Founding member of Faithless, producer and DJ Sister Bliss joins Absolute Radio host Danielle Perry in a new episode of her podcast ‘Elevenses with Danielle Perry’, which each week sees her ask guests the same eleven soul-searching questions.
Whilst discussing her biggest fears, she reveals she’s afraid of music being side-lined by education:
“I’m scared we’re moving to a direction from education onwards where music is being devalued in a syllabus and children aren’t having music lessons as a matter of course… But there’s lots of schools where they don’t teach music at all to anyone, so that’s a fear.”
And the music and night-time industries are not getting the right support from the Government:
“Dance music really is a community and it contributes hugely to the economy; it’s very short-sighted to forget about nightclubs and DJs and freelancers. There was a massive grant announced – £1.75 billion – but I don’t think hardly any of it got to nightclubs. It’s not seen as the high arts, and that somehow makes it easy to disrespect.”
“The night-time industry contributes £66 billion to the economy… it’s a huge employer. We need those venues, we need a plan from the Government, we need our industry not to be ignored. There’s a lot of suffering; I think there’s 1.3 million employed by the night-time industries.”
“We need support, not everyone qualified for the self-employed benefit, not many people were able to be furloughed. I think it’s important for us to stand with one united voice and write to our MPs and do as much as we can to take action and let the Government know that we exist and we’ve damn well contributed to this country and its standing globally.”
“Mental health services are massively over-stretched… within music you get a lot of very sensitive, fragile people, whose income is very variable, many of us are freelance, we don’t know when the next paycheck is coming. It’s a very scary scenario thinking you just don’t know if you are going to have a roof over your head in a couple of months’ time.”
Being a woman in the music industry: “I definitely felt I was in a very male-dominated industry and I had to grow a bit of a thick skin and be quite tough… I do feel I had to work twice as hard to get half the recognition, I’ve sold a lot more records than a lot of DJs that are celebrated as ‘the world’s best DJs’… I felt I had to really prove myself – that I could rock it as much as any man could.”
On experiencing Imposter Syndrome: “I’ve got a very, very loud inner critic and sometimes it needs beating down and it’s something that I’ve had to really work on. I think a lot of people in the world of performing have what’s called Imposter Syndrome, that they don’t really own their success that they don’t really own their achievements. I still listen to artists and think they have more talent in their little finger than I do in my whole body. I think I’m a hard worker and I think I must have flashes of special things happening musically on occasion, but I do always feel that I deliver my best work in a team – even though I write all the music myself, I do need that validation… but I am ridden with self-doubt a lot of the time.”
On Faithless’ upcoming album: “We are putting an album out after 10 years so I feel like it’s not just judged as a piece of music, it’s judged against everything we’ve ever done and that legacy if you like, and that’s a burden. I might just want to make a mad punk rock record or something really uncompromising, but I can’t do that under the Faithless banner because that would just be too jarring for our audience; we have a responsibility to our audience.”
This episode with Sister Bliss marks the last episode of the series of Elevenses with Danielle Perry. Past episodes have included interviews with Steve Coogan, Jeff Goldblum, Sophie Dahl and Karl Pilkington; listen to them all online now.
Speaking on ‘Elevenses with Danielle Perry’
Episode 8 out now
