104 - Faith No More with Roddy Bottum

104 - Faith No More with Roddy Bottum

Author: Rock n Roll Book Club February 21, 2026 Duration: 56:58

Roddy Bottum is best known as the keyboard player in Faith No More & his new book The Royal We is out now on Akashic Books. 


Roddy moves to San Francisco from L.A. in 1981 & a l;ittle while later he joins what was originally known as Faith No Man. After a few lineup changes (including a brief stint with Courtney Love as lead vocalist) the band morphs into the first incarnation of Faith No More with Roddy writing their breakthrough track We Care A Lot. 


The band make their first trip to the UK for a small tour including a show at Dingwalls in London. 


Things really start to come together when lead vocalist Mike Patton joins & The Real Thing album comes out in 1989 - backed by a top 10 single in Epic. 


Roddy’s keyboard sound sets the band apart from their contemporaries & a huge tour with Metallica & Guns n Roses follows. We hear about Roddy’s experiences as a gay man in this very masculine & often toxic world. 


The Angel Dust album follows in 1992 as the bands commercial peak continues - the band comes to an end in 1998 although a couple of reunions have took place since in 2009 & 2015. 


Roddy also tells us about his other project Imperial Teen, a very different sounding band to Faith No More. 



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Hosted, Produced & Edited by Simon Cardwell

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The Music Maps Podcast from the Rock n Roll Book Club isn't your typical music show. It's an audio expedition where geography is the guide. Every episode starts with a specific location-a city, a venue, a forgotten roadside attraction-and uses that place as a launchpad to explore the sounds, stories, and scenes connected to it. You might find yourself deep in the blues clubs of Chicago one week and tracing the underground punk threads of a small European town the next. The conversations are wide-ranging, connecting the dots between iconic artists and obscure movements, all anchored to a point on the map. Listening to this podcast feels like adding a new, richly detailed pin to a global atlas of musical influence. It’s about the context behind the chords and the cultural soil from which genres grow. The result is a continuously evolving, deeply human portrait of how music and place are inextricably linked, one fascinating destination at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Music Maps Podcast
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