Download Festival head honcho Andy Copping (above) has revealed in an in-depth interview on the festival website that he played a large role in getting Faith No More back together.

Sample quote: “Faith No More’s an interesting one, because we were actually talking to them last year for 2008, but it became pretty apparent that we weren’t going to get them in time. I’d started the whole ball rolling, getting the band talking again – they weren’t even talking as a band 18 months ago! We’ve got some contacts with Mike Patton, who’s really the anchor of the whole thing in getting them all back together, so we made contact with him, and he was making the right noises.

So I guess that I was kind of a catalyst in getting them all back together, and was hoping that it would go quicker than it actually did. In the end we realised it was going to be too late for Download 2008, but what I hadn’t realised was that they had continued talking to each other after we’d approached them. I got a call towards the end of 2008: would we be interested in Faith No More for 2009? And of course I was overjoyed and said “absolutely 100%”, so it was a good thing that we started the process so early, and at least managed to secure them for this year.”

There’s more good stuff in the juicy interview here.