Flight From The Machine: When The Shackles Came Off Creativity Reigns Supreme
It’s not often a dance act transcends the world of the dancefloor – but finding chart success with songs like God Is A DJ and Insomnia,Faithless are an exception. Made up of rapper Maxi Jazz, songwriter Sister Bliss and production wiz Rollo, Faithless were everywhere in the 90’s with their massive dancefloor anthems flooding clubs and bedrooms alike. Yet for the past four years the band has been silent, each member either pursuing their own projects, or taking time off.
Fear not though, for Faithless have returned – holding aloft their weighty new slab of dancefloor-skewed electronica The Dance. It’s an album which sees the band returning to their dance music roots with a modern edge, reflecting where the band see dance music today. “I think with this album we really wanted to make something that had a big fat sound,” Sister Bliss tells me excitedly down the phone in her delightful British accent. “We know a lot of our fans love the big anthems and most people discovered Faithless that way. With this album, we definitely wanted to make it more dancey and more clubby because we really felt very much in the middle of that world again. When we made our last album I was pregnant with my son, so I wasn’t feeling very disco at all. I felt a lot more in the heart of dance music with this album.”
Now the band are out of their record deal, they were free to release the music themselves and able to take the creative process at their own pace, avoiding the many pitfalls inherent in the machinations of major labels. “It was going to take as long as it took. We didn’t have any sort of concept, we just wrote music and Maxi wrote lyrics, and it kind of came together like that.”
This need for freedom extends beyond being allowed to make their own creative decisions, including wider issues like how to market and manage the band and their music. Having been through the major label construction line before, the band are well acquainted with all the bullshit it can entail, and weren’t about to go through it all again. “You can often fall into this trap when you’re on a record label, where there are fifty other artists on the label and they’ve each got their slot, and if you miss your slot then everyone’s busy working Kasabian or whoever it is. I didn’t really want to be under those constraints. Luckily we were in a position where we could afford to fund it ourselves up to a point – obviously when the money runs out it’ll be a different story, but I think that sense of freedom is very important.”
Starting out signed to indie dance labels before signing to a major, the band are already quite familiar with the whole DIY ethic, as are most bands who emerged in the early days of dance when the genre was looked upon with disdain by the music establishment. While this more independent approach may not be new to the band, the circumstances in which they have adopted it are different these days, offering a prospect as thrilling as it is risky. “I mean the music industry has just changed completely since we released even the last record let alone our first, but it just seemed we were better able to move with a changing market on our own rather than being a small part in some massive machine.”
Faithless [UK] are playing Good Vibrations feat. Phoenix, Sasha, Nas and many more at Flemington Racecourse Sunday February 13. New album The Dance is out now through Liberator.
Five Faithless Fun Facts
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Maxi celebrated his 50th birthday by headlining the O2 Wireless Festival 2007 in London, the only suitable way for a prolific dance artist to celebrate such a milestone, he is currently 53.
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Rollo’s sister is none other then Dido (Sampled for Eminem’s Stan), Dido would often lend her voice for some of the earlier EP’s by Faithless.
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Maxi Jazz is a practicing Soka GakkaiBuddhist and a self confessed car nut, having raced in the Porsche Carrera Cup GB in 2006 and 2007 respectively.
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Sister Bliss started to play piano at the age of five and now is an accomplished multi instrumentalist having learned the violin, saxophone and bass.
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Rollo composed the official melody of the UEFA Euro 2008.
