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When Roddy Bottum began developing his remarkable autobiography The Royal We, the keyboard player for Faith No More had a clear vision of the kind of book he aimed to avoid. “The kind that has pictures in the middle,” he says, during a video call from Oxnard, California, where he is completing a new album with his band Imperial Teen. “I’m not a big fan of rock memoirs – they often follow a tired formula, laden with famous names and lacking depth.”

The Royal We is definitely not name-droppy – Bottum leaves out the surnames of his bandmates. And while he describes the band’s beginnings and formative stages, this takes a back seat to his “teenage exploits” in San Francisco, “before the internet, before that city got ruined.” Much of the emphasis is on his personal journey with identity, and how the related secrecy and shame have affected his life. “As a teenager, at 13 or 14, I began intimate encounters with men,” he explains. “The stigma was immense, and it influenced my entire existence.” In the memoir, episodes involving his seeking encounters in restrooms and parks as a teenager are recounted without hesitation and unapologetically. “I had sex with older men in bushes,” he notes. “Shamefully at first, proudly later. Back off.”

“During presentations, I open with that segment,” he declares. “I am aware of the shock value in those words; it’s highly improper. But I have no regret. With Trump in power, my truth needs to be shouted loud, to combat the prejudice, the anti-transgender and anti-gay attitudes.” He stops. “I aim to stir controversy. Some of my family members are devout Christians, and I fully plan to disrupt their holiday meal with this publication. Because they’ll all read it.”

The memoir begins on the teenage Bottum relocating from his birthplace Los Angeles. “San Francisco was an abrupt about-face from the sunny superficiality of LA,” he says. “Chilly. Gloomy. Individuals with jet-black hair and pale complexions, people doing crystal meth and heroin. San Francisco’s gay community was unlike anything in Los Angeles. It motivated me.”

Joining Faith No More

During this period, in 1981, Bottum teamed up with Faith No Man, later renamed Faith No More with Billy Gould and Mike Bordin, enhancing their “driving beat section” with “an element of grace over the gloom. Keyboards were rare in rock groups at the time.” They rotate vocalists, including – temporarily – Courtney Love, the memoir’s most vivid character, an unabashed chaos agent setting apartments ablaze and creating adversaries wherever she went.

“We immediately felt a bond, Courtney and I,” Bottum states. Their platonic friendship temporarily shifted into a sexual relationship, leading to pregnancy and abortion; later, Bottum became a reliable friend of Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain. Far from the grunge Lady Macbeth of misogynist legend, Bottum depicts Love as someone with wit, energy and independence.

“Courtney faced many challenges,” he agrees. “A divisive figure with immense strength, and highly intelligent. That makes for a compelling subject in writing. She’s a warm, compassionate person, and many fail to see that side. But we were very close and took care of each other.”

Faith No More’s Formative Years

The nascent Faith No More were, Bottum admits, “absolutely preposterous.” Their music centred around driving, repetitive riffs played freely while under the influence of assorted narcotics, including MDMA, while their frontman, unconventional addict Chuck Mosley, “didn’t have a good singing voice.” But they had ambition. “Our peers favored gothic and somber themes, but we loved MTV, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Irrationality, we saw ourselves in that league. Yet we were far from glamorous or appealing.”

But their ironic hybrid track We Care a Lot became a modest television favorite in 1988, Mosley ceded the mic to the camera-friendly Mike Patton (who did have a good singing voice), and by 1990 Faith No More’s third album was a bona fide, Grammy-nominated hit. Typically, The Royal We doesn’t linger over this triumph, skipping ahead instead to their disastrous stint on Guns N’ Roses and Metallica’s 1992 stadium tour.

“I used heroin to numb the pain of my concealed life.”

On the Road with Legends

It was, Bottum notes, “an unprecedented touring event.” But Faith No More were quickly distanced by the “poisonous” rock’n’roll circus they’d entered; in the memoir, he describes an uncomfortable encounter with groupies recruited for GN’R’s entertainment. “The toxic masculinity exuded by that group was stifling,” he explains. “They had that song One In a Million, with the N word and the F word [faggot], and that set the tone behind the scenes. I refused to participate. We resisted sacrificing our values for this negativity.”

The tour – from which Faith No More were fired two weeks early, for criticizing GN’R in the press – marked a turning point for Bottum. “I needed to be who I was,” he affirms, “to talk about being gay, to separate myself from this negative setting.” Against his managers’ advice, he announced he was gay in the pages of the Advocate the following year. “I stood alone as an openly gay man in rock music,” he emphasizes. “Freddie Mercury never publicly acknowledged his sexuality. Michael Stipe didn’t talk about it, nor Judas Priest’s frontman, nor the alternative rock figure. This fueled my frustration. I needed to put myself on that page of history, to promote inclusivity in the music industry. And I met so many kids who were queer, who felt my being a queer person in music made a difference to them.”

Overcoming Addiction

Bottum never talked about his sexuality with his group, even though he journeyed with his boyfriend on the tourbus. “They were open minded, they would have been OK with it,” he notes. “It was the damage of being a gay kid in that era, the damage of the shame and homophobia.” He found instant acceptance from Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who was the clear opposite of the gender bias and anti-gay sentiment that had blighted the GN’R tour. “Cobain was unique,” Bottum says softly. “Cobain enjoyed challenging norms through identity. That likely strengthened our bond. My sexuality was something he valued. He was a very special person.”

Bottum developed a strong bond to Cobain and Love, the trio bonded at the time by drug use. Bottum