Joe's Big Toe

This week’s Spot­light on: Szi­get will be focus­sing on the massive UK dance act, Faith­less. Formed in 1995 by Sis­ter Bliss, she recruited Maxi Jazz, Jamie Catto and Rollo Arm­strong to join her. The four­some released Salva Mea later on that year. They have released six albums of ori­ginal mater­ial, Rev­er­ence, Sunday 8PM, Out­ro­spect­ive, No Roots, To All New Arrivals and The Dance. They describe their sound as a blend of trip-hop and techno, and they have undoubtedly influ­enced thou­sands and thou­sands of today’s dance acts.

The suc­cess­ful artist Dido, is Rollo Armstrong’s sis­ter, and the two acts have worked together extens­ively. My Lover’s Gone, on Dido’s 1999 No Angel was by and large the same track as Post­cards on the 1998 Faith­less record Sunday 8PM. Rollo has a con­di­tion known as syn­aes­thesia, which means that he exper­i­ences senses dif­fer­ently to the way we are used to per­ceiv­ing them (an example often given is that cer­tain syn­aes­thet­ics can “see sounds”, but it is, of course, nowhere near as simple as that).

As a group, Faith­less are quite unique, in that its com­pon­ent mem­bers are very act­ive indi­vidu­ally — Sis­ter Bliss is a recog­nised dance DJ, Maxi Jazz is a musi­cian in his own right, and Jamie Catto (although he left the band after Sunday 8PM) has worked with Maxi Jazz and Dido on pro­jects with them.

The band released “The Dance” this year exclus­ively in Tes­cos and on iTunes for three months, and will be tour­ing through­out this sum­mer, hav­ing played a set at Gla­ston­bury for the first time in 8 years a few weeks ago. On Last.fm, the band have racked up 15 mil­lion listens across almost one mil­lion listen­ers, with Insom­nia being by far their most pop­u­lar song, fol­lowed by God Is A DJ.

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