1999
Tuesday, 11 pm.
Faithless
Heaven
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
UK composite, Faithless has been gaining ground for about three years now. From the debut single, Salvea Mea to their album success, Reverence , the band has been getting regular airplay and recognition for their cross-over success. For cross-over success, read mainstream. Which is why even a stranger to Clubland such as I, might have stumbled over the techno energies and quirky lyrics of their single, Insomnia. And also why I am at Heaven, filing past the metal detectors on a Tuesday night, to join a packed house of Faithless faithful, primed for the white light and some serious dance beats.
The key to the Faithless success might be that they are so multiskilled as to be three bands in one. There is the rapid fire AAAABBBBBCCCCC rhyme scheme of veteran rapper Maxi Priest, the pop ballads from singer/songwriter Jamie Catto and the wall of sound keyboards from former rave DJ, Sister Bliss. And now that we are well used to the disappearance of the author and can go all the way back to Phil Spector for the Svengali Producer, it comes as less of a surprise that the Faithless sound is credited to the musical alchemy of Producer/Mixer, Rollo. It is he, camera shy and refuser of interviews, who is the eminence gris who has brought together Maxi, Catto, Sister Bliss and their respective genres, to create what is in fact, a dance club version of an old style showband.
As the stage colours layer over each other, greens and cerises, drilling through dense white fog, Rollo’s tone poem overture unfolds. The Garden. Twittering birdcalls are fed into a slow synth fugue which then shifts pace to a funk beat. Dave Randall’s acoustic guitar tinkles, Sister Bliss plays some Satie-ish piano chords and the dance floor sways as one. Through the coloured smog eight figures have gradually taken up position.
Now make that nine. To huge applause, Maxi Priest, the lanky English Jamaican vocalist glides along the stage front, his slim arms draped in a stylishly ample lounge suit. He hits the mark with Reverence– “You don’t need eyes to see/ that you need vision”. But Maxi has also covered the waterfront- as he reminds us with She’s My Baby, his gritty confession of precocious sex from their current CD, Sunday 8pm (Festival)
Then Catto and Bliss work away at their anvils for another extended prologue of pulsing beat overlaid with staccatto melodies and synth washes. Add to this percussionist Sudha Kheterpal, the thudding bass from Aubrey Nunn and power drummer Andrew Treacy and it is like the rhythm of a locomotive, that old in-out of piston and valve which has made sexual metaphor of machines since their invention. As Robert Hughes reminds us, this is what Duchamp meant by the Bride Stripped Bare. And it is definitely what Maxi and seven hundred ravers mean byTake the Long Way Home.
Jamie Catto delivers a ballad, Angeline from Reverence , full of nifty guitar trills from Randall and back-ups from June Hamm and Susan Noel. But it is Maxi’s return for Insomnia -“I can’t get no slee-eep…” followed by a torrent of scudding sound- and the hard-edged Bring My Family Back, that is the centre of interest. He is the Faithless sound, and his lyrics, matured by experience and Buddhist calm, are much more appealing than the psychotic hostilities often associated with hip-hop.
Which is why Postcards, Maxi’s diary of life on the road has a casual flair and sense of the particular which is genuinely poetic and, amidst the generic milking-machine sounds of techno, highly distinctive. It is also why Maxi can stand centrestage surrounded by the bombastic drum and bass fanfare of six labouring musicians and announce -” This is my Church/This is where I heal my hurts/ It’s in natural grace/ or watching young life shape/It’s in minor keys/ Solutions and remedies/ enemies becoming friends/ where bitterness ends/ This is my Church.”
The lyrics are then over-run by a giant tide of pounding beats, pattering rhythms and stitching syncopations that both match and propel the natural pulse and cardiac rate of the Congregation. Tonight, says Maxi without a skerrick of hubris, God is a DJ. That this doesn’t sound merely preposterous, but is instead a rather appealing call to harmonic transcendence is what makes this band worth the visit. A less ironic, intelligent and musically astute outfit would have fallen to earth long before this. So, even if John isn’t more famous than Jesus and God isn’t a DJ, the Faithless crowd is having the time of its life. And, I have to say that two hours in Heaven has done quite a lot to heal my hurts as well.
Commissioned for The Adelaide Review but not published.