inthemix | International News | Faithless predict 'inevitable' global catastrophe

“People tend to bury their heads in the sand but I think we’re already suffering; we’re about to enter a recession because fuel costs are going through the roof and it’s restricting trade.”

Chatting to Skrufff a few weeks before the world stock market collapsed, Faithless star Sister Bliss was only partially accurate in her prophesy, given that the chaos means oil prices – at least temporarily – have dropped. However, raising the issue in another interview she spoke ‘of plunging into the most unthinkable global catastrophes of our own making which we will experience in this lifetime’, with global warning her greatest concern.

“Climate change will cause it,” she suggests. “I think it’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying a hybrid car or whatever, we have already set the wheels in motion and we’re ignoring it at our peril. All we can do is to need less. We wrote a song called ‘I Want More’ and it’s about this feeling that nothing is ever enough.

“The environment is suffering because of this attitude and I know the contradiction because I fly to gigs,” Bliss continued. “But what I mean are governments not taking the big measures, and I blame them especially for not listening. Though of course it could happen due to other factors not caused by humans such as an ice age or meteor strike,” she warns. “What I believe though is that it is inevitable.”

Despite her end-is-nigh assessment, she admits the happiest period of her 15 year career as both pop star and globe trotting DJ is the present, not least as Faithless’ often derided socially conscious lyrics have increasingly been reflected by the mainstream. “The last year of touring has been very enjoyable, when I had the baby. I particularly felt that Maxi’s message was more powerful than ever before and it needed to be heard,” she says.

“One of the things that convinced me was when we did a show in Berlin with an amazing artist called Emmanuel Jal, a Sudanese musician and former child soldier, and it was just incredible. We had to do this press panel for Oxfam, because the gig was for Oxfam, and it was so moving. When we performed that night I could see in Max’s eyes that he really connected with Emmanuel and with the whole situation and he really felt every lyric that we’d ever written, however slagged off we might have been by all the various critics.”