• There are still tickets on sale – allocated seating – for Faith No More’s show at the Vector Arena in Auckland on Thursday 18 February. Check out Ticketmaster.
• Learn English with Faith No More? Sarah and the Daily English Show in Auckland seem to think they can help.
  
  More information here.
• The ever-resourceful mikepatton.cl has broken down the Second Coming tour so far into numbers, revealing that six songs have been performed at all 47 show while another seven songs have only been performed once. Go figure here.
• Keep an eye out at Secret Serpents new blog for details of when the Down Under posters go on sale.
• Bill took time out in New Zealand to film this piece about Koolarrow bands providing music for a new New Zealand film A Dream of Dark Colours.
  

Via Gezarie and mikepatton.cl, here is an image of the official Faith No More tour poster for the group’s concert at the Festival Hall, Melbourne on 25 February designed by none other than Faith No More bass player Bill Gould.

You can see the full array of posters including the distinctly Roxy Music album cover circa 1974-style effort for Christchurch over at mikepatton.cl.

Via the always informative Inside the Rock Poster Frame blog, details of Faith No More’s tour posters for their New Zealand and Australia shows. The big news is that the poster for the Melbourne Festival show on 25 February is being designed by one Bill Gould. Unfortunately, no image of that one yet but the posters will be on sale at those shows and later on SecretSerpents.com, which still has Europe posters on sale as well.
Here’s the Auckland poster by Brian Ewing and Buff Monster.

Footage of Faith No More’s first ever live show at the Mabs in San Francisco on 11 October in 1983.
The four-song set included The Jungle, Why Do You Bother?, Spirit and another unknown song.
According to the aussiemusicfan.com gig database the band line-up was:
Joe Pop-O-Pie (vocals)
Jake Smith (guitar)
Bill Gould (bass)
Mike Bordin (drums)
Roddy Bottum (keyboards)

The Jungle
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Why Do You Bother?
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Unknown
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Spirit
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Joe Pop-O-Pie was the vocalist of the legendary Pop-o-pie in San Francisco in the early 1980s and there was a revolving crossover of members between the band and FNM. Find some details and photos on Pop-o-pie here. The band were famed for regularly playing their one hit – a cover of the Grateful Dead’s Truckin’ – over and over again in live shows. A contemporary report in the San Francisco Bay Guardian quotes Billy Gould as saying: “That was actually one of the highlights of my life,” Gould said about performing the song live and watching unsuspecting audiences go from nervous laughter to mild annoyance and then to full-fledged anger and, finally, passive acceptance. “There was this one [show] we did in Texas, like in Dallas at this warehouse, where we just played ‘Fascists Eat Donuts’ for so long that I was actually starting to hallucinate. I was starting to hear new melodies and new songs, because it was just this drone that was going on relentlessly.”

Roddy tweeted on the show this week: “First gig was phenoms. We had really grand aspirations and our aim was to hypnotize. Pretty certain we pulled it off.”

Thanks to Gezarie for bringing the video to my attention.

The media blackout seems to have been well and truly abandoned for the South American leg of the Second Coming tour with major Argentinean newspaper Clarin today featuring an in-depth interview with Faith No More bassist Bill Gould. Sample quote: “[Clarin] And some new songs?  [Billy] No, no…  We began to practise six weeks before the start of the tour, we had to re-learn some 75 songs  – to be able to vary the list of songs in the shows in different cities and so there was not time to compose.  Yes I can tell you that we have spoken of that, and that I am in favour, but I think we will have to see how we feel after this tour. “

Faith No More have broken their self-imposed media blackout for the Second Coming tour with Bill Gould granting an interview to Chilean newspaper La Tercera. The FNM bassist speaks of the band’s love of Chile and plans for the future. Sample quote: [La Tercera:] “Can we think of new songs by Faith No More? [Bill:] I’d love that to happen, but it’s something to be solved once we finish the tour. For now we are enjoying playing, we’re having a great time.”
Read the full interview here.

Hi, its been a while. All pretty quiet on the FNM front but here’s our latest digest. We still hope to revamp the site a little ahead of the South American dates but we’ve been a little busy with the day job and getting engaged and what have you. But the site will have a new lick of paint in the next month or so.

• Stubbadub have the details of the latest Patton project here.
• Chuck Mosley will play the CMJ Festival in New York later this month.
• More Chuck news. The former FNM front man interviewed on Talking Metal. Check out the story on Blabbermouth.
• More side project news for Bill Gould, who will be guesting on the new album from UK metal band Benediction. More here.
• And yet more from Blabbermouth. We pointed you to some pro-shot Area 4 footage a few weeks ago and they have more here.
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• A reminder that you can still vote for Faith No More as Band of the Year in the Classic Rock magazine Roll of Honour awards. Vote here.

• Finally, managed to find a report of Billy Gould speaking at the Heineken Music Conference in Tel-Aviv from the Jerusalem Post. Sample quote: “Labels used to be in it for the long term with an artist – they’d get signed to a development deal, and the label wouldn’t mind if the first record didn’t sell. The idea was to build a following, and by the third album, you’d begin to see the results of your labor,” he said. “There’s no way that would happen today. If you’re not a hit, you’re gone.”
• The tour posters from the second leg of The Second Coming tour are now on sale at Secret Serpents.
• Here’s a generally positive  Rock en Seine review from ClickMusic.
• And a glowing review in French from MusicPlease here and another from Telerama here.
• Chuck Mosley interview from the Charlotte Indie Music Examiner.

Faith No More have announced a fourth Brazil date for this November. From Billy on Twitter: “Another Brazil date added: Sunday November 8, Belo Horizonte Chevrolet Hall”.
Faith No More Brazil dates are now as follows:

• Tuesday 3 November: Pepsi On Stage, Porto Alegre, Brazil Tickets
• Thursday 5 November: Citibank Hall, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Tickets
• Saturday 7 November: The Maquinaria Festival, Sao Paul, Brazil Tickets
• Sunday 8 November: Chevrolet Hall, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
  

• Xtreme Music – where music meets spirituality – have a new publication The Spiritual Significance of Music Metal Edition. It features a short interview on the subject with Bill Gould. Full interview here. Sample quote: “I haven’t been able to observe any positive correlation between the quality of music and the spirituality of it’s performers.”
• The Philip Freeman book Sound Levels which features an in-depth (around 17 pages) article on Mike Patton is now available to download online for £3.56 at Lulu. The article largely focuses on Fantomas and Patton’s creative process and is certainly recommended for Patton fans.  Sample quote: “A lot of people assume that if I’m doing something that isn’t ‘fuck you’ from top to bottom, then I’ve lost my edge, or there’s nothing interesting about what I’m doing anymore.”
• Some nice Facebook pics of Faith No More in Helsinki.