In a top-floor flat overlooking Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, Roddy Bottum is talking me through his fringe show Sasquatch: The Opera. Bottum is the keyboard player in Faith No More, whose twisted take on hard rock propelled them to global success in the 90s, and he’s at the festival with a cast of opera singers and experimenters from New York’s avant garde performance art scene. Though it’s a few days until curtain-up, they want to give me a preview. In true fringe style they perform four scenes right here in the living room, to music played on his laptop.
Sasquatch: The Opera tells the story of a hillbilly family who con tourists in search of the mythical monster known as Bigfoot, until the daughter, Dodder, meets him and falls in love. Bass-baritone Joe Chappel begins his scene sprawled on the sofa with his legs thrown over the back, intoning lines such as: “What a night, what a night / There was drink, there was fight” with almost alarming intensity.
Bottum had initially hoped to cast Kim Deal, formerly of the Pixies, in the lead role, but “the costume freaked her out”. Sasquatch is portrayed by Mari Moriarty, artistic director of performance collective Theatre for Savage Youth. Bonnie Baxter, who plays Dodder, has a music and video project called Kill Alters (once described as “an almost traumatising listen”) and has never acted before. Even played between the TV and kitchen table, their interspecies love duet manages to be touching as well as perverse. A scene set in a crystal meth laboratory sees another singer grabbing your correspondent by the throat. But the performance is arresting even without the hands-on treatment. Musically, Sasquatch is dissonant and foreboding, with an emotional charge equal to its experimental nature.
For Bottum, the title itself was a “great, provocative place to start”. He remembers chatting to Hamilton’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, in New York. “He was like, ‘What do you do now?’ And I told him I’m working on Sasquatch: The Opera, and he was like ‘Oh my gosh, really?!’”
It’s the kind of story which has always resonated with Bottum. “I was drawn to that tortured individual, a monster people are afraid of, and at the core of that character is a sense of compassion and frailty and high intellect. Polar opposites in a character really fascinate me – it moves me to tears.”
Bottum hopes that his opera – which also includes a drug-addicted character singing an aria while he’s withdrawing – will combine shocks with moments of beauty. “I want it to look like a horror story – and it is scary – but the core of it is a love story, and there is a pathos that hopefully will surprise people.”
Before moving to New York to compose his opera, Bottum had been writing scores for Hollywood, including Nickelodeon’s Fred: The Movie: “TV is so geared to making money, it was refreshing to get out of that realm.” Sasquatch was first presented as a 20-minute show in 2015; this version is an hour long.
Bottum has a lot riding on his creation: as well as five cast members there are a six-strong chorus, half a dozen musicians and two people on lights and sound. Bottum is bankrolling the lot. It’s even more impressive given that his New York apartment was gutted in a fire last October. “I lost everything,” he says. “I remember looking at the Sasquatch costume, totally doused with water, and thinking ‘Well, this is not going to happen’. It’s been a tough time, but being able to create through it was really empowering.”
Bottum is made of stern stuff. Born in Los Angeles, he joined Faith No More in 1983. Their genre-mashing, OTT single Epic became a Top 10 hit in America in 1990; they went on to have 14 hits in the UK, including an uncharacteristically straightforward cover of the Commodores’ Easy. “By the time we started getting any notoriety, we had been at it for so long we felt like we deserved it,” he says.
In 1993, he came out in an interview with gay magazine the Advocate, years before contemporaries such as Sugar’s Bob Mould or REM’s Michael Stipe. It was doubly brave given that Faith No More were on tour with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses at the time. “Guns N’ Roses had just put out that weird song where they say the N-word and use the word faggots,” remembers Bottum, referring to their notorious track One in a Million. “I think it was a great shock to know that this band [on tour] with them had a gay person in it. That was not as accepted back then which seems crazy.”
Did Axl and co ever talk to him about being gay? “Not so much,” Bottum says. “We were all friendly but it’s an unspoken thing – when a person deals with their sexuality there’s this distance that people around the situation will afford you. Straight dudes don’t want to talk to me about being gay – that’s a given. They’ll be, among themselves, ‘That’s cool’ but they’ll never want to go there with me.”
In a way, says Bottum, his experiences informed his opera. “Faith No More is perceived as this big, macho rock statement and being a gay man in that world – I guess that sort of sums up Sasquatch.” Having split up in 1998, the band re-formed 11 years later, and released a new album, Sol Invictus, in 2015. The sleeve depicted them in tuxedos, Bottum holding a gimp on a leash. “We were a really provocative band,” he says. “We were trying to get under people’s skin and that comes from a weird place. It’s really attention seeking in a way I don’t identify with, but I realise that I still do that.”
Bottum is about to make his acting debut in Tyrel, a film by Chilean director Sebastián Silva about a group of men who spend a weekend in the Catskills and “the different way that people of colour and white people deal with each other”. He has already staged his second opera The Ride at the Lincoln Center in New York, and promises there are more to come. But while Sasquatch is the subject of this opera, there’s one monster he won’t go near.
“I don’t even like to say his name. It’s like Voldemort,” Bottum remarks. “When there are serial killers that will shoot up a school or whatever, I’m into the concept of not saying their names and not giving them the credit that they are vying for. Trump … just wants attention for disgusting things. He’s clearly a good topic for an opera, he changed the world in so many ways, but I’m not going to go there.”
- Sasquatch: The Opera is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
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