It appears that the classic incarnation of Faith No More is... no more. The great Bay Area alt-metal band started in the early '80s and recorded their first two albums with singer Chuck Mosely, who passed away in 2017. When they kicked Mosely out of the band in 1989, they recruited Mike Patton, a fresh-faced 20-year-old who led the bugged-out thrash group Mr. Bungle. Faith No More went on to their greatest run of success with Patton as their frontman, recording classic albums like The Real Thing and Angel Dust. Faith No More broke up in 1998 and reunited in 2009, but they haven't played a live show with Patton in nearly a decade. (Their most recent shows were actually a pair of reunions with Mosely in 2016, a year before he died.) Now, it's looking less and less likely that Patton will rejoin the band anytime soon.
After a five-year break, Faith No More were scheduled to return to the road in 2020, but COVID put an end to those plans. Once restrictions lifted in 2021, the band announced more touring plans, but Patton canceled those shows, citing mental health concerns: "I have issues that were exacerbated by the pandemic that are challenging me right now. I don’t feel I can give what I should at this point and I am not going to give anything less than 100 percent." His bandmates issued a statement acknowledging the frustration of the crew and the band's fans (as well as, presumably, the band members themselves) while also expressing their support of Patton. In interviews, Patton would sometimes say that he wasn't sure his bandmates wanted him back. Now, the band's other Mike, drummer Mike Bordin, says that Patton just doesn't seem to want to come back.
As Blabbermouth reports, Mike Bordin was a recent guest on comedian Dean Delray's Let There Be Talk podcast. Bordin says that the band spent six months rehearsing in advance of those 2021 shows and that Patton skipped rehearsal just a day and a half before their first show back. When they went to see Patton, Bordin says, "it was very clear that he was unable at that point to physically do it. We made the decision that, 'Look, we've gotta support our guy.' It's gonna be a shitstorm canceling fucking 75 shows, but none of us wants to be the guy that breaks his back and forces him to do something that he's not in the position to be able to do. It wasn't even an argument."
After that period of support, though, Bordin says that he watched Patton return to playing live with the reactivated version of Mr. Bungle:
My statement on it is that he's gone from being unable to do the shows to clearly being unwilling to do shows with us. And that's heavy. That's a big difference. That's a big difference. And we haven't really had much dialogue on it... It doesn't feel great to me. It honestly kind of hurts my feelings a little bit, but that's personal. That's a private thing. It's business. We were never gonna force somebody to do something that they weren't able to do. And now, as I say, it looks like it's more really about being willing to do it.
Bordin says that he's grateful for all the band's time with Mike Patton but that he doesn't know where they'll go in the future. I bet they'll figure things out eventually; they just need to open up some lines of communication. In the meantime, if I could make a small suggestion: Bring back former singer Courtney Love!
