You To Me Are Everything

Just like Rhianna I like a little F ‘n M.

It's so cool, it's so hip, it's alright
It's so groovy, it's outta sight
You can touch it, smell it, taste it so sweet
But it makes no difference 'cause it knocks you off your feet

Some of my very favourite memories of being a teenager/student/elegant young wastrel are just totally losing it and laying waste to dancefloors to the sound of ‘Epic’. It still sounds like nothing else on the planet.

Faith No More were a seriously good band and The Real Thing was their absolute pinnacle for me.

Of course when they first started getting coverage and folks started to like them, I decided without hearing I note that I thought they were overrated, like the absolute fuck wit I used to be; ‘Epic’ changed that for me. Soon the copy of The Real Thing I had taped from my girlfriend, who was far too good for me, had been replaced by a shiny new picture disc.

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I can still remember the absolute hard-charging thrill of hearing opener ‘From Out Of Nowhere’ for the first time. It is still a thrill today, sometimes I forget just how unusual their sound was in metal circles back then. Okay so my beloved Jane’s Addiction and much less beloved RHCP were waging war on the margins but things used to be very orthodox way back in ’89. To have the keyboards so front and centre in such a loud band, to have a vocalist who was able to croon, rap and yowl so ably, often in the same song … it just didn’t happen.

Except it did and The Real Thing is proof of it all.

Faith No More, with new vocalist Mike Patton, were somehow able to weld together a killer robot of an LP out of rap, thrash metal, pop, funk, rock and soundtrack music, like the mad scrapyard professors they were. The real key to it all though, was just how accessible they made it all sound; no mean feat.

Listening to it all again now I am impressed by just what a great performance the whole band put in on The Real Thing, every person playing out of his skin on every single track. As I always am I am just in awe of Big Sick Ugly Jim Martin, he can change it up on a pinhead, going from the meanest thrash riffs you’ve ever heard, to beautifully melodic elegiac codas. The man was incredible, plus he just had the best look in rock.

So as well as slicing and dicing us with tracks like ‘Surprise! You’re Dead!, the band switch to incredible technicolour explosions like the title track, which is both gorgeous and savage, impossible to pin down to a genre. That latter point is one of the biggest draws for me, I love stuff that fucks with fixed genres and dances on the cusp of being neither one thing, or another. Listen to ‘The Real Thing’ and try to define it, I can’t and that’s the beauty of it all.

I was going to name my favourite tracks on The Real Thing but basically I can’t, its all of them from the bonkers instrumental ‘Woodpecker From Mars’, to the heavy stomping ‘The Morning After’, to the brilliantly poppy ‘Falling To Pieces’, there isn’t a weak link anywhere.

As befitted a band who were happy having a go at incorporating as many different musical styles as they could into their music, Faith No More crossed over massively with fans all the different metal subgenres – no mean feat back then, daft as it sounds and to more normal folks in the general populace too.

The great news for fans at this time was that the band were just getting better and better too, as they toured with everyone, everywhere, they simultaneously got more jaded, more sarcastic, more ambitious, more extreme, just MORE. The earlier LPs with Chuck Mosley on vocals were great in places too, but The Real Thing was when they blasted off.

The Real Thing is an album that really hasn’t aged for me at all, it still sounds great and makes me want to plunge around my front room in an alarmingly stompy fashion. Long may it continue.

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My copy of The Real Thing is a picture disc, it sounds a touch quiet but it is a far better sounding one than a lot I own of a similar vintage. It’s plenty cool looking but personally I like it better when they just package picture discs up like regular LPs with all the fripperies such as lyric sheets and dust jackets.

Vinyl got short-changed on this release too with cassettes and the-format-that-must-not-be-named weighing in with the excellent jazz creep of ‘Edge Of The World’ and the excellent Sabbath cover ‘War Pigs’ from a time before every band in the world wasn’t raving about them.

1108 Down.

PS: What, no footnotes? is this a 1537 first?

PPS: I always love the way that all 5 members of FNM look like they’re from different bands.