Alive And Alone

Rip It Up, Issue 240, 1 August 1997, Page 21

Alive And Alone

T j ? just gone nine o’clock in the morning 1 L 3 in London. Jamie Catto of Faithless only got to bed at six. He was recording at the band’s studio until three, then got home and ran with an urge to write a song. Catto keeps a notepad, a dictaphone, and a guitar by the bed for such occasions; “Songs generally arrive between three and six in the morning”, he explains. Without pausing, and either in spite of, or due to, being granted just three hours sleep, Catto launches into a wayward description of his songwriting technique. “I don’t really have an approach to songwriting. I’ve got this teacher, who talks beautifully, all around the world. His name is Ram Das, he’s an American, and one of the guys that pioneered acid with Timothy Leary. He found something with acid, and thought, ‘alright, if this experience is in my brain, there must be a way to access it without the acid’. So he went off to India, and found a guru, and now he lectures all around the world. He says that when he speaks, it’s a process of emptying, he doesn’t think of things to say to answer questions, whatever comes out comes out. And that is very much what making music is like, it’s not a process of thinking up music, it’s a process of emptying and listening to the song that’s already there.” Faithless are a London based musical collective whose debut album Reverence treads the increasingly murky ground between trip hop, jungle, pop, drum ‘n’ bass, ambient, and rock. “And why not?”, demands Catto. “You can marry any musical style these days, you’ve just got to get it in tune and in time. The idea that a band has to have one sound all the time to make it easier for the corporate machine to market, it doesn’t serve music in anyway at all. It comes from all the wrong fears about life, it’s just not a healthy way to live.” Faithless operate from a base at Swanyard Studios, in a similar manner to Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound stable. It’s all for one and one for all. Currently, there’s six acts signed to the Faithless-owned record label, Cheeky, and each individual in each group makes solo and band albums. With three studios in the complex, a trio of records can be underway simultaneously. “It’s creative chaos”, says Catto. “You see all the musicians running up and down stairs, in and out of doors, juggling these different albums at the same time. The amazing thing is, there’s not two albums that sound vaguely the same, as each member of the Cheeky family has their unique style. What’s beautiful about the collective is, everyone’s there to serve the sound of whoever is making the album. No one is there to try and get more of their guitar on a track or try an realise an idea they wanted to push, everyone’s just there to help.” Granted, says Catto, at first glance the Faithless camp appear to be an idealistic

commune of dreaming 90s hippies, but the reality suggests different. Without the assistance of the media, fancy promotional gimmicks, and the usual underhanded music industry machinations, Faithless have scored three Top 10 singles in England, and are close to selling a million copies of Reverence. A network of Faithless loyalists, captured only by the music, have simply gone out and spread the word. “Because we haven’t had any marketing strategy, people have discovered us for themselves”, says Catto, “and that makes it more personal. It’s not like a whole mass of people have seen a poster or an ad on TV, and flocked to buy it. Without bragging, what we have achieved is quite amazing, because we’ve by-passed all the usual channels for becoming a name band, and succeeded on our terms. We’re very blessed that we’ve got nobody in a suit coming in and telling us what we have to do. In this country, even the independent labels are 99% major label backed. They say Oasis on Creation makes them independent, but Creation are owned by Sony. We really are an independent, so we answer only to ourselves.” Prior to joining Faithless, Catto was “a dreaming hippie”, he laughs. After spending four years touring the world with the folk/rock group, the Big Truth Band, Catto teamed up with dance producer, Rollo, house DJ, Sister Bliss, and freestyle rapper, Maxi Jazz, and found himself enamoured with a new style of music. “The music that I was into before this, I was hanging out with people who played acoustic guitars, hand drummers, people who were singing and chanting, and behaving in a peculiar manner. Now I’m playing with computers, and those people definitely raise their eyebrows — they enjoy the fact that I’ve gone from a band called the Big Truth Band to a band called Faithless. It’s one big twist. I used to be really snobbish about samplers and computers, I thought if it wasn’t an instrument it couldn’t have a soul. But I understand now that a sampler is just another instrument to express yourself.” Faithless are all about enlightenment, says Catto, who lists his pet hate as, “closed minds.” At their best, he hopes Faithless will assist people in removing their everyday blinkers, and to be open to uncharted experiences.

“It’s a bit of a pipe dream maybe, but you can’t help thinking that if you have a way of expressing your voice, you have a responsibility to broaden people’s horizons. Faithless are just one of many things going on at the moment that is tearing down boundaries, and hopefully, finally a lot of people who are a bit more out there are going to get listened to. Coming up to the new millennium, boundaries are blurring, and those people that have hung on too tightly to their old skin are going to have it stripped off.”

JOHN RUSSELL