History of the FAITH NO MORE Star logo

July 06, 2018

History of the FAITH NO MORE Star logo

The eight pointed Faith No More star has been their logo from the very beginning, and after 35 years fans still associate the symbol with the band.
The star itself is referred to in Hinduism as The Star of Lakshmi where it represents Ashtalakshmi the eight forms of the goddess Lakshmi. However this is not where our beloved logo derives from, the original FNM logo was adapted from the symbol for chaos which originates from The Eternal Champion, a fantasy novel by Michael Moorcock published in 1970.
It was FNM founder and leader Bill Gould who first had the idea to use the star.

"The star was my thing. It's a pretty deep and pervasive symbol that has meaning in several different cultures. What it signified for me at the time was chaos...order through disorder.
....chaos was the thing that drew me to it originally. In a nutshell, musically as well as personally I think all of us found ourselves faced with certain structures in our lives that didn't really work for us..either through coming of Faith No Man or just turning 20, living on our own, and wanting to do things differently, and the way we approached this was to try something that had no rules, only the rules we made ourselves. So this mean doing new things and seeing where they would go. The point of this chaos is that we were trying to discover who we really were, and maybe in this recording you can hear a little of that." - Bill Gould

The star was part of the band's culture from their inception, featuring on stage backdrops and t-shirts. It would appear on the band's very first demo cassette in 1983, then would adorn the cover of their first studio album We Care A Lot in 1985.
This would be the last time the symbol would be given prominence on a FNM record sleeve (until the We Care A Lot reissue in 2016), it can be found in the sleeve notes Introduce Yourself .

In 1989 the star was supposed to feature on the cover for The Real Thing, Mike Bordin explained that, "The logo got lost along the way, we had no control over the artwork at that stage."

It would seem that the record company thought the symbol had a connection to devil worship or alike and wanted to disassociate the band from it. However the FNM star would continue to appear in other places.

In 1992 the FNM star became the band's emblem once again. Throughout the touring of Angel Dust Mike Bordin's bass drum carried a design which included the star. The logo figured in almost all the t-shirt designs for this era.

The logo then seemed to fall from FNM culture entirely during the next 6 years until the break up of the band in 1998.
However in 2009 Faith No More reunited and returned and with them came the classic emblem.The star became a vital part of the Faith No More Version 2.0 promotion art, appearing in a subtly updated interpretation of the original 1985 artwork. The FNM star was also included by various artists at Secret Serpents in tour poster designs.

The star was widely used to promote the band's 2015 studio album Sol Invictus, adorning their record sleeve again for the first time in 28 years. The star was evident more than ever on merchandise.