Building on a 30-year career, dance music pioneers Faithless returned to the stage last year with renewed energy – and now they’re bringing the rave to Newmarket. Louise Hoffman catches up with founding member Sister Bliss ahead of the show
Top image by Aaron Parsons
Think of 90s dance and rave culture, and it’s pretty likely that Faithless are one of the first bands climbing onto that strobe-lit stage of your imagination.
Their music was the soundtrack to an era of total surrender to sound – and still today, despite the prevailing trend for experiences lived through camera phones, their audiences are fully immersed. “Well, you just can’t mosh with a phone,” laughs musician, DJ and co-founding force of Faithless, Sister Bliss.
“I try not to look up too much or I’ll play the wrong notes, but I want to engage – I want people to know that we’re experiencing them while we’re playing – and it’s always really gratifying to see people lost in the music and up on each other’s shoulders going mad.
“It just blows my mind – what can I say. Energy is energy, whether it’s now or whether it was back then.”
I wanted to talk more about that 90s vibe, though – especially the very first gig that Faithless ever performed. “That was at The Jazz Cafe in London, and it was pretty wild!” Bliss recalls. “We only did the show because our first album Reverence was barely selling, and our radio pluggers were desperate to showcase that it was more than just dance tracks. We had a bit of connection in the clubs with Salva Mea and Insomnia but they hadn’t blown up like they did – we rereleased them subsequently and they became global hits.
“But the buzz was growing, and that night there was an absolute roadblock, which was quite bananas. I recall Sasha and Paul Oakenfold were on the list, but they couldn’t even get near the club, so we had to throw their tickets out of the dressing room window so they could grab them!”
Bliss also recalls some of the humorously rookie moments of those early days: “In the first release of Reverence, we messed up – we chose a really lovely cardboard sleeve, but it was the wrong size and you couldn’t rack it in Woolworths or the record shops,” she laughs. “Of course, now it’s a collector’s item! But back then, it was this ridiculous album that didn’t fit anywhere, and so we got lots of returns and only sold 16 copies a week for the first few weeks… which we thought was amazing!
“That’s the other thing; perception was very different then. But you start a ripple, don’t you? It only takes a little drop and things start to happen. It was only meant to be a one-off show at The Jazz Cafe, but then they offered us a European tour, and the record started going up and up in the German charts. Then all the venues we were playing at got upgraded and it was this wild, chaotic time where – having only really played The Jazz Cafe to 400 people – we were suddenly playing to 5,000 people in a Mercedes factory with the Fugees!”
It was during this European takeover that the British press started to cotton on to the enormity of the band’s potential – and in those pre- and nascent days of the internet, media interest was absolutely imperative to success.
“Obviously, you had people experiencing your gig in the flesh and word would spread to the next city, ‘God, have you seen this band?’. But the music press were the gatekeepers,” Bliss acknowledges. “So, early interviews in the NME and Melody Maker, as well as support from Muzik Magazine by editor Ben Turner were all really important.
“But of course, that was coupled with underground club support. When people were falling in love with the record, they didn’t have Shazam – they’d have to go and ask the DJ, ‘what’s that tune?’. I used to go to raves and stand next to the DJ to find out what Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald was. Isn’t that mad? But it really was that analogue back then!”
Death and rebirth
Asked what she misses most, Bliss doesn’t skip a beat: Maxi Jazz, founding member of Faithless (alongside Bliss and Rollo), who passed away in 2022 – and whom she still dreams about.
Faithless performed at the Roundhouse – as part of their return to live performance. Image by Blue Laybourne
Having reformed the band just last year, playing live shows that ‘tell that story of who we are, what we were and pay homage to Maxi and all his brilliance’, I wondered if returning to the stage had brought any unexpected emotions for Bliss.
“Every time I hear Maxi’s voice in our key songs like Insomnia and God Is a DJ, I just feel this welling up. His voice is in my ears and my head, reverberating in my body, and it never fails to bring that big yearning, sad feeling of missing him. That’s what grief is; it changes, but it’s constant. I just wish he was bounding around on the stage in front of me – I look out, almost willing him to ‘become’ again.
“But I’ve been surprised by how fun it’s been, too,” she adds. “There are four core band members who were on our last tour – people who know the music inside out – but also three new members: Nathan Ball and Amelia Fox, who are fantastic singers, plus new guitarist Max Rad, who’s also a producer. It’s breathed new life into it, and they’ve just been an absolute joy to tour with because they’re not jaded old f*ckers like we are, quite frankly!”
Pushing forward
Faithless has always been a big champion of the album format – playing with its potential to reflect, in Bliss’s words, a ‘Venn diagram’ of each band member’s musical tastes and ideas. “There was no one telling us, ‘oh, you can’t have a folk song next to a banging main-floor anthem’, so we just worked on what we were feeling, and I think – for better or worse – that’s how we’ve always operated.”
Always – and forever. Because the band’s brand-new release, Champion Sound, is not only an album but a double album, with four distinct sides – each one representing a different mood.
“People say, ‘oh, no one listens to albums any more’, but I hope this record, in its broken-down four-side format, will ease people back into the joy of letting music unfold rather than being condensed into edits that can be as short as two minutes now. How can you express yourself in two minutes?” Bliss questions. “For me, it’s all about slowing everything down so we can be expansive musically.”
Drip feeding the musical delights, the band is releasing one side per month, with two sides available so far (at time of writing), and a full release planned for September. “The first side is Forever Free, which starts with the only posthumously released Maxi vocal, and that’s a really beautiful, trippy, dancy side of the album,” says Bliss. “Then the second side, Phone Number, is this bleary, post-rave love story, when you’re remembering locking eyes with someone on the dance floor and giving them your phone number… or did you actually give it to them?”
Tracks from this album will be among those in the setlist for August’s headline live performance at Newmarket Racecourse – alongside old favourites and music that has been of huge influence to the band.
“It’s been great performing the new music live and weaving it in with classic Faithless songs – there’s an art form in that to me,” says Bliss. “The present and the past can coexist in a beautiful way.”
Above all though, she adds, the show is really a love letter to Maxi and to electronic dance music. “I keep saying it, but I wish Maxi could see how happy people are in the crowds, and how much they still love him and the songs. They’ve lived in people’s lives – what a thing.”
Faithless will be performing at Newmarket Nights on Friday 8 August. Find out more at thejockeyclub.co.uk/newmarket
