Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Urban Bolta
Location: Donington Park, United Kingdom
Concert date: 11.06.2009
Attendance: 70000
Ticket price: 180€ (weekend ticket)
More than eleven years have passed since Faith No More played what was (until now) their last show – in Lisbon. Then this February, out of the blue, came the news that after a break of more than a decade the Faith No More machine would fire up again, kicking off with a tour of the old continent. Mike Patton, Mike Bordin, Roddy Bottum, Billy Gould and Jon Hudson are the lineup FNM hit the road with, and they’ll be entertaining crowds all over Europe all summer long. It’s the exact same lineup that recorded their last studio album, Album Of The Year, in 1997 and that was in place when they called it quits. The split back then was mutual – everyone was busy with their own side projects, the creative drive and the will to work under the FNM banner were gone, so the end was inevitable, but most importantly, it was a friendly end, with no hard feelings. And that very fact is the key reason the guys got back together and set off toward a new challenge.
Download festival is a three-day event that has only been writing its history since 2003, but in that time it has already grown into one of the best-attended festivals not just in England but worldwide. Every year it takes place at Donington Park in central England, which is also known as a Formula One venue. This year Download ran from June 12 to 14 and hosted names like ZZ Top, Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Journey and Korn, to name just a few. The organizers confirmed FNM as the headliner of the first day, and to make the announcement even more bombastic, they added a “disclaimer”: this would be the very first show of the reunion tour! That held up for a while, but then FNM also confirmed a gig at Brixton Academy two days before the festival kicked off, so the Download set ended up being the second show of the reunion tour, though still the first in front of a huge crowd – Brixton Academy holds a modest few thousand people (yes, that’s where AC/DC shot the video for Thunderstruck and where plenty of cosmopolitan names of rock’n’roll have recorded their live albums).
Right on the announced time, the place erupted in front of the stage! The stars of the night marched out and started playing – for the intro they covered the ancient song Reunited, which stands out from the typical Faith No More sound but sweeps the listener straight into a show full of anticipation. The stage was draped entirely in red. There were curtains on each side that evoked a theater atmosphere, and behind drummer Mike Bordin a huge red backdrop stretched across the whole stage. After the intro, it got real! The Real Thing is a representative song for the band. A calm start, a special mood created by the dark sound of the keyboards, vocals that shift from totally mellow to angrily menacing, and a raw bass and guitar line that cut deep into the listener’s ears, all of it spiced up with tempo changes. What a start! The first of the hits followed, From Out To Nowhere, and then it was time for the first address to the crowd from singer Mike Patton. In his own style he roughed up the audience a bit, telling us not to care about tonight’s show, since they used to be better and prettier and have nothing left to show these days. And they carried on – every song strengthened my conviction that I was watching a phenomenal performance that took miles of preparation. Every second of the set, every move onstage was living proof of that.
Watching Mike Bordin play makes drumming look like the easiest job in the world. The partly gray, balding Mike, who still wears long dreadlocks down his back, has been with the band since the very beginning and as such is totally tuned in to Faith No More’s music. His special trait is definitely being left-handed, which brings a slightly different drumming technique. Bassist Billy Gould, keyboardist Roddy Bottum and suit-clad guitarist Jon Hudson are fairly static onstage – considering the genre and all the energy of their music, of course – which automatically shifts the attention to vocalist Mike Patton – who probably likes that quite a bit. In the FNM sound the bass guitar plays a very important role; in fact, the structures of some songs are built right on an outstanding bassline. That’s exactly why Gould’s laid-back approach is almost a small surprise, since live a strong bassline as a rule leaves an even bigger impression on the listener than when you’re listening on your bed at home. Mike Patton is a frontman from head to toe! Rarely does a band leader make such an impression on me as Mike did at this show. He talked to the crowd very little and, as one of the few (compared to the frontmen of the other acts), he stayed indifferent to the sea of people below the stage. Without a glance at his surroundings or at what was going on around him, he just did his job, as if in some kind of concert trance he falls into at every show. He constantly adapts to the tempo of the songs: one moment he’s jumping around the stage energetically and flailing his arms, the next he’s sitting on a monitor, and every now and then he grabs a stick that helps him get around the stage. He also showed off his language skills, weaving Spanish and, if memory serves, Portuguese into the standard versions of the tracks. He’s one of those guys who, even without rambling between songs, wins a visitor over in an instant with his charisma and demeanor.
The setlist was a kind of cross-section of Faith No More’s career so far, with every single album represented; only Angel Dust (1992), which critics consider the band’s musical peak, got a bit more attention than the rest. There isn’t much material from the era of ex-vocalist Chuck Mosley, but to be honest, that wasn’t to be expected anyway.
FNM’s music is made up of a thousand and one bits, and every single member writes (used to write) it, so you can find influences of heavy metal, funk, hard rock, hip hop, punk and experimental rock in there, though the easiest way to define it is as alt metal. They found just the right combination of raw energy and almost pop melodicism on the other side, which puts them at the very peak of creativity. It’s precisely this diversity that lets so many people find themselves in their sound, and if we add the English mentality and the band’s inactivity over the last decade, we can imagine what madness the FNM guys caused with their show. The crowd started going nuts and raising hell the moment the first heavy riff dropped, and the euphoria only eased off after FNM had played the bass epic We Care a Lot, left the stage, and it was clear the day of music was over. An exceptional performance by exceptional musicians and an endless crowd of visitors conjured up a perfect evening that I’ll remember for a long time.
Photos: Urban Bolta
Setlist
1. Reunited 2. The Real Thing 3. From Out of Nowhere 4. Land of Sunshine 5. Caffeine 6. Evidence 7. Poker Face 8. Suprise! You’re Dead! 9. Easy 10. Last Cup of Sorrow 11. Midlife Crisis 12. Introduce Yourself 13. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies 14. Take This Bottle 15. Ashes to Ashes 16. Malpractice Play 17. Cuckoo for Caca 18. Be Aggressive 19. Epic 20. Mark Bowen —encore— 21. Chariots of Fire / Stripsearch 22. We Care a Lot
Photo Gallery
