It sounds not unlike the strain of electronica that got bracketed as chill-out at the turn of the millennium – Air, Röyksopp, Moby’s Play – which means it fits perfectly with a curious current trend for dance music nostalgia. The result, The Last Summer, is an unashamedly sepia-tinted and sunlit album inspired by holidays he spent in his teens and early 20s in Greece and Ibiza. I thought once I get back – if I get back – I want a little purple patch, a bit like…” He searches for a comparison and laughs. “But in a very cliched banal way,” he says, “cancer does make you slightly re-evaluate your life. Prior to his illness, he’d been living in a kind of semi-retirement, Faithless having last made an album nine years ago. He’s now “fully cured so no sympathy needed”, but spent his recuperation “going back to stuff I loved – books, films, albums, and when you hear excellence or read excellence, it makes you want to raise your own bar”. It’s just horrible.” We went from not playing live to headlining a Mercedes factory in Germany with the Fugees in the space of two months After the operation, he suffered from thoracotomy syndrome “where it feels like your nerves are on fire inside of you, they won’t meld together. He didn’t realise he was ill until his wife bought him a health check for his 50th birthday, which unearthed a tumour requiring an operation “where they cut open my ribs and cut loads of nerves and stuff”. And he wouldn’t have made a solo album had he not contracted lung cancer a couple of years ago. Indeed, he notes, he wouldn’t be here today had he not made a solo album, albeit one that features his sister and most of Faithless – The Last Summer, under the name R Plus. “That’s one thing I’ve never done and will never do,” he shudders, as if I’d just suggested he use the success of Dido’s hit singles as an opportunity to plunge his head in a bucket of sick. Nor did he ever feel like doing the obvious thing and using the success of the huge hits he co-wrote with his sister – Here With Me, White Flag, Life For Rent – as an opportunity to start a career as the kind of blue-chip songwriter for hire that currently dominates pop.
ROLLO ARMSTRONG INSOMNIA PLUS
Watch the video for Those Were the Days by R Plus “Well, I can’t play an instrument,” he says with a frown, which never stopped other dance producers from prodding at an unplugged synth while a backing track plays – and basking in the adulation of their fans. But the closest he ever got to appearing on stage with Faithless was manning the mixing desk at their first gig.
If you factor in the albums he helped his sister, Dido, make – the first two of which are among the biggest-selling in UK chart history – the total goes up to something like 50m. He is, after all, a member of a band who, at the last count, had sold something like 15m records worldwide: Faithless, whose supercharged, stadium-packing take on late 90s club music, most notably trance and what used to be called epic house, has a claim to presage the rise of EDM, of which more later. It’s hard not to applaud Armstrong’s skill at avoiding the limelight so completely that his Wikipedia page comes accompanied by a photo that looks like it was taken while he was still at university.
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