The true story behind Faith No More’s ‘Epic’: “It was about sexual frustration”
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(Credits: Far Out / Slash Records)
Anybody tuning in to MTV at any point in early 1990 would have likely been bludgeoned with Faith No More’s track ‘Epic’.
It was a video begging for heavy rotation on the famed cable network. An exploding piano, chintzy lightning bolts, eyeballs in hands shooting green gunk, and a dramatic rain pour on the Faith No More ensemble as they pound a heavy groove rap attack replete with classical piano bluster.
Fronting the cartoon gang was animated singer Mike Patton, smacking himself in the head with his own boxing-gloved hands and sitting in an armchair as a target for some cosmic, Lovecraftian slime barrage. ‘Epic’ was the kind of promo that, even if you didn’t dig the funk-metal Frankenstein’s monster, such comic arrest kept you from turning over the channel.
It had been close to a decade before fortune began favouring the band. Operating as early as 1981 as the more post-punk leaning Faith No Man, and briefly counting Courtney Love as vocalist, the settled line-up with Chuck Mosely behind the mic would lead to the renamed Faith No More’s first taste of mainstream appeal with 1987’s Introduce Yourself. Scoring a minor hit with ‘We Care a Lot’, Mosely’s increasingly drunken behaviour and penchant for brawling forced his exit and a vacancy in need of filling, pronto.
In came Patton. Barely out of his teens and still a student at Humboldt State University, the handing of a tape to Faith No More after a show boasting his work with his Mr Bungle project prompted an audition offer and a phone call from guitarist Jim Martin to quit his studies and join the band. After a moment’s hesitation, Patton stepped up and was swiftly pulled from the small Eureka town to San Francisco to begin preparations for Faith No More’s second major label album, The Real Thing.
Patton was afforded less than a fortnight to write the bulk of the lyrics, much of the music already cut during various jams and studio sessions. With ‘Epic’s thunderous groove landing on his plate, Patton swiftly matched its feverish swagger with a lyrical collage of seeming nonsense draped in allusive clues to some magnetic, yet mysterious force of nature.
It’s a stroke of cocksure ingenuity. What exactly is this thing that’s so “epic”? What has Patton uncovered that’s “so cool, it’s so hip, it’s alright” and “feels so good, it’s like walking on glass”? Elsewhere, further colourful pointers glean no further clarity, simply stating that “You want it all, but you can’t have it / It’s in your face, but you can’t grab it”, before Patton asks “what is it?” with the band conclusively responding “It’s It!”
‘Epic’ flexes some of the finest cryptic joviality since The Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’. When experiencing its bombastic video, it’s tempting to figure that “it” is maybe some gargantuan entity beyond the realm of understanding, or perhaps the peaks of spiritual enlightenment leading toward an electric plane of epiphany. “It was about sexual frustration,” Patton bluntly told Circus at the time. “Sex and lack of sex.”
Later, he confessed to adding masturbation to the conceptual mix, too: “Most people don’t like to talk about it. I’m here to tell ya, I love it. That’s kinda of what ‘Epic’s really about.”
There wasn’t much faith in the band by their Slash label, letting the band choose whatever second single they wished to promote The Real Thing after the underwhelming response to ‘From Out to Nowhere’. Opting for ‘Epic’, Faith No More were thrust to the fore of the alternative upswell set to burst across the charts in the following decade, and dropped a gloriously rhapsodic and silly brew of metal-theatre brilliance that stood as their sky-high, definitive anthem from then on.
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