it all started when Faith No More and Mr. Bungle canceled their September and October 2021 tour dates as vocalist Mike Patton dealt with ongoing mental health issues. Those cancellations bled into 2022, with Faith No More cancelling the whole year's worth of dates. Mr. Bungle would eventually get back on its feet, but Faith No More never recovered. Patton would later address his issues with Faith No More's other members as having "some issues" still going on, and that was that – Faith No More never returned to the stage or made any further comments.
Now in a post on his Substack (which you can check out here), Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottom briefly addressed the band's situation as a "semi permanent hiatus." So I guess it's good they're not definitively broken up, right? "Readers, hey," wrote Bottom. "Lemme introduce me but let's also acknowledge us.
"Introductions can be awkward, I know, I'll start. I'm Roddy. I've made a life for myself making music. With Faith No More and then Imperial Teen. I live in NYC and I work with my boyfriend in a band called MAN ON MAN and two awesome friends in a band called CRICKETS and also sometimes the horror art project gnarl core Nastie Band. FNM is kind of on semi permanent hiatus and Imperial Teen is making a record slowly but definitely. I wrote an opera about Sasquatch a couple years ago but I can talk about all those projects later. I'm here in anticipation of a book I've written, it's a memoir called The Royal We. It's my first foray into writing and it's exciting and scary and a whole new world for me..
"My initial purge and process was to lay out my life in story form from beginning to end. I did it every morning first thing for like over a year until I was happy with it. When I shared it with an agent he told me that ‘cradle to grave' pieces don't really sell that well. Say that phrase out loud. Cradle to grave. Can you even? I don't care so much about the selling part, but the phrase scared the fuck out of me. For starters, i hate biopics. The predictability and the formula and honestly the straight line of a story, there just aren't enough surprises, know what I mean? I find myself checking my watch, just waiting for the protagonist to die. Creating something formulaic and routine like that freaked me out so I went to Paris and reworked everything I'd done. I know. Paris. It's ok to roll your eyes. I needed to change up everything so I could change up everything so I went there and sat in an old library for a month and wrote.
"Now as it sits, my book is more of an ode to San Francisco, bicycle messengering, sex work, heroin, dreadlocks, the birth of politics in punk rock, wheatgrass, witches, crystal meth, coming out, self love and the burning down and obliteration of a great American city. It's not a tell all but it tells a lot. I'm leaning into the poetic and the literary. There are people you know in it, overdoses, tragedies and victories and failures. I'll share excerpts of it here as we go forward but for now that's me.""
