Garbage Days Revisited #7: Faith No More - "King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime" (1995)

 

"It’s always funny until someone gets hurt. And then it’s just hilarious" - Faith No More, Ricochet

It seems that when you discuss Faith No More these days the conversation seems to begin and end with The Real Thing and Angel Dust with this album being regarded as the point where lineup instability started to cost the band momentum. Which to my mind is greatly unfair - I would argue that King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime is very much the equal of those two much more celebrated efforts. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Faith No More can probably hold their heads up as one of the first rock bands I got into after I saw the video for Epic on Top of the Pops as an 11-year-old. My mind was comprehensively blown - it sounded like hardly anything else I'd ever heard up until this point and I ended up quickly heading down to Woolworths a couple of days later to buy it on cassette single. As I've said before, it seems as if I bought a lot of rock/metal singles as an 11-12 year old - AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Skid Row, the Quireboys, the Dogs D'Amour and Poison were all present and correct in my tape rack at this point and G'n'R, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and WASP wouldn't be too far behind in following them. As I've said before, it was only really the rise of grunge that kind of pushed me down the less travelled grebo/fraggle route which would slowly mutate into Britpop. But even then I was still listening to the Wildhearts, Terrorvision, Therapy? and the Almighty so I guess you could say the love of loud guitars was never that far below the surface and when Britpop finally combusted it would well and truly rear its head again. But that's another story for a future Sounds From The Junkshop.

The re-release of Epic would actually turn out to be FNM's last single for a couple of years - they'd already been touring its parent album The Real Thing for over a year at this point and were ready to go back into the studio to start on the follow-up. In the meantime, guitarist Jim Martin would rather brilliantly crop up in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (I'm pretty sure my love of the Bill & Ted films was a contributory factor into being a sort-of-metalhead as well). For some reason though the next single I bought was Everything's Ruined which was actually the third single from Angel Dust - I think I might've taped Midlife Crisis off the radio but I missed its follow-up A Small Victory altogether. Even as a 13-year-old, I could pick up from Ruined (a Mike Patton diatribe about struggling to cope with the sudden fame that The Real Thing had brought them) that this wasn't the work of a happy band so the fact that they followed it up with a completely straight cover of the Commodores' Easy* and scored a Top 3 hit with it was well and truly brilliantly mind-boggling.

(* Angel Dust was no less of a headfuck - I remember a friend taping it for me at the time and hearing the sheer terrifying chaos of Crack Hitler and Jizzlobber, two of the most utterly insane songs I'd listened to at that point, being followed by a straight cover of the theme from Midnight Cowboy and the aforementioned Easy to end the album remains one of the most utterly brilliantly bizarre closing quartets of songs that there is in my humble opinion. Seriously, go listen to it now. I'll wait until you come back, don't worry)

Behind the scenes though, things were falling apart. Jim Martin, the group's Sabbath-loving guitarist, had been growing apart from the rest of the band for a while and was unceremoniously fired soon after Easy came out while keyboardist Roddy Bottum had been battling both a drug addiction and a nervous breakdown after coming out of the closet and took himself off to rehab. So for the King For A Day sessions, Patton, bassist Billy Gould and drummer Mike Bordin were essentially recording as a trio. Bottum would occasionally join them in the studio when circumstances permitted and a number of guitarists were brought in to help on various tracks including Patton's bandmate from Mr Bungle Tre Spruance and the excellently named Dean Menta.

The return single Digging The Grave kind of set the template out for the album - a lot more stripped down and back to basics with just guitar, bass, drums and vocals but still packing that unhinged sinister feel that informed all of FNM's best stuff. There seem to be a lot of people who bemoan the fact that the group went a lot less "metal" after Jim Martin left but if anything this was a more punked-up take on what the group had been doing and I thought it worked brilliantly.

I bought King For A Day... the day it came out and for my money (as I've said earlier), it holds its own with its two more celebrated predecessors from the frenetic panic attack of Get Out which opens things while the lurching Ricochet sees them drifting into almost grunge territory but with a sense of humour that you'd never have got from dullards like Bush or Pearl Jam. Evidence is the first sign that there's going to be plenty of variety here though as it goes into a sort of cocktail jazz, almost spy theme, territory before the brilliantly unhinged album highlight The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies sees them amping things back up to devastating effect.

The album continues to swing like a meth-crazed baboon between styles for the rest of it but it's that varied that you never lose interest from the sheer insanity of Ugly In The Morning and Cuckoo For Caca (written about Patton's well-documented obsession with...well, shit) through the sinister minimalist Caralho Voador, the horn-powered almost soul-style rhythms of Star AD and the genuinely touching ballad Take This Bottle.

However, unlike The Real Thing and Angel Dust, the critical reception and commerical performance of King For A Day is much more muted and I'm still not quite sure why 25 years later. Admittedly by 1995 following the rise of Britpop and grunge being out of vogue, not many American rock bands were making a lot of waves over here (and let's be honest in the cases of the failure of the dreadful likes of Hootie & The Blowfish, Counting Crows et al to make any headway on this side of the Atlantic, that surely has to overall be a good thing) and it's safe to say that the band were in a spot of disarray following all the comings and goings by this point but it's still a fine record and deserves to be rediscovered.

FNM would last for one more record in 1997's Album Of The Year but sadly despite the title, this really was where the law of diminishing returns finally caught up with them. The group had stabilised by this point with Bottum back on board and new guitarist Jon Hudson safely settled in (thus creating the line-up that's still in place to this day) but it just lacked the stardust of its predecessors and they would quietly disband the following year with Bordin going on to drum for Ozzy Osbourne and Patton going through a bewilderingly vast variety of solo projects, some brilliantly unhinged and some downright unlistenable. However, the group would reunite in the early teens and produce a comeback album in 2015's Sol Invictus which was a triumphant return and really had no right to be as good as it was. As of 2021 we're still awaiting a follow-up but the group are still out there touring every so often and I have a feeling we haven't heard the last from them on record.

I remember a few years ago having a discussion on a Wildhearts FB group where someone posted the question as to whether anyone thought that the group had an American equivalent. Safe to say that Faith No More were pretty much the overwhelming name that most people came up with. In an era where American rock music was dominated by the dismal corporate facsimile of grunge that was swamping nearly everything with blandness, they were a desperately needed spark of ingenuity, great tunes and fuck-you-we'll-do-it-our-way attitude. It's been great to have them back again for the last decade or so and long may they continue. In the meantime, may I humbly suggest that if you were one of those who wrote King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime off at the time as "ah, it's not got Jim Martin on it, it's bound to be rubbish" that you give it a revisit - it's more than worth your time.