Recording and touring Angel Dust - an album that saw more than a bit of Bungle's depravity creep into Faith No More's DNA - took up much of Patton's time over the next couple of years. Mr Bungle found a niche audience among FNM fans, but left many others baffled, and the album was generally torn to pieces in the conservative metal press. Hammering the point home with an oversized mallet, the album art is taken from Dave Loupare and Dan Sweetman's illustrated novella A Cotton Candy Autopsy, a Bradbury-meets-Bukowski tale of sex, violence, alcohol, death and surprising tenderness among a group of depraved circus clowns. At times -'Travolta', 'Dead Goon', 'Love Is A Fist' - Bungle hone their silliness into something genuinely terrifying, essentially the homicidal clown trope in musical form. However, for all their reliance on farts and boobies and cracking one off, the songs themselves are quite astonishing mishmashes of forward-charging metal, rambunctious ska, warped carnival music and completely indefinable weirdness. It's brash, fun, obscene and often deliberately annoying - starting with 30 seconds of silence just to confuse you, with between-song skits of shitting noises, porn and information film samples, barely discernible field recordings and Mantovani-syle muzak. Produced by and with an uncredited guest appearance from avant-garde workhorse John Zorn, Mr Bungle's self-titled 1991 debut was a startlingly bizarre record then, and a riotous if slightly puerile one now.

Indeed, the video for 'Epic' features Patton ungallantly promoting his other project in the memorable 'There's A Tractor In My Balls' t-shirt. The band had previously released four demos, but it was Patton’s rapid elevation to MTV superstardom that finally landed Mr Bungle a multi-album deal with a grasping but unsuspecting Warner Brothers in 1990. A few members would come and go over the years, but the original core - Patton, guitarist Trey Spruance and bassist Trevor Dunn - would remain together until Bungle eventually fizzled away in the early 2000s. Those with a yen to watch it can even revel in footage of an adolescent Bungle performing in the Eureka High School talent contest. Formed in San Francisco in 1985, Bungle predated Patton’s involvement with FNM by several years, and would outlive them, too. Arguably, that term was more applicable to Faith No More. Mr Bungle has often been portrayed as a Mike Patton side-project.

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