Maxi Jazz and Sister Bliss Interview

If most ten year olds‚ birthday parties tend to be modest affairs featuring paper hats and party games, then it‚s no surprise to find that stadium-rocking dance outfit Faithless are celebrating making double figures on a somewhat grander scale.

Emerging from the 90s club scene to stake a claim as one of the biggest electronic acts in the world, Faithless trio Rollo, Sister Bliss and Maxi Jazz have been busting up dance floors, concert halls and home systems for a decade this spring and coming weeks will find them celebrating in style.

In the run-up to the release of their Forever Faithless‚ greatest hits CD, the band have teamed up with Sony Ericsson and Orange and took their legendary live experience out on their Forever Faithless tour throughout April and are now playing an exclusive gig in a secret London location on May 19th.

And on May 16 Faithless will re-release the classic Insomnia‚ single, which will be available to Orange customers as an exclusively mixed ring tone and download, along with other tracks from the album.

We caught up with Faithless front man Maxi Jazz and musical maestro Sister Bliss to get the low-down on ten years of faithful service on-stage and in the studio.


Q: Faithless has struck a chord with people all over the world. Can you put your finger on how and why your music has become so engrained in people‚s lives?

Maxi Jazz: It's a combination of things, I think. Blissy, when she composes, always writes from the heart. It‚s very emotional and Rollo has the ears to spot that and put it into a context. With the lyrics, we try to make them of substance rather than just weightless and I think it‚s probably a combination of those three things, plus the live shows, that have kept us in the public eye far longer than we deserve to be.

Q: Was there any particular point in your career when you can remember thinking that you had finally arrived?

Maxi Jazz: We were on the Queen Vic jukebox once and that's pretty much a marker.

Sister Bliss: Yeah, when you're on East Enders you know you've made it, but I have to say that being used for a question on The Weakest Link‚ was really quite something. I would think that‚s a pretty obscure question. If they got it right I'd be impressed, cause the great thing about Faithless is we have managed to have success, but on our own terms, without being rampantly commercial. We've managed to remain outside of that. People call us a cult band, whatever that means.

Q: You are an internationally known band. It seems odd that people would think of you as a cult band.

Sister Bliss: Well I think there‚s a way of making records, where you're not on the radio like Beyonce or whoever. It‚s a very different sound that Faithless has, which doesn't necessarily always sit on formatted radio stations. There‚s more of an underground feel if you're a band that has come from club culture.

Q: Is club culture still a part of what you do? Do you still feel part of that scene?

Sister Bliss: I do, very much so, because I'm a DJ as well as being in the band. And Maxi‚s a hip hop DJ, so clubs and dance music of varying tempos, we live and breathe that music. We're both vinyl aficionados, we love going out and buying loads of records and playing at parties. We're very appreciative of the climate that we were born from, us and other bands, such as the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy, who've taken dance music to a wider audience. We're very proud to be part of that vanguard.

Q: Your new Forever Faithless‚ CD is a retrospective of tracks from the last ten years. What has been the most memorable moment over that time?

Maxi Jazz: There have been a few but the first one that pops into my head is walking on stage at Glastonbury for the first time in 2002. As I walked on I was like oh my goodness! I couldn't see anything except people. I thought right, we'd better work hard today, then. By the end of the fourth song, the whole place was jumping like one person and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Q: It must be staggering playing to a huge crowd like that.

Maxi Jazz: It is. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to continue because you do get very emotional. It's a bit like driving a car very fast, you know, you're enjoying it but you're concentrating a lot as well. Every now-and-then you get moments where it does hit you and suddenly you want to cry. But it's pretty difficult to cry and rap at the same time, so you've gotta turn around, get yourself together and press on with it.

Q: Maxi, is it true you were in a car accident a little while ago?

Maxi Jazz: Yeah, three years ago, after a gig in Leeds. I had given my pride-and-joy to a race team to change the clutch. They kept it for three months and charged me five grand! So I arrived back from Leeds and there's my baby sitting outside my house for the first time in twelve weeks. I was like right, she's got all these horrible people's vibes in and I'm gonna remove them right now. The plan was to take her up to the petrol station, fill her up and bring her back, but ice formed and frost came down as I was driving up there. As I was coming round this corner, I lost the back end and went sliding into a tree and the tree sort-of entered the driver's door and broke my hip. I had to spend some time in hospital over Christmas, recovering. What's interesting is that I had been doing motor racing that year and prior to my road accident I had a pretty serious shunt on the track and injured myself pretty significantly. My neck, my spine, my ribcage and my pelvis were all twisted up, but it was only when I was getting my hip looked at that the other injuries became apparent. And if those hadn't been sorted out I'd have been crippled by now.

Q: Did the experience of the crash and your recovery inform your music?

Maxi Jazz: Pretty much everything that happens to me informs the music, but not especially, no. But it was a chance for me to test my own theories of self-determination and will because I was told by a consultant that it would be three months before I was walking without pain and nine months before I was back on stage. I was actually back on stage three months later. Thank God I'd earned a few quid and could afford a trainer to come on the road with me and give me this seriously painful treatment before, during and after gigs. I was still able to do the gigs and that was nice.

Q: How does it feel to have a greatest hits album coming out? A lot of people might think if they're doing their greatest hits, is it over for the band, have they wrapped it all up?

Sister Bliss: There was a lot of pressure for us to release a greatest hits album after our third album, Outrospective‚ but I was like no that feels really wrong. So we went away and made No Roots‚ and after that a greatest hits album felt like the right thing to do, to underline the fact that we've been around for ten years, which is quite impressive in this fickle old world. Compiling it did kind-of blow me away. Some hits have definitely been larger than others but when you see it all together on one CD, it is quite an amazing feeling. I never would have thought when we started that we'd reach the point where we could make a greatest hits album but I also feel that Faithless has never pigeonholed itself. So the world is our oyster as long as we enjoy making music together, which we do immensely. It feels like roll on the fifth album‚ as soon as we've got the greatest hits out of the way.


Through out May download exclusive Faithless ring tones, video clips, exclusive remix tones of Insomnia and We Come 1 on your Orange phone from Orange World.

Discover the new Sony Ericsson K300i at Orange shops now, visit www.K300iFindMusic.co.uk or text FAITHLESS free to 247, for more information or chances to see Faithless.