Faith No More singer Mike Patton says that the band’s last tour came with an “unspoken” sense of closure.
The alternative metal innovators last hit the road in 2015, promoting the release of that year’s comeback album Sol Invictus. They were scheduled to return in 2020, but plans for their live shows were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, then abandoned altogether following Patton’s struggle with mental health issues.
In a new interview with Kyle Meredith With…, Patton implies that Faith No More have wrapped things up for good, saying that the members quietly felt closure last time they toured. “I think that we all kind of felt it, but it was unspoken,” he says (via ThePRP).
He adds: “And it’s funny, just when you’ve been in a band or a musical situation for a period of time, you always, in the back of your head, you’re kind of thinking, ‘Well, maybe this is it.’ And I don’t mind that feeling. I don’t see it as a sad thing. I see it as being present and being able to really appreciate it while it’s happening.”
Faith No More have been the most commercially successful of Patton’s many endeavours, their 1989 album (and his debut with the band) The Real Thing having gone Platinum in multiple markets. The album’s second single, Epic, reached number nine on the US charts and was certified Platinum in Australia and New Zealand. But, the singer – who’s also released solo music and performed in Mr Bungle, Tomahawk, Fantômas and others – says that he never viewed the band as his “main” project.
“[What] I’d never really understood, and I had to figure this out very early on, was the concept of a side-project – that’s assuming that there’s a main one,” he says. “And for me, I really never had one. There were projects like Faith No More where I spent more time on, in terms of touring and promoting, quote-unquote, if you will.
“But everything that I’ve done was of equal importance to me. They just weren’t viewed that way. And the public, for whatever reason, needs to have a hierarchy kind of built in there, just to make themselves feel better about it, I guess. I don’t know.”
Patton’s comments seem to confirm the breakup of Faith No More, after keyboardist Roddy Bottum hinted last year that the band would not tour together again.
“I don’t think so. No,” he told Alternative Nation. “It’s not just me. I don’t think anyone’s sort of up for it at this point. We had a bunch of shows that we were gonna play [in 2020], and they got cancelled, just for various reasons. But I don’t think the course that we were on has fixed itself.”
Since the cancellation of Faith No More’s most recent tour plans, Patton’s been busy mostly with Mr Bungle: the avant-garde metal band he co-founded in high school and who re-recorded their 1986 thrash demo, The Raging Wrath Of The Easter Bunny, in 2020. Last year, he released the album AVTT/PTTN in collaboration with folk outfit the Avett Brothers, and earlier this week he announced the touring return of his rock supergroup Tomahawk, who haven’t performed since 2013.
