Sister Bliss remembers it all: every late night, every dingy pub backroom and dodgy disco ball, every packed dancefloor. “When I DJed back in the day, I played all over Ireland – north and south, everywhere. All the crazy little nooks and crannies, from Letterkenny to Cork to Waterford. I mean, who knew there were these meccas of clubs?”
Her adventures in dance music led from the murky function rooms of boozers in Donegal to some of the mainstays of 1990s club culture in Ireland such as Sir Henry’s in Cork. She is now returning to Ireland with Faithless, the house titans who gatecrashed the 1990s with whomping mega-hits Insomnia and God Is a DJ. But the concert at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, will come with a bittersweet sting as Faithless carry on without their frontman and guiding light, rapper Maxi Jazz, who died two days before Christmas in 2022 after a long illness.
Jazz wasn’t a conventional lead singer. A poet and preacher, he brought wisdom and spirituality to the historically hedonistic milieu of banging techno. “This is my church/ this is where I heal my hurt,” he famously declared on God Is a DJ – an eight-minute onslaught of epic house in which Jazz likened the escapism of the nightclub to the spiritual ecstasy and sense of belonging historically associated with religion.
“He was a practising Buddhist. He chanted every day, and he believed it raised his life state to deal with everything that came his way,” says Bliss, who cofounded Faithless with Jazz and producer Rollo Armstrong in London in 1995. “Not many people come along that have that kind of wisdom and clarity. I was lucky to have met him. He was 38 when we became successful. He’d waited a long, long, long time. He was a fully formed human being.”
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He had been unwell for some time prior to his death aged 65 but was protective of his personal life.
“Maxi was very private. We didn’t tell the press he wasn’t well. His friends kept it to themselves,” says Bliss, who remains upset at unsubstantiated rumours about his death.
“There’s always speculation. I’ll tell you what drives me mad is when people claim the [Covid] vaccine killed him. It’s complete bullshit. He had all sorts of complicated things going on for him towards the end, so he wasn’t well for quite some time. He was valiant and incredible: it was like a cat with nine lives. Each time he went into hospital, I wasn’t sure if he’d be coming back out. He loved life. He absolutely loved being alive.”
His work meant something to people too. Whenever they were out together she was always struck by how strangers were drawn to Jazz. “People would recognise Maxi, especially if we were together. They’d get all excited, and they’re going, ‘Your shit is deep, man.’ So even if they didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, they appreciated that it wasn’t kind of just the lowest common denominator party music, throwing hands in the air. That he was trying to impart wisdom or something soulful.”
After Jazz’s death, Bliss and the band’s nontouring third member, Rollo – brother of singer Dido – were unsure how to move forward. Maybe this was the end of Faithless. As the raw ache of grief faded, they decided to carry on what they had started with their frontman and, in 2024, announced their return to live music after eight years away. They followed that announcement with a new album, Champion Sound, which opens with a recording of Jazz reciting a line of verse – a poignant farewell from the charismatic frontman.
Bliss sees the new tour as a celebration of Maxi Jazz’s legacy. She mentions The Prodigy’s return after the death of Keith Flint in 2019 as an example of how to keep the music of a fallen comrade alive. In the case of The Prodigy, the solution has been to reproduce Flint’s likeness during Firestarter with a flashing LED screen – a low-tech approach that feels appropriate to the singer’s no-frills stage presence. “Keith not being there – a lot of people miss his presence. But the way the band paid tribute to Keith was brilliant. Really original – almost low tech.”
Rave had already gone mainstream when Faithless broke through with Insomnia in November 1995. Yet despite the genre’s popularity, the tune really shouldn’t have been a hit: it doesn’t have a chorus and Jazz’s lyrics tackle the not especially glamorous subject of sleep deprivation. But it was profound and earnest and it came along at just the right time – as dance music was about to morph into the self-parody of big beat and Britpop was descending into a post-Oasis punch-up among Liam Gallagher copycats.
“I like to think a good tune transcends fashion phases, styles, and dance music’s now got its own massive back catalogue,” says Bliss, whose real name is Ayalah Deborah Bentovim.
“It really did go from being a proper poor cousin to rock and indie. It was trounced by the press in the early days, outside of the dance-music press – which was quite small. Now it’s just become this enormous global force.”
Success meant Faithless were in demand as producers and remixers, and worked with everyone from The Cardigans to Simply Red. At one point there was even a mooted collaboration with Sinéad O’Connor. This never came to pass, but Bliss has warm memories of her encounters with the Irish singer.
“Maxi and I hung out with her,” she says. “She headlined Sziget, which is a wonderful festival in Budapest. Maxi and I stood on the side of the stage and just wept. We just wept through her whole set because it was so exquisite and emotional.”
They “hung out” afterwards – a memory Bliss treasures. “I feel very blessed that I got to meet her, and we chatted about being mums on the road and how tricky it was being a woman in the music business. She felt utterly lovely and chatty and friendly, and also absolutely unadorned. When she went on stage, she was in her scruffy era. She was wearing some crappy fleece, a scruffy white T-shirt, and was barefoot. But she just opened her mouth, and this truth came out. Glorious, beautiful. There’ll never be a singer like her.
“And I remember seeing her at a gay pride event in about 1987 or 1988. She came to London, and she’d just done Mandinka. I think it must have been in Hyde Park. Anyway, there was some party in a park, and I ended up there with all my gay friends. She was performing live. So that was before Nothing Compares 2 U when she went absolutely megastar.”
Bliss was one of the few women on the scene at that time. Being surrounded by men meant she was painfully aware of the gender dynamics of her genre, and while she had no unpleasant encounters, she is conscious of being treated as a second-class citizen in other ways. Only years later, when the EDM scene conquered the United States, did things start to change.
“There were very few female DJs. I was always treated well. I can’t sit here and complain, but I do know for a fact that I was underpaid compared to my male counterparts, even when I had a hit record all over the world.
“The way it would be now would be I’d be getting half a million dollars to play in Vegas. The run of hits we had would have been a completely different beast if they had been released 15 or 20 years later, when America got dance music,” she says, smiling. “Then it began raining dollars.”
[ Faithless DJ Sister Bliss: 'The industry is pretty much run by men'Opens in new window ]
She feels that rave music was, at its heart, about inclusivity – something we need now more than ever. In Ireland and the UK, it was associated with being out of your gourd in a field. But if you trace its roots back to the US, as she did when she went to New York in her 20s, it becomes apparent that this music has always had a subversive streak. In their own epic fashion, Faithless have continued to uphold that tradition.
“I went to New York in the late 1980s and watched house music taking shape. It was black, and it was gay, and it wasn’t part of the mainstream in any shape or form. It was still reeling from that anti-disco wave that went across America, when they burnt records.
“So house music was truly, truly underground when I first experienced it in New York. Those records that came from America had this deeper meaning. You could really feel it – the records that urged you to forget yourself and be together in this amazing communion. There’s an element of Faithless that’s always touched on that, from We Come 1 and God Is a DJ – and that dancing together was a political act.”
In Dublin they will share a bill with Moby – an artist who has a huge fan base but also a habit of provoking online backlashes, most recently over his assertion that Lola by The Kinks was transphobic. “He’s a contentious figure. He’s quite polarising,” she says.
But she sees this as a positive – proof that rave music remains relevant and continues to evoke strong feelings. “We’re known for the big dance anthems. There is that body of work that Faithless has that is musically genre hopping – all over the place – but it’s coherent, it’s cohesive, it’s not just for the sake of it. It’s always trying to express something.”
Rave music has not always aged well – listened to today, many of the dance hits of the 1990s sound almost pre-industrially primitive. However, Faithless tunes live forever. I mention to Bliss that I was at a DJ set at All Together Now in Waterford and that when the hands-in-the-air refrain from Insomnia suddenly came in, the crowd – mostly people in their 20s and 30s – properly freaked out.
“We’re pretty primal people and we want to dance around a fire to a tribal beat. I don’t think that much has changed in thousands of years. The first time I heard an acid house record it did something to me – it blew my mind. Somehow all the pieces of me came together when I first heard electronic music in that environment: in a club mixed with other records. This flow, this continuum, all of those that are powerful for people to experience: connection, total loss of ego. People putting aside the harshness of life for those few precious hours and dancing under one groove – which sounds completely banal and maybe a bit facile. But actually when we do, we feel most at one with ourselves and with each other. I’m going to carry on flying that flag.”
Faithless play the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, on Friday, August 21st
