Festival Music

FROM OUT OF NOWHER

I t’s almost impossible these days to imagine just how bad things were, but rock music was a fucking embarrassment in the early 80s. The collapse of the dinosaur rock behemoths of the previous decade into hopelessly bloated, overblown, self-important drivel, married with the birth of MTV, and led to a whole new generation of preening, overblown, self-important drivel, with tighter trousers to boot.

The so-called hair metal scene of Los Angeles in the early 80s was a vacuous world of drink, drugs and womanising excess for its own sake, with virtually no talent anywhere to be found. Guns ‘n’ Roses visceral debut album aside, rock fans were assaulted by abject shite from every angle, Mötley Crüe, Poison and Faster Pussycat dominating the airwaves with their spandex and back-combed buffoonery. Received historical wisdom has it that grunge came along and blew all that away, but that’s not quite how it happened. Before Seattle began stirring, a handful of bands were making loud guitar music with something to say, with an attitude, and with a vision and willingness to experiment and push what they were doing. At the forefront of that were Faith No More.

Alongside the likes of the recently reformed Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More blazed a trail across the media and set themselves up in direct opposition to what had gone before, all three bands mixing metal, funk, punk, prog, rap and even jazz to hugely influential effect.

I know, I know, it seems strange today to think of the Chili Peppers as a force for subversion, such is their association with the anodyne rock’n’roll mainstream over the last two decades, but their love of hardcore and uncompromising stance early on in the music business were refreshing and new. And so it was with Faith No More as well. Formed in the early 80s in San Francisco, the band put out a self-financed debut album, We Care a Lot, fronted by original singer Chuck Mosley. Although Mosley was eventually replaced by better-known frontman Mike Patton, the template was there from the start, and the eponymous lead single from the album became an anthem for disenfranchised music fans around the globe, fans who were sick of the bullshit they were being fed by an increasingly homogenised media.

OK, other bands were taking on the hair- metallers in more extreme ways at the same time, the hardcore likes of Big Black, Fugazi and Sonic Youth, but the crucial difference was that the triumvirate of Faith No More, Jane’s Addiction and the Chili Peppers took them on in the charts, and won.

48 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 20–27 Aug 2009