ROLLO ARMSTRONG INSOMNIA PLUS

You can’t move at the moment for orchestras sawing their way through 90s dance hits, Faithless’s Insomnia invariably among them, for the edification of middle-aged former ravers. 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

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. Until now, he shrugs, “there’s never been a need for me to say anything about anything, really”. Not, he says sheepishly, because he doesn’t trust the press, but because he wants to listen back afterwards and see how he’s done. When I get my phone out to record our conversation, he produces his own. He’s not suspicious or wary – quite the opposite, he’s very friendly – but he has a pad with him that I get the feeling contains notes for him to refer to during his answers. Rollo Armstrong is clearly not a man used to giving interviews.

Rollo armstrong insomnia