Following the news that Bay Area alternative metallers/experimental rockers/funk metallers (hmm… they never were that easy to pigeonhole, were they?) Faith No More are reuniting for a European festival tour this summer, here’s a quickfire collection of intriguing nuggets about the band…

1. Drummer Mike Bordin was originally nicknamed ‘Puffy’ because of his considerable coiffure. Bordin said: “It has to do with how I looked as a teenager. I used to have this big, big hair – like afro hair, and when I walked it’d go… whoooosh, whoooosh! My hair was really puffy. It looked like one of those foam things you put on microphones.”

2. Legendary Kerrang! designer Steve ‘Krusher’ Joule once stood in for FNM guitarist ‘Big Sick Ugly’ Jim Martin for an MTV interview, due to the fact that the latter was somewhat, er, incapacitated. Because ‘Krusher’ bore an amazing resemblance to Martin, and only grunted in answer to MTV’s questions, no one noticed the difference.

3. Frontman Mike Patton can speak several languages – among them Portuguese, a lingo which he used on Caralho Voador (a track from from FNM’s King For A Day… Fool For a Lifetime album). The title is Portuguese for ‘flying dick’.

4. Before hiring Chuck Moseley as their first official singer, the band gave Courtney Love, ex-girlfriend of bassist Billy Gould, an audition.

5. Mike Patton’s lyrics to the FNM song Land Of Sunshine came from fortune cookie messages he had collected and an entry exam to join the Church Of Scientology.

6. The video to the FNM song Last Cup Of Sorrow (see above) is based on the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo. ‘Cup Of Sorrows’, interestingly, is also the name of a tarot card.

7. The FNM song Be Aggressive, from their Angel Dust album, was written by Roddy Bottum – about oral sex. Bottom said: “It was a pretty fun thing to write, knowing that Mike was going to have to put himself on the line and go up onstage and sing these vocals.” Bottum came out as gay in 1993.

8. Billy Gould once said about guitarist ‘Big Sick Ugly’ Jim Martin: “I don’t think he [Martin] has any idea what we’re doing; I don’t think he understands our music at all.” Which doesn’t bode well for Martin being involved in the upcoming FNM reunion…

9. Speaking to Kerrang!’s Steffan Chirzai in 1993, towards the end of the Angel Dust tour, Billy Gould said: “I was convinced he [Patton] was going to shit onstage. We’d just been talking about it the night before, how no one’s taken a shit on a big stage – G.G. Allin in the clubs, but not places like that.” (In fairness, we don’t believe Patton ever did actually do the dirty deed on stage. But we could be wrong. It wouldn’t surprise us…)

10. The striking video to Epic was inspired by Salvador Dali and features a goldfish suffocating memorably on a polished floor. The goldfish was rumoured to have belonged to Björk – but Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton, who was actually present during the filming of the video, says: “Nonsense. It was just an ordinary tiddler from a nearby pet shop.” That’s cleared that one up, then. (For some reason we couldn’t find the video to Epic on YouTube – so here’s their version of The Commodores’ Easy instead. And you know what? We still dig the moment when Mike Patton turns Lionel Richie’s original limp-wristed “OOOOH” into a full-on sneering “EWWWWW-GGGHHH!”)