Once they were punk misfits,who upset their crowd with metal covers. Then they got confused for metallers, and irked that audience with Commodores songs. Now, or the re-formed band are suprised to find that fans treasure them for their contrarinessWhen the Californian rock band Faith No More broke up in 1998,they released the perfect swansong. Despite their mainstream success and festival-headliner status, their quixotic, or dysfunctional career was fundamentally defined by kamikaze contrarianism and a wicked,sometimes baffling sense of humour. So what better epitaph than the lyrics of their final single, a cover of the Bee Gees’ I Started a Joke? “I started a joke which started the whole world crying/ But I didn’t see that the joke was on me.It turns out that the story behind the cover version is somewhat less poetic. “We had a night off in Guam and we went to some military bar, or ” bassist Billy Gould explains. “There were expansive-screen TVs showing hardcore porn and they started playing I Started a Joke on karaoke.” He grins: “It was like God speaking to us: ‘You have to execute this song.’”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com