Faith No More interview with Bill Gould: ‘We were playing this weird music and we just got lucky’

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music

Get our Now Hear This email for free

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

When most people think of Faith No More, the majority will inevitably cast their minds to Mike Patton’s tenure in the band; between 1989 – 1998 (and once again since their spectacular reformation in 2009) the eclectic and eccentric pioneers of the alternative have consistently confounded expectations and become one of the most celebrated bands of the past 30 years. Even those less familiar with the band’s work pre-Patton will be aware of the song We Care A Lot, the sardonic Live Aid-baiting, funk metal anthem recorded with vocalist Chuck Mosley that is still regularly pumped out at building-demolishing volume in rock clubs the world over. The album We Care A Lot however is less prevalent in people’s minds, the 1985 debut album from the San Francisco misfits (and not, as is commonly inferred, 1987’s Introduce Yourself). It’s been nigh on impossible to get hold of a copy in any sort of physical format for years but finally, the album is getting the re-issue treatment on Vinyl, CD and Download through Koolarrow Records. As part of the release, the band have unveiled hitherto unseen footage from a show played at the I-Beam in San Francisco, January 13^th, 1986 and you can watch album track The Jungle from the show below.

The origins of Faith No More lie predominantly in its present day rhythm section, with bassist Bill Gould and drummer Mike ‘Puffy’ Bordin forming Sharp Young Men, alongside vocalist Mike Morris and Keyboardist Wade Worthington in 1979. The name changed in 1983 to Faith. No Man in accordance with the release of the band’s first recorded output, a double A-side single entitled Quiet in Heaven/Song of Liberty recorded in producer Matt Wallace’s parents’ garage. Worthington left shortly afterwards and was replaced by classically trained pianist Roddy Bottum, who alongside Gould would go on to be responsible for many of Faith No More’s most enduring songs, including From Out of Nowhere, The Real Thing, Just a Man, Land of Sunshine and the forever enduring title track to We Care A Lot.

The trinity of Bordin, Bottum and Gould were unhappy with the direction Morris was taking them, but rather than fire him, they simply left and formed their own band. A friend of Gould’s suggested the name Faith No More, seeing as ‘the man’ AKA Mike Morris, was no more. Whilst Bordin, Bottum and Gould remained (and still do to this day), the early days of the band saw the coming and going of six guitarists and almost as many vocalists including, bizarrely, Courtney Love; she left as an autocratic force of nature in a band that strived to be democratic. It turns out that the search for a (slightly) more permanent vocalist (for two albums at least) was to be found in one of Gould’s old bands. ‘I grew up in LA and started playing bass when I was 12 years old. I was in a band with guys I knew from my Boy Scout troop (laughs) … seriously! We were called The Animated, my Mom would drop me off at their house with my guitar and my little amp. We'd write songs and Chuck was the keyboard player in the neighbourhood, so we’d ask him to jump in and jam on a few songs. I played in that band until I was about 18 before moving up to San Francisco to go to school. It was a really chaotic place but in a good way, it was a post-hippy, very free environment and there wasn't a lot of industry, so it was very cheap to live there and you could more or less do whatever you wanted. There were a lot of artists and bands there but we were really different sonically to anything else going on, which meant we couldn't get gigs. Well, we could get gigs but they were horrible ones. We didn't really start playing until around 1982 and by the time we came to start recording the record, which was around 1984, we’d had two to three years of sh**ty gigs.’

Despite Gould moving, he and Mosley remained good friends. ‘We were always hanging out drinking beer and one day during a Faith No More show, we just told Chuck to get on the microphone and do whatever the hell he wanted. It was fun so we asked him to do it again and he kind of just became a singer by default.’ But even with a line up finally settled (at least for the moment), the band still struggled to get fans on-board with their crazy hybrid of funk, synths and metal, even in the bohemian environs of San Francisco. ‘We were really into the music we were making,’ says Gould ‘we connected with it strongly but it felt like it wasn’t translating to the audience somehow. I think every band has that, right? 'How can we get gigs if people don't know who we are? How can we get a label if we can't get any gigs?' It’s a classic young band scenario. There was a little network of bands that we knew who always seemed to be going off touring around the States and we wanted to do that. (Legendary Metallica bassist) Cliff Burton was in Puffy's old band and Metallica were playing all these cool festivals in Europe and we wanted to do that too! There was a whole punk scene there and they were going on tour as well. I guess there was a crowd of people all over the country who wanted to be a part of that scene, bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Religion, but we weren't that kind of band, so it didn't work when we played to those people. The other thing going on at that time was this American alternative rock movement, bands like The Replacements and Soul Asylum, but we didn't fit into that either, so we were in a really weird spot!'

When it’s pointed out to Gould that Faith No More have hardly made a habit of fitting in throughout their entire career, it elicits a hearty laugh from Gould. ‘Basically yeah, I mean we did a lot of things that didn't make sense to people outside of the band but I don't think that's ever been a problem, as long as it made sense to us, we always kind of found our way through it. We were playing this weird music and we just got lucky! We were recording these demo tapes but they were falling flat, so my theory was if we recorded in a 24-track studio, it would sound better and people would take us more seriously. It's a stupid way to look at it, but that was my 21-year old brain trying to figure out why we weren’t connecting with people. That said, we tried it and that’s what ended up being the first side of this record. We then we got signed a week afterwards; it happened that quickly.’

With no backing from a record label, the band had to raise the money themselves. Whilst this practise is rife today in a modern digital age where recording technology is available in laptops and mobile phones across the Western world, raising enough capital to record professionally in 1984 was a tall order. Gould doesn’t remember the exact amount they came up with but he says ‘it was probably around $2,000’ which adjusted for inflation is just a few hundred dollars shy of $5,000 in today’s money. They recorded the first five songs of the record (Side A of the vinyl release) before running out of funds. Thankfully the songs they had were enough to gain the attention of Ruth Schwartz, one of the original co-editors of the celebrated punk subculture zine Maximum Rocknroll. Schwartz had founded an independent punk distribution company called Mordam records in 1983, and provided the help the band so desperately needed. ‘We met Ruth and she wanted to distribute the record, but we only had half of it recorded. She said, 'No problem, I'll put up the money for the other half.' She gave us this ragingly great deal where after a certain amount of years, we got the rights to the album back, and that deal is one of the reasons we’re able to re-release this record now. It was an extremely fair one-page deal in a time that was famous for record deals being the worst, a lot of bands practically signed their lives away. This was Ruth’s first release on Mordam and she was absolutely fantastic, we owe her everything.’

The world’s reaction to We Care A Lot upon its release in November 1985 was fairly mute; the band would have to wait another four years for their stratospheric rise upon the release of 1989’s The Real Thing. ‘We didn't have a sophisticated delivery system which made it hard to get the record out to people’ says Gould ‘Spin Magazine came to one of our shows, that was a huge deal for us but other than that I think it was pretty much ignored at the time. We’d never have reviews written about us in San Francisco! Once we got on to Slash Records, they had a little bit more muscle behind them and we were taken a little more seriously then, but we definitely went through a good four or five years of being invisible.’

With the record having been unavailable for such a long period of time, many are unaware of this side of the band’s history. With the exception of the title song, which was re-recorded for their sophomore release, 1987’s Introduce Yourself and still regularly played live today, songs such as the driving 80’s fused synth tech noir workout of Arabian Disco or the atmospheric hypnotically disorientating likes of Why Do You Bother remain largely unheard by a large portion of the band’s core fan base. Gould was unaware that he even had the master tapes until he cleared out the assorted junk and memorabilia that had piled up in his basement. ‘I've been a touring guy most of my life, even when the band split up, I was still travelling a lot and I kept picking up all kinds of stuff and storing it in the basement’ he says of the discovery. ‘I have stuff in boxes that I haven't gone through for years and my wife got to a point where she said, 'We're living in boxes! You don't even know what’s down there, can we just dump some of that s**t you have down there!?’ ... and that's when I found the tapes. I was like, 'Oh my God, what is this?' I’d found the half inch masters, which were the finished mixes and I found one 24-track reel that had the three songs that Matt Wallace has remixed for this re-issue (We Care A Lot, Pills For Breakfast and As The Worm Turns). I said to him, ‘if you could remix these songs today, what would you do with them?' and what you hear on the record is the result.’

Wallace has become synonymous with Faith No More having produced five out of seven of their studio albums and often being referred to as the sixth member of the band, with Gould first meeting him back in the Faith. No Man days. ‘It's what he would do differently,’ says Gould ‘I always felt like the record sounded pretty eighties, it just had a very dated sound. But I threw a couple hundred bucks down to bake the tapes, just to see what they’d sound like now, more out of curiosity than anything. I'm listening on the monitors as the reels are getting played and it sounded f**king great! It brought me right back to when we were mixing it. So I told the other guys and they said, ‘hell yeah, let's put it out!’ A lot of people don't know this side of the band so it's a cool thing to be able to put out again.’

We Care A Lot, the debut record by Faith No More, will be re-issued on Vinyl, CD and digitally via Koolarrow Records on 19^th August and is available to pre-order now