Meet the boyfriends bringing gay bear energy to rock with their band MAN ON MAN
Excl: "The currency in the queer universe right now is fierceness - it's fun, but a narrow aesthetic," says Joey Holman as he and Faith No More's Roddy Bottum talk Courtney Love and Provincetown
By James Hodge
You may know Roddy Bottum as the keyboardist from iconic 80s rock band, Faith No More. These days, he’s better known as one of Man On Man, his queer rock partnership with Joey Holman. The pair met in 2020 and made music together to get each other through the darkest days of the pandemic.
After assembling their love songs into a record, their brand of romantic queer rock has been lauded by Rolling Stone and quickly amassed an enthusiastic following. Now, they return with their second record, ‘Provincetown.’
Here, Man On Man speak to Attitude about the power of queer community, challenging conventional aesthetics, and singing songs about blowjobs…
Congratulations on the release of ‘Provincetown’. A follow-up record is often known as the difficult second album. How was the experience for you both?
Roddy: The first record caught us by surprise: it was an accident when the love songs we wrote together to keep ourselves sane came together as a record. Provincetown, then, feels more like our first true record because this time there was intention. We are addressing the people, addressing the times, sharing ourselves.
Why did you name the album after Provincetown?
Joey: Provincetown, MA, is a nirvana of queer safety, community and creativity. It feels like a utopia of queer artists, partygoers, tourists. As a place it sums up what we were representing through this record: an idyllic space where we’re surrounded by our friends, creating and living together in a perfect world.
Rock is often exclusively associated with masculine heterosexuality but there’s a queer element to it…
Joey: I think rock is inherently queer. Even if you look at the classic rock, they’re playing with gender and sexuality through appearance and voice. The best artists fuck with the whole tough guy macho image. Think of Black Sabbeth and Led Zeppelin. It’s a spectacle of loudness and colour and costumes. That’s queer: making noise in the most theatrical way.
Absolutely. Even the music of Faith No More has often been highlighted as having queer elements. One review described it as being the music equivalent of ‘a GI Joe doll dressed in a Barbie bikini with its limbs torn off.’
Roddy: The band had originally been a male driven, aggressive musical force. The thing that later made them different? Me. My addition in the 90s of the keyboard added a femininity and a queerness. When we first got a lot of notoriety, we toured with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses, and it threw us into this very toxic male environment. My response was to take it to an extreme place that flaunted queerness. I came out and talk about sexuality: I was writing songs about blowjobs! It was an attempt to fuck with straight norm at the time.
And now as a partnership, is it a very different experience creating music as your more authentic selves from a place of heart and love?
Roddy: It doesn’t get any more pure than this. Two lovers writing love songs to each other. There have been other famous musical partnerships before: Sonny and Cher; Ike and Tina Turner – but never has a queer couple shared themselves in this way.
Your perspective as artists feels at once political and comical…
Roddy: It feels dishonest to pretend that we are making music to purposely be political, but we don’t. It’s simply that queerness is still perceived as weird by so many people. Simply by writing love songs together – producing something beautiful and tender and loving – becomes subversive when you are queer.
Joey: We use humor as a shortcut to connect with our people. We have a sense of humour about the queer experience – takes on hook-up apps; sex culture; masculinity. Straight people, honestly, sometimes don’t get it – they think we are a “funny” band because they are uncomfortable with how we present and what we explore. But we aren’t a comedy act – our in-jokes are the jokes we have between us as a couple, between us and our queer community who are in on it and laughing with us.
You have a strongly paired aesthetic too. It’s unusual to see representation of older, beefier gay men…
Joey: The currency in the queer universe right now is fierceness. It’s extremely polished. How fabulous can you be? It’s fun, but it’s a very narrow aesthetic – high gloss photos, beauty, elaborate clothing – super drag. Sometimes it’s equally fun to downplay that as a queer person. We are two big, hairy men. And we don’t really fit comfortably into the queer aesthetic and that’s great too. We are going to be in tighty-whiteys with our big chests, and present ourselves as we authentically are.
Roddy, you famously dated Courtney Love back in the 1990s. Is she a fan of Man On Man?
Roddy: We’re still super close – I talk to her a lot – but she’s very self-driven. She’s not that interested in Roddy’s ‘little queer project’. We were staying with her last year. One afternoon, we told her we were heading out. She was like, ‘Where are you going?’ I replied we were going to soundcheck – she had no clue what I meant. I decided to play with her. ‘We are in a band called Soundcheck. We are playing tonight.’ She had no idea we were called Man On Man. I’m not sure she realises now!
What is your message to the queers who haven’t listened to your music yet?
Joey: Come to our shows and find out! Our performances are both a protest march and a celebration. You are walking into a crowd of people who are united in their queerness; everyone is on the same page.
Roddy: It’s always good to expand the queer artists that you’re consuming. Come and join the party!