Why Faith No More grew to despise the album that made them: “We hated those songs”
Artists growing to despise their greatest work is depressingly commonplace within the music industry. After all, once a record enters that equally feared and endlessly pursued realm of popularity, it no longer belongs solely to its creators, which is something that Faith No More were forced to come to terms with during the turn of the 1990s.
Like many of the bands that helped to define the American rock scene of the 1990s, Faith No More first emerged during the previous decade, with their unique blend of funk, metal, and alternative rock establishing them as a unique, if pretty niche, voice in the Californian rock scene. The moment that the mainstream first started paying attention to the subversive sounds of the band came in 1989, with the breakthrough album The Real Thing, which perfectly set them up to command the rock airwaves of the 1990s.
Offering an evolution of their original mid-1980s output, The Real Thing was something of a rebirth for the group, being their first record with Mike Patton taking the mantle of lead vocalist. It was the album that gave the band their first taste of crossing over into the realm of mainstream popularity, but that success didn’t arrive instantly.
Whereas some records become instant classics from the moment they first make contact with the airwaves, Faith No More’s 1989 album languished around the lower end of the album charts, selling a modest but certainly not revolutionary number of copies for over a year. Rather than maintaining the same level of relative obscurity as their first two records, though, The Real Thing instead became an archetypal example of a slow burner.
Over a year after the initial album release, the lead single ‘Epic’ became a regular feature on MTV, which helped to introduce what would become the band’s defining moment to the masses. In fact, the music video became so widely known that it spurred a re-release of the single, which then went to number 23 in the UK singles charts. At long last, Faith No More’s time in the spotlight had finally arrived.
Nevertheless, the band had had to endure a whole year of the album being almost entirely ignored, which was understandably frustrating. “It was like a sick joke,” bassist Billy Gould declared to Metal Hammer, recalling the fact that the band weren’t overly impressed by their sudden surge in popularity. “For the past 12 months we’d worked our asses off and everyone had been telling us how great we were, but we weren’t selling any records and we were fucking broke,” he shared.
“And then just as the label told us that the record was effectively dead, it all kicked off, and we had to start all over again,” the bassist continued, suggesting that becoming one of the biggest overnight successes in American rock was not without its difficulties.
Namely, that they were essentially forced to continue playing and touring The Real Thing now that mainstream audiences had caught up with them. “By the end we hated those songs so fucking much,” he said.
In the end, it took three years for Faith No More to move on from that breakthrough album, continuing their newfound run of success with Angel Dust, which helped to reaffirm their position among the defining groups of 1990s America, even if most audiences had been somewhat late to the party.
