Classic Concert of the Day: Faith No More at Brixton Academy, London, England, 1990
You’re all cooped up. We’re all cooped up. Everyone’s friggin’ cooped up! You’re scrolling through our social feeds, texting with friends, eating, drinking coffee, watching TV, scrolling through our social feeds again, eating again, playing that dumb mobile game you downloaded from an Instagram ad and can’t stop playing, eating again, chatting with friends on a Zoom call, scrolling through our social feeds again, all while worrying about where your next paycheck is gonna come from. These are tough times, people.
To help pass the time, we’ll be sharing a classic metal concert every day. Watch some of it, watch all of it, watch only one song… we don’t care! As it long as it provides you with a bit of entertainment.
Continuing with our theme of looking back at classic concerts by bands that have had shows postponed or cancelled due the COVID-19 pandemic: we pour one out for Hellfest 2020, one of the headliners of which would have been Faith No More, by revisiting You Fat Bastards: Live at the Brixton Academy, the band’s 1990 live album and concert film. The show took place on April 28, less than a year after the release of The Real Thing — the band’s first album with singer Mike Patton — and just three months after the release of the track “Epic” as a single. That song, for the three of you don’t know, skyrocketed the band to a new level of stardom, and is likely the reason a lot of us ever got into FNM in the first place.
It’s easy to focus on Patton. The vocalist, who was just 22-years-old at the time, not only sounded great, but had an inhuman level of energy, and was operating at maximum weirdness (I mean that as a compliment), at one point even breaking into a few bars of Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” during “Epic.” But no one should discount the A+++ performances of the other band members — bassist Billy Gould, drummer Mike Bordin, keyboardist Roddy Bottum, and eventual award-winning pumpkin farmer Jim Martin — all of whom were at the top of their game.
If you can’t have fun watching this, you probably can’t have fun at all.
