“It feels good to have a thousand people flipping you off. Just to see the amount of middle fingers go up when we go into it is amazing”: The alt-rock superstars who trolled their fans with a 70s easy listening cover – and scored a huge hit with it

Faith No More posing for a photograph in 1992.

It’s 1992 and you’re the hottest alt-metal band on the planet. After breaking out of the mid-80s US underground, your last album has gone platinum, you’ve played the MTV Awards and Saturday Night Live, and absolutely everybody is biting your style. What do you do? If you’re Faith No More, you record a straight-laced cover of The Commodores’ smooth 70s soul-pop ballad Easy.

FNM’s breakthrough 1989 album The Real Thing was a glorious mash-up of funk, metal and everything in between. They’d recorded a cover as a bonus track for that album, a faithful version of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. It looked like an obvious move, but maybe it was too obvious for singer Mike Patton, who would troll audiences by changing the lyrics to: “Generals gathered in their masses/Golly gee, I hate Black Sabbath.”