The core lineup of Faith No More (drummer Mike “Puffy” Bordin, keyboardist Billy Gould and keyboardist Roddy Bottum) recently sat down for a round table discussion with Noisey on their past and their recent deluxe “We Care A Lot” reissue. Amid the conversation they spoke of their kinship with Metallica and the band’s late bassist Cliff Burton. When asked if they ever shared a bill with Metallica back in the mid-80’s, they responded:

Billy Gould: “No, but we were all friends. The first band that Puffy and Jim Martin were in was with Cliff Burton. I think they were called Vicious Hatred. So Cliff used to hang out all the time. He’d come to our shows. And he was in a situation where Metallica already had a manager and they were always on tour, so we’d ask them for advice. He was really helpful, actually.” - Advertisement - Mike “Puffy” Bordin: “I met Cliff the first day of 6th grade, I was maybe 10 or 11. I was the guy with the Black Sabbath t-shirt on, so we became friends. Our friendship was about music, with music, through music. We went to a ton of shows and we loved what was going on in the scene then. One day we were sitting in his room and he said, “I’m gonna start playing bass.” And I was like, “OK, I’ll play drums.” And it was really just an instinct, a reaction. So we learned to play together. And once we had been playing for about a year, we had heard that somebody in the next town over from us needed a bassist and drummer and that was Jim‘s band.” Roddy Bottum: “James Hetfield was really good friends with Jim, and Hetfield used to wear a Faith No More shirt, which really helped open the door to this huge metal attention thing. I personally would never, ever considered us metal. Sure we had that chunka-chunka thing going on, but we were never trying to go for that vibe. So it was a super surprise to me. I was like, “Really? The guys from Metallica are into this?” [laughs] I would just assume it was because they were friends with Jim, but clearly it was a flavor that other metal kids were into and it opened the floodgates to a bunch of metal admirers. And that was huge for us, because it wasn’t what we started out as, that’s for sure.”

Bordin further commented of Burton:

“It’s a tough subject with anybody that knew him, as his father once said to me a long time ago when I said to him, “It’s been 20 years and I still don’t think I’m over it.” He told me, “You’re never going to get over it.” But one thing I gotta say is that there’s a club in this world, and there’s only two members, and the name of the club is “Drummers who’ve played with Cliff Burton, Jason Newsted and Robert Trujillo“. There’s only two members in this whole world, and that’s me and Lars.

Gould also spoke of trying to get original Faith No More guitarist Jim Martin involved in the band’s August reunion shows with their ex-singer Chuck Mosley. Unfortunately, Martin snubbed him, as Gould explained:

“Yeah, we did reach out to him, but he didn’t get back to us. What can you do, right? He has his own thing, too, his own personality. I’d like to think as I’m getting older everyone in the band has made their decisions and bands go the way they do, but it’s nice to be able to reconcile that and look back on what you did with warm feelings. And I always kept it open to reconcile the whole thing completely, but you have to take what you can get.”

For more on that, poaching Mike Patton from Mr. Bungle and more, head to Noisey.