In the summer of 1992, a writer for the now defunct Details magazine was dispatched to Europe to hang out with Faith No More, as they spent a week off in London killing time between stadium shows supporting Guns N' Roses.
With the group's brilliant fourth album Angel Dust, released that same week, set to enter the UK charts at number two, the journalist might reasonably have expected to find San Francisco quintet loving life on this European vacation, but no: the quintet were bored, frustrated and already thoroughly disenchanted with the GN'R circus. Still, their disenchantment did make for some excellent interview quotes.
Charting FNM's daily adventures, the writer filed this copy for the night of June 11:
'Thursday, Mike Patton gets drunk on cider. On the way back from the pub to his hotel he stops outside Kensington Palace -- just by the hotel -- where Prince Charles and Lady Di live. Patton drops his trousers and takes a dump on a park bench by the palace.
That night Billy [Gould] and Roddy [Bottum] are in Amsterdam to see L7 and the Rollins Band.
"Did you HEAR what Patton did?" giggles Billy, just off the plane from Amsterdam. "The turd is still there".'
Patton would subsequently go into more detail about his own personal number two release.
"Yeah I pooped on a bench right outside the Palace," he told Select magazine, also now no longer in print. "I couldn't believe it was so easy to get in there. It's the equivalent of the US President's White House, right? If you were caught inside there, they'd torture and shoot you! I mean, the Princess could have passed by at any minute, which would've been quite handy, 'cause I could've asked for some toilet paper..."
In Details, Patton claimed to have "kind of a problem" when it came to answering the call of nature. "I don't like to use toilets, ever," he told the magazine. He then shared an anecdote about a club owner in the US once locking his side-band Mr. Bungle in the venue after accusing them of owing him money: Patton's response, he explained, was to deposit a special gift in the club's microwave.
"It started out being a problem, but now it's more of a weapon than anything," Patton suggested.
Faith No More would eventually return to the business of playing music on June 13, opening Guns N' Roses' Wembley Stadium gig. This improves their mood not a jot. "How many of you people phoned in bomb threats today?" Patton enquires at one stage.
'Afterward, the group sit backstage in painful silence, Details reports. After cooling their heels for a week, and pulling a hundred stupid stunts to pass the time before their show, they come away hating the set. They thought they performed abysmally.
"I've got to say," says Roddy. "Sometimes, Mike, you come off a little arrogant".'
Listen to Faith No More's Wembley show below:
