The man of 1000 voices celebrates his 57 birthday on January 27th.
It is well known that Mike Patton takes savage and perverse pleasure in fucking with the press and fans alike, his statements both on and off the stage have sometimes been far fetched, sometimes offensive but always in good humour.
"It's really not even worth talking about. It's just. when I'm on stage sometimes the mouth opens and, y'know. diarrhoea flows out. Anything I can do not to think on stage, I will do. Why? Because I don't think it belongs there. I've said some really bad things and gotten us into some really awkward situations and there are responsibilities." - Mike Patton 1992
The Real Thing took the world by storm and catapulted Patton into a stratosphere of fame. He handled this by being as awkward and childish as he possibly could. Patton introduced masturbation and porn into almost every interview, sidestepping questions that alluded towards lyrical meaning, his musical influences or his personal life. He became a schizophrenic interviewee, who used various personalities which were not characters or a façade he had created, he simply was revealing his true self rather than hiding behind some Rockstar mythology.
Patton publicly berated celebrities in the press and from on stage while they watched - he claimed Lenny Kravitz and Sinead O'Connor were in comparable positions backstage, that Aerosmith and Poison were over the hill , that Sebastian Bach could suck his own dick! He shared stories about Axl Rose going bald and that Warren Beatty was fucking Axl's girlfriend.
While FNM's contemporaries spoke of wild drunken nights and sex with groupies Patton and his fellows tackled more pressing issues such as pedophilia, serial killers and unsavoury toilet habits. These tactics were mostly used to alleviate boredom and to distance themselves from the rock n' roll circus of touring with major metal acts. Of course the stories weren't always true, in some cases they were simply pushing the boundaries to discover what the press would actually print. True or false it made for entertaining reading.
This year we are wishing the Faith No More front-man many happy returns by revisiting some of his most outrageous and memorable press interviews from over the years.
Spin Magazine | December 1990
"Masturbation is a lot easier to do than relating to someone. It's like playing a video machine. You can relate to a machine a lot easier than a human being. You can just pound yourself for hours and hours and not think about it. With sex, no matter how great it is, there's always something missing... Masturbation is like this little knot I have inside of me that I can't untie."
NME | July 1990
"I'm an avid [porn] collector. I have a few movies but it's mostly magazines because movies are too expensive. Where I live, me and my friends don't have much to do except go into liquor stores and see if we can steal some. Masturbation is a great thing to talk about, I love to bring it up whenever I first meet people, it's just the best topic, though some people are too scared to admit it. You can really get to know someone through masturbation. Me and my friends are pretty close back home."
"Ok. I admit it. Necrophilia is definitely a fascination. I haven't been put in a situation where I could explore it, yet, but Karen Greenley is someone who interests me. She was this girl who went around mortuaries and got jobs as a caretaker. She'd take the nightshift and start having fun with corpses. She got caught but I think she got off by just paying a fine or something."
RIP Magazine | 1990
"I'd really like to set all that straight. What he doesn't realize is that I am Anthony Kiedis, and I'm the raddest dude. Let me tell you, I'm in the greatest band, and it's so cool. But all these jerks, one of which is that Mike Patton asshole, all want to be me. So I'm gonna get him, and I'm gonna get him good."
Sky Magazine | December 1992
"On our last tour I jumped into the crowd and broke this kid's nose. I tried to get him medical aid but he said he'd rather have a T-shirt. It's bad. What do you tell his parents? The other day I met a guy who had a scar over his eye, just like mine. I asked him how he got it and he said: 'You did it to me. But it's cool'."
The Face | 1992
"When I was staying in a hotel room once, I took a shit, rolled it into a ball and put it in the hair dryer so that the next guest to dry their hair would get hot shit in their face. Ain't that rock n' roll? I do hope rock stars are a dying breed. People love to lap them up -- you know how something always tastes better if you swallow it quickly."
NME | June 1992
"I think meeting people is great. But on a sexual level it's much easier to get bored I guess ... I don't know ... I've had a lot of mechanical sex ... I wouldn't say that I'm seriously into S&M. I mean, come on, having somebody pee on you wearing a Darth Vader suit. It's great and everything. But take a few steps back and you have to laugh. I don't know what happened to me. Maybe I went through puberty or something. I'd say touring as much as we did -- becoming a stimulation junkie, developing a very high threshold for pain and a very low attention span -- would tie anyone in a knot."
Melody Maker | August 1992
"He [Axl] came up to me the other night and said, 'Hey, man, your song really helped me through some really heavy shit in my life'. I said, 'Really? What song is that?' He said, 'Midlife Crisis'. 'What kind of shit?' l asked, He looked at the ground for about an hour then shook his head and said, 'Mmm, just a lot of shit, man'. I tell you, I was biting my lip so hard trying not to loose it. 'We've given up trying to be quiet about their stupid games. It's gotta come out somewhere. For a while we were a little cautious of saying anything, but we were uncomfortable with that.
OOR Magazine | August 1992
The best shows we've done were under the worst conditions. At places where no one wanted to see us. We were supporting Metallica, somewhere in Utah. It's swarming with Mormons there. They hated us. Threw bottles. Spat at us. Fourteen, fifteen thousand people. Then I made a remark about Mormons and they hated us even more. Then our bass player played a fifteen minute solo. One note, dang dang dang. Bottles flew over our heads. War. But those circumstances, when you don't feel at ease, are often the most inspiring.
Kerrang! | September 1992
"It's like when you fart in the presence of someone you shouldn't. You laugh. It's like a nervous reaction to the whole scale of things out there. It's embarrassing. You have to take a certain amount of reality out there with you. We just walk out without an intro tape, in the middle of the afternoon, and play stuff. It's like, 'Here we are, people' Time to start!'.
Basically, we are a small band. We are a pubic hair in Guns N' Roses' shower!"
SKY Magazine | December 1992
"I mean we do our own thing, like I don't use toilets -- I just don't. It's not a wild rock n' roll thing; it's a hobby -- shit terrorism. I did a shit on the bench outside Charles and Diana's palace, but that didn't cause any rumpus. It could have been anyone's shit really. The consistency wasn't so good. It wasn't a prizewinning trophy."
Melody Maker | July 1993
"I don't think about anything onstage. Definitely for me it's usually about an absence of thought. And usually I don't remember anything afterwards, I just get told what I've done. Sometimes it's just like passing out for and hour or so. I always thought that if you're able to have a coherent thought or complete sentence onstage then you're in the wrong job. For me, it's always been the opposite. It's kind of like waking up in the middle of the night and running through a storm, naked. You come back. What happened? I don't know. You don't think, you just open your ears-thoughts enter and process themselves."
Metal Hammer | January 1995
"Ha ha. Oh my god! My favourite thing, especially on this record, is to write lyrics and not tell the band what I'm singing, and then have them guess what I'm singing. Usually they go, 'Are you saying what I think you're saying?' and it's better than what I wrote. So I just use what they wrote instead. Instead of the word 'horn' it's supposed to be 'hole', and 'came' is not in there either. But I didn't wanna correct you, because it's just too beautiful."
CMJ Monthly | April 1995
"Revenge is good. I think revenge is healthy too, and if you can use music in that way, a sort of therapeutic way for yourself, it can't do any harm. So if King [For A Day] is angry in any way, it's angry in a random, chaotic, healthy way. Like the guy who goes into a building, shoots a bunch of holes in the wall and then leaves. He didn't kill anybody."
Kerrang! | August 1997
"I make music. I lock myself In a studio. It doesn't make for a very well-rounded, interesting life, but that's what I do. I have a lot of friends to play with in a lot of different groups. Apart from that, dominoes, cards and my Sony Playstation are good."
Kerrang! | March 2001
"I wish I could flip burgers because it'd be something to fall back on when the music dries up, but sadly I never had such a prestigious job. The 'famous' thing comes and goes and you learn to take it with a grain of salt. Fame is a joke. It's an absolute crap shoot. I mean I was most famous when I was making my worst music. I had absolutely no perspective on fame when 'The Real Thing' took off, I was just goofing around with a new band, I had my head in my ass and I didn't know what was going on. It was bizarre but if you can't laugh at it is there any meaning to life? I appreciated it for what it was, a total out-of-control nauseous carnival ride."
Kerrang! | October 2001
"They [INXS] called and asked with a straight face. But I couldn't answer with a straight face. They were really pissed off with me because I've told people about it. They wanted me to be hush-hush because I'd turned them down. They don't have a clue what they want, that's the funny thing about it. They just wanted someone who had a bit of a name behind them."
Kerrang! | May 2003
"That probably happens on a daily basis. It's not like you sit down with a glass of wine and look off into the sunset and are struck with divine inspiration. Most of the time for me it's like brushing your teeth, it's routine, and what I do is try and write, or work, on music a few hours a day, no matter what. It's more like, for me, a chore. I force myself to do it. So, there it is, in all of its romantic glory."
Tape Op | 2006
"Having no real musical education, my canvas — the only way I can document the stuff — is by pressing record on whatever it may be. Ghetto blaster. I'm constantly leaving myself messages at home. In a way, I had to learn how to use "the studio" as an instrument."
Believer Magazine 2013
"I’m not a poet. I’m not up onstage to get something off my chest. I’m making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I’m not going to get in the way of that."
Decibel Magazine | March 2013
"If you love your work, it's not really work. It becomes something you do without thinking about. It becomes a bodily function, like waking up in the middle of the night and taking a leak. Except I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. One thing I try to be conscious of is not putting out everything I write or record. It's like working out or exercising—that's how I see it. What I love about what I do is the work and the process of creating. It's not the producing of a document in the form of a record or even a live concert. It's the actual spark of having an idea and putting it down—for yourself. Later on, you decide whether it's worth putting out so the world can hear it."
Alarm Magazine February 2014
"I think that this Faith No More reunion taught me a pretty good lesson: 'Hey, these things that you've done in the past aren't your enemies.' They're not something to run away from but rather something to just understand. If I'm going to write a piece of music
tomorrow, I'm not really going to understand it for another 10 years—maybe, if I'm lucky! The reunion with Faith No More was a really eye-opening experience because it taught me how to appreciate the music that I've done from a distance. When you're in it, you're too close. When you're writing it, it's still like a part of you."
Kerrang! | April 2015
"I'm sure you could pull up all sorts of quotes from me where I'm saying, 'We'll never make another record again, I never want to be a part of that ever again.' But, you know, circumstances change. And it's nice to be wrong; it's nice to admit when you're wrong. And I was wrong! I did not know that this band had more statements in them. Believe me, I was as surprised as anyone when I heard this music and realised that I wanted to be a part of it."
Rolling Stone | April 2022
“This is fucking great. I can stay home and record. I’ve got a home studio. So I was like, Yeah, what’s the big deal? And then something clicked, and I became completely isolated and almost antisocial and afraid of people."
Revolver | October 2022
"...in a weird way, I guess my career is a fucked-up mixtape. I do what feels right and what sounds right. At the time I joined Dead Cross, I really needed to do that. Now I’m on to some other stuff. Maybe I’m a wanderer. I don’t know. I just wanna do justice to every recording or concert that I’m involved in. I wanna do it the right way. Hopefully in an authentic way."
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