Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

Fun fact: Faith No More is Mike Patton toning it down.

It’s true. One of the most bizarre, compelling and spectacular acts in heavy metal stems from its creator being his most accessible and digestible. This is despite Faith No More being an abrasive, rigidly anti-commercial act to basically anyone not deeply involved in the world of alternative metal. There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the work of David Lynch, who baffled the world with the first two seasons of Twin Peaks.

Then, Lynch seemingly approached Twin Peaks: The Return with the attitude of “Everything before was made with a big-time TV network breathing down my neck, this is the weird shit!” This was essentially the attitude Mike Patton brought to his side project in the 1990s. One that had started life as a fairly straight-ahead death metal band in 1985, but wouldn’t take proper flight until Patton parlayed his success with Faith No More into getting them a record deal in 1990.

This was a band Patton had formed with his high school friends Trevor Dunn and Trey Spruance, whom he’d met when they played together in Eureka High School’s jazz band. After tooling around in a few metal cover bands, the trio started listening to more dramatic and experimental forms of metal and decided to form a band specifically to explore the strange side of metal. They took their name from a nickname they had for an annoying classmate of theirs, cribbed from an episode of The Pee-Wee Herman Show, Mr Bungle.

Most of the time, metal bands that are a little out of the ordinary don’t start showing that experimental side after a few years spent playing typical heavy metal music. Look at Pantera’s hilarious years as a glam metal band for more information. Not so with Mr Bungle. Not only were the band members musical omnivores who were as likely to listen to Camper Van Beethoven and The Specials as Metallica, but they also had pissing people off baked into their very DNA. In the lead-up to one of their very first shows, the band realised they’d have a captive audience of metalheads and thought, “What if we just played a bunch of ska tunes instead?”

How did this early Mr Bungle gig go?

Well, the band lived. According to Spruance, it went a little better than they thought, saying, “We just had this idea, you know: ‘OK, we’re going to play this ska music, and that’ll be amazing.’ Half of the audience hated us, but there was definitely a joy in confronting that wall between styles.” There’s a decent argument that the very soul of the band lay in confronting that wall between styles, as by the time Mr Bungle recorded their first demos, that was still very much what the band were going for.

These were, after all, demos of a band playing a fusion of death metal and ska, with songs decorated with instrumental flourishes from train whistles, saxophones, bongos and an errant kazoo if you listened really closely under the almost atonal, wilfully abrasive din. Their sound developed over the next four demos they released, becoming a truly unholy mix of Primus and Bad Manners that would never have achieved a record deal in a million years… if it wasn’t for their singer forcing the issue.

Patton joined Faith No More in 1988, and after that, the band became a massive deal surprisingly quickly, with ‘Epic’ landing in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. While his schedule in Faith No More was suddenly a lot busier, Patton was adamant that both bands would be active at the same time. Thus, he secured the band a record deal just in time for the 1990s, where their brand of weirdo metal became in vogue for the first and just about the only time.

Proof, if any was needed, that you truly never know what can happen when you make the art that you want to make and damn anyone who tells you otherwise.