THE REAL THING 30 | Greg Puciato 'The Real Thing Changed My Life'.

Faith No More's seminal record The Real Thing re-imagined guitar based music during the 90s and by doing so inspired a whole generation of musicians including Greg Puciato.

The lead singer of The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Black Queen and Killer Be Killed explained on BBC Radio One Rock Show how FNM's third album changed his life. Greg has cited Mike Patton, who of course sung with DEP on their EP Irony Is A Dead Scene, as a major influence. 

We reached out to Greg to help us celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Real Thing and he kindly explained to us his love of the album.

"The Real Thing came out during a time where for me popular rock music I had exposure to was either in the world of hair metal or thrash, and even at nine years old I was already tiring of both. At that age, and where I grew up, it was hard for me to find out about anything new besides via MTV, radio, or standing around in the local convenience store reading magazines until they kicked me out.

I don’t remember exactly when the first time I saw the video for Epic was. Or when I consequently got The Real Thing (on blue cassette), the You Fat Bastards VHS not far behind. I wore both tapes out. A wave of alternative music hit me like everyone else quickly and unavoidably afterwards. But what a lot of people don’t realize now is that before all of the other 'alternative' bands got their major mainstream exposures, Faith No More was out there first. 

I remember seeing Epic on the 1990 MTV awards after being into them for a bit already (a little time is a long time when you’re nine), and even that was a good YEAR before Nirvana broke, a year before Sailing The Seas of Cheese,  before Pearl Jam's Ten, before Badmotorfinger, etc. 

This was one of the first truly 'free' albums I ever heard. Something that felt less like branding and more like expression, more identifiable and exciting to me than anything else I had encountered. As a budding musician and as someone who already had a strong distaste both towards authority and towards feeling trapped, it was inspiring to see and hear a band that didn’t even look like they should all be in the same band together! Using 64 musical crayons instead of 4, and not even bothering to color in-between the lines. 

That record and attitude no-question helped pave the way for a lot of what I (and we) ended up doing in The Dillinger Escape Plan and in my career as a whole approach-wise."

photograph by Stephen Odom