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When Roddy Bottum began crafting his notable autobiography The Royal We, the keyboard player for Faith No More had a specific goal of the sort of book he did not wish to create. “The kind that has pictures in the middle,” he says, during a video call from Oxnard, California, where he is wrapping up a new album with his band Imperial Teen. “I have little interest in rock memoirs – they’re the most predictable, name-droppy, sub-literature experiences.”

The Royal We certainly isn’t name-droppy – Bottum omits the surnames of his fellow musicians. And while he outlines the group’s origins and initial growth, this takes a back seat to his “adventures as a young person” 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 accompanying concealment and shame have affected his life. “From a young age, around 13 or 14, I engaged in sexual relations with men,” he states. “The stigma was immense, and it influenced my entire existence.” In the memoir, events involving his cruising public toilets and parks as a teenager are recounted without hesitation and defiantly. “I engaged with older men in secluded areas,” he records. “Initially with shame, later with pride. Back off.”

“At book events, I begin by reading that part,” he says. “I understand how provocative statements like that are; it’s utterly unseemly. But I’m not ashamed. With Trump in power, my truth needs to be shouted loud, to fight the prejudice, the anti-trans and anti-gay attitudes.” He halts. “I seek to challenge norms. I have relatives who are Christian people, and I fully plan to disrupt their holiday meal with this publication. As they are sure to peruse it.”

The memoir begins on the teenage Bottum shifting from his home Los Angeles. “San Francisco offered a sharp contrast to LA’s glossy surface,” he says. “Cold. Dark. Individuals with jet-black hair and pale complexions, individuals using hard drugs like meth and heroin. The queer culture that existed in San Francisco was all so different from Los Angeles. It felt empowering.”

Becoming Part of 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, accenting their “powerful bass and drums” with “a sense of beauty atop that darkness. Most rock acts avoided keyboards back then.” They rotate vocalists, including – for a short time – Courtney Love, the memoir’s most memorable personality, an unabashed chaos agent lighting homes on fire and alienating people constantly.

“We immediately felt a bond, Courtney and I,” Bottum recalls. Their non-romantic relationship momentarily crossed into a sexual relationship, causing pregnancy and abortion; later, Bottum became a trusted confidant of Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain. Far from the grunge Lady Macbeth of misogynist legend, Bottum portrays Love as someone with cleverness, drive and independence.

“Courtney faced many challenges,” he concurs. “A divisive figure with immense strength, and highly intelligent. And that’s a very attractive, exciting person to write about. 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 acknowledges, “completely ridiculous.” Their music revolved around insistent, weighty rhythms jammed out while under the influence of multiple substances, including MDMA, while their frontman, eccentric drinker Chuck Mosley, “lacked vocal talent.” But they had ambition. “Everyone in our scene was into goth and dark stuff, but we were fans of pop culture icons. Somehow, we felt connected to that world. Though there was nothing shiny or attractive or poptastic about us.”

But their ironic hybrid track We Care a Lot became a small-scale success on MTV in 1988, Mosley ceded the mic to the visually appealing Mike Patton (who did have a good singing voice), and by 1990 Faith No More’s third album was a true, critically acclaimed achievement. Typically, The Royal We doesn’t linger over this triumph, shifting abruptly instead to their disastrous stint on Guns N’ Roses and Metallica’s 1992 stadium tour.

“The heroin was me self-medicating, so I could feel OK about living all these secrets.”

Touring with Giants

It was, Bottum says, “an unprecedented touring event.” But Faith No More were quickly estranged by the “harmful” rock’n’roll circus they’d clambered aboard; 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. “Their track One In a Million included offensive slurs, and that was the vibe backstage. I wanted no involvement. We declined to contribute our identity to such toxicity.”

The tour – from which Faith No More were sacked two weeks early, for speaking against GN’R in the press – marked a turning point for Bottum. “I needed to be who I was,” he declares, “to talk about being gay, to remove myself from this negative setting.” Against his managers’ advice, he publicly revealed his sexuality in the pages of the Advocate the following year. “I stood alone as an openly gay man in rock music,” he says. “Mercury kept his identity private. Michael Stipe didn’t talk about it, nor Judas Priest’s frontman, nor the alternative rock figure. It made me angry. It was essential to document my story, to get people to accept a queer person in music. And I met so many kids who were queer, who felt my being a queer person in music made a difference to them.”

Challenges and Recovery

Bottum never talked about his sexuality with his bandmates, 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 swift approval from Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who was the proud antithesis of the sexism and homophobia that had marred the GN’R tour. “Kurt was like a unicorn,” Bottum murmurs. “Cobain enjoyed challenging norms through identity. I think that’s why we were really good friends. My sexuality was something he valued. He was a very special person.”

Bottum became intimate to Cobain and Love, the trio bonded at the time by heroin addiction. Bottum