album Of The Year. "Another wonderfully diverse offering from the San Francisco gods. This time they're all moody and brooding, with Mike Patton whispering all but the chorus while a children's box plinks away in the background. Even their crap stuff is interesting at the very least, but this is a sultry late night summer classic. Brilliant." - Kerrang! | 1997 "The toy piano idea basically started as a loop in Studio Vision, where I was playing bass and guitar. The piano was added as a rhythm element. That's all it was: rhythm. Pitchbends with a little bit of delay can be great for giving that certain unsettling feeling.Mike can do a lot of wild things with his voice, for one. But, yeah, he sang through an old Telefunken tube mic and we compressed the living shit out of it." - Bill Gould 1997 "This came from me a little bit... I would say it's a little more dub like, the bass line was very dub-ish. I think I heard something like this - just a very heavy, slow song, probably like a cross between some old dub records and something like Basement Five and a band like Chrome. They were an old San Francisco band, kind of like punk that was very heavy metal, but dark and foreboding... very cinematic. Ifs depressing, but beautiful at the same time. As an album, it was our death record and it was something to feel, something we were going through. The words are from Patton, but I think we were all on the same page with this one." - Bill Gould 1998 Billboard | June 1998 Faith No More's New Vid To Give Viewers Vertigo by Gina Van Der Vliet LOS ANGELES—As a homage to Alfred Hitchcock, Faith No More's new video "Last Cup Of Sorrow" shows the band in a parody of the legendary director's 1958 movie "Vertigo." "I always thought 'Vertigo' had an interesting music video feel to it because of the [rich Graphics] in the film," says GMS director Joseph Kahn. "Also the of idea of FNM's Mike Patton playing Jimmy Stewart seemed funny to me. Basically you're taking this really subversive person and putting him in this clean, sterile, technicolor 50s world, yet pieces of the subversiveness of his persona keep coming through this world. It's like blending an old film with this totally weird 90s type of guy." One of the moments Kahn is hinting at is a scene showing Patton hiding a porno magazine from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays the dual roles originally portrayed by Kim Novak. As in the movie. Patton rescues Leigh's character from drowning and brings her back to his apartment. Leigh's second character is not as clean cut as in Hitchcock movie. After the blond character supposedly falls to her death, the actress returns as a sado masochist call girl in a black wig who attacks Patton's character. Ironically, she uses as a weapon the same stool that Patton was unable to stand on earlier in the video due to his fear of heights. "That's the type of subversive stuff I liked doing, without disrespecting the film," Kahn explains. "But personally I think Hitchcock would have liked the sense of humour." Like the movie, which was recently re-released in U.S. theatres, the video was shot in San Francisco—Faith No More's home town—often at many of the same original locations used for the film. For example, the Supper Club. formerly known as Ernie's, was the restaurant that Hitchcock was originally trying to depict in his film. The filmed movie scenes however, were shot on a movie set built to look like the restaurant. To create an authentic touch, Kahn, Leigh, and the band managed to shoot the scene inside the actual restaurant, which had just reopened it's doors. Throughout the video, the band members—Patton, vocals; Billy Gould, bass; Roddy Bottum, keyboards; Mike Bordin, drums; and John Hudson, guitars—are shown in cameo roles assigned by Kahn. "At first I was kind of bummed because I [was asked to portray] the lady in the painting, which I didn't really wanna do," Gould says with a laugh. "But it all worked out good." According to Gould, picking a video treatment is often a tedious process for the band, since there are seldom treatments the members can collectively get enthusiastic about "We Usually pick the one that's the least bad," Gould says. "But in this case (the idea) sounded pretty good. And when we got to the shoot and met Joseph we knew it was a good thing. He's a cool dude. We very much had the same vision, which is really rare. It made for a situation in which we felt we were actually creating something together." 'Last Cup Of Sorrow' premiered May 18 on MTV's "120 Minutes"and is anticipated to go into active rotation by the week of June 16, according to Wendy Griffith. Says Gould, "It doesn't look like an MTV video, which I like, it's definitely different."