"Faith No More
10th June 2009
Brixton Academy
I’ve been accused many times of over-personalising my reviews. Some people love it and some people hate it. Mostly people just ask “are you really married or is your ‘wife’ some kind of cheap literary device?”
The arrival of original alternative metallers Faith No More should have brought forth a stream of nostalgic contemplation of the last two and a half decades. There would have been an extended metaphor involving the band, its music and my own history since watching ‘We Care A Lot’ on The Chart Show in 1985.
On this occasion it does not, for a very good reason. That’s not to say I won’t be over-personalising it.
Sam was a bouncing, bright and wonderful woman. A big breasted, hard rocking, funny, generous friend to one and all, not without her faults but all the better for them. Sam was my music mistress. When the metal was at its noisiest and sweariest, when my wife really couldn’t stand it, Sam took over and we rocked out.
Sam loved Faith No More as I did. However by virtue of her charity work it seemed that, after a wait of twelve years, we would be at some expensive and dull function in candy-ass monkey suits instead of watching San Francisco’s worst doing the nasty at Download. When I procured two tickets for the Brixton warm-up, Sam was the happiest I have ever seen her. We would, at last, see them live.
Sam didn’t, however, get to see Faith No More play because the very weekend I told her the news, she put her motorbike into a tree and died instantly.
I’ve had plenty of ‘life has to go on’ moments over the last month or so and it is in this spirit that I’m doing this review. To try and write about my experience of the concert without putting it in its emotional context would have been journalistically dishonest. So here it is, part review, part eulogy.
My long illness has required patience in the face of life’s fragility and fleetingness but a sudden death has brought it into sharp focus. The kind of focus sharpening you get from cheap Photoshop filters, a sharpness that lends the image a hazy unreality with all the edges seemingly drawn over in pencil. Clear as day before you is the notion CARPE DIEM and yet the very act that made this vague truism meaningful has simultaneously robbed you of the will to act on it.
I am at the gig but I am dragging emotional baggage, I want to have fun but I am sad. Which is a shame, because this is a party. People have waited a long time for this and the crowd is bordering on the ecstatic. They howl every time the music over the PA dies in case this is the moment that the band is coming on. People are truly excited. Twelve years is a long time. It’s been long enough for a legion of imitators to rise and fall, for FNM to be forgotten as the progenitors of so much that has followed. The audience here knows better.
Faith No More always had potential (‘We Care a Lot’, ‘Anne’s Song’), a knack for a violent pop moment (‘Epic’) and finally a perfect artistic vision (‘Angel Dust’) before vanishing literally up their arses. They were always on the verge of breaking up or killing each other but the tension paid dividends. They only came unstuck with the departure of the perennially unpopular Ugly Sick Jim Martin and his hackneyed ‘80s crunch guitar. It was an apparently useless thread to pull, but without his sound or perhaps without a unified hate figure, FNM descended into in-fighting, indulgence and that deeply unsettling preoccupation with eating excrement.
They always maintained a savage beauty live however and they haven’t lost an iota of their power. Their act is unquestionably stunning. Their musical diversity and sick humour ably demonstrated. Their often ignored ability to create delicate crystalline soundscapes is alive and well. The audience plays their part. They sing in the right place, punch the air with the venom of their younger days and ‘Epic’, when it comes, reminds anyone who seriously doubts their value what stunning writers they were.
The only problem with ‘Epic’ is in its very title. So vast, so awesome is the conceit behind the song that everything seems anti-climactic in its wake. This especially true of their later work which verges on the samey and smothers the end of the gig. They finished the set, the encores drifted vaguely over the stage and the gig ended without a bang, but a whimper.
It would be nice if this review ended with me saying that it was every bit the gig that Sam would have wanted but, once again in the interests of honesty, I can’t.
“It f***** tailed off, didn’t it? Why didn’t they finish with ‘Everything’s Ruined’? ‘A Small Victory’? ‘We Care A Lot’ for f***’s sake?” is what she would have said and she would have been, as she was so often, completely right.
Maybe, just maybe, in the eyes of a normal person, a person without the raw wound of loss throbbing away inside them, the end was OK. They were good, they’re playing Download this week, they’ll be back, there might be a new album, they looked like they were getting on, we’ll see them again next year...or maybe there won’t be a tomorrow, next week or next year and this night will never come again.
Seize the day Gentlemen. Seize the day."
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