Faithless
Sadly, Faithless are no longer preaching to the converted.
Jane Gillow
When Jarvo waggled his skinny arse at Jacko at those Brit Awards, ridiculing the King of Pomp, he didn't just weave himself into the fabric of pop music folklore. That infamous gesture, watched by millions, was a watershed moment for audiences who were tired of being preached to by holier-than-thou pop stars, inflated by the notion that they have something important to say about world issues when really – at best – they are being clichéd and sentimental.
Maxi Jazz, frontman and self-appointed soothsayer of Faithless, makes you wish Jarvis had made the business of puncturing over-inflated pop egos a full-time career. Arms outstretched in a Jesus-like pose, Jazz unveils his earnest spiritualism-by-numbers to a crowd who, brandishing glo-sticks and making enough imaginary boxes to keep an entire series of Changing Rooms going, are clearly here to dance.
At their best, he and Sister Bliss are a charismatic team and the more upbeat tracks off their recent album Outrospective such as ‘Tarantula’ and ‘Muhammad Ali’, with it's killer riff and soulful spin, are definite crowd-pleasers. But whereas Basement Jaxx or Daft Punk would've revelled in whipping the crowd into a frenzy of flailing limbs, Faithless spoil it, by getting all worthy on us.
The triteness of Jazz’s New Age rhetoric becomes almost unbearable during the tepid trance cheese of ‘We Come 1’ when, draped in an Irish flag, he sings, in all earnestness, ‘You’re the left eye/I’m the right/Would it not be madness to fight?/We come one.’ A committed Buddhist, he clearly means well but if he’d had a selection of kids waiting in the wings ‘from both sides of the divide’ the point couldn’t have been more crassly made.
Cunningly, they save the only moment of evangelism anyone does want to hear, the epic ‘God Is A DJ’, for the encore. By which point, sadly, Faithless are no longer preaching to the converted.
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