Faith No More, who just announced an extra Los Angeles show for their final reunion tour, opted to do no proper press behind the The Second Coming Tour they’re finishing in December. The group did, however, opt to answer questions submitted by the band’s three most prevalent fan groups – and the interview is pretty revealing. The questions, compiled by our great friends at stubbadub, Faith No More 2.0 and Faith No More French Community, were answered by the band in an informal setting and filmed for fans to enjoy.
With Roddy Bottum and Billy Gould handling most of the interview, here are some of the revelations:
On plans for the future:
We’re not going to make another record … It’s working really well right now and what we do and the creative decisions we make together now are a lot easier to make than they were in the past. And it feels really good. That said, we sort of made a decision when we started booking these tours that we would tour for a specific amount of time and stop and that’s a decision that we made.
On why they didn’t do an extensive US tour (or play festival Outsidelands in their hometown of San Francisco):
Roddy: People have been asking me on this tour and on different tours and when we were just in America assuming the fact, they think the reason we are not touring America is because we weren’t popular there or there weren’t enough people to want to see us play. That’s not the case. I’m sure if we wanted to tour America, we would tour America just fine. We just didn’t have a real desire to get in the bus and play little cities all across America; that’s just not where we’re at today.
Bill: That kind of burned us out back in the day. I would say that the powers that be in the States who put on the shows… I mean we have a show in our hometown San Francisco Outsidelands I think it’s called and they didn’t want us on this year which is really odd as we’re from there and we’re actually available to do it. Though we had really big commercial success in the States, it was for a very limited time and the people who worked for us out there saw us as this kind of thing and in the industry – I don’t know if that’s a good word to use – there’s a certain perception that has stuck with us and not anywhere else. I don’t think it gets down to the basic fan but getting stuff done we have to go through this prejudice a little bit.
On anxieities and trepidations about reuniting:
Bill: When I used to be in the band I always felt a little different from a lot of other bands. And a lot of bands in the past 5 years have gotten back together and I’d say for 90% of them it’s not a very pretty thing. And I always took a lot of pride myself in being in this band and I really was scared about jumping into something that I wasn’t proud of at all. It makes what you did the first time around completely meaningless if you blow it the second time.
Roddy: Agreed. We’ve always done things since we started as a band exactly the way we wanted to. So it was important for all of us going back into it the second time around and to do things our way and to do things in a tasteful way. There was a little bit of nervous trepidation I think going into it knowing that that could be compromised and knowing that we would be judged for doing this other than just as a thing that we wanted to do personally.
On having no PR on this tour:
It was really important for us to have a voice coming from the band. We decided straight off that we didn’t want to do any press because really there’s nothing that we are promoting and had no real need to talk about ourselves. We made that statement a long time ago; we made our records and moved on and there is nothing new to address. So we made a decision straight off the bat that we weren’t going to do any press. Soon after we made that decision Billy signed on to Twitter first and then we realised the capability of how many people you can reach and how many people are interested. I think there was a lot of people initially when we started out the tour who wanted to know what was going on, wanted the inside scoop. The Twitter thing is an excellent opportunity for both of us to reach out and address people.
Billy Gould also mentioned that he has “500-600 things” that could be Faith No More songs, but, as mentioned earlier, there are no plans to record a new record.
In addition, a clip was played of an unreleased FNM song, entitled “Shuffle Song” from the band’s 1992 Angel Dust sessions. The song comes in around 10:07 on part one of the interview (and the comment that the song featured “too many guitars” and that why it didn’t work).
Check out Parts 1 and 2 of the interviews below!
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