Madonna does her yoga to their double-Grammy- nominated first album; Bono says they are geniuses; spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle loves them; and Simon Fuller gave them £2m to travel around the world, posing sexy, meaningful questions about spirituality, relationships, sex, death and healing to the likes of Bob Geldof, the spiritual leader Bhagavan Das and dance shaman Gabrielle Roth. Along the way they made infectious music with Baul singers in Bengal, Lila Downs in Mexico, Michael Stipe in New York. They are 1 Giant Leap and they spend their time trying to find the meaning of life, making music along the way.

“We’re obsessed with our personal growth,” say Jamie Catto, a founding member of Faithless, and his 1 Giant Leap partner, music producer Duncan Bridgeman. These two fortysomething urban funksters combine making albums with a passionate emotional and spiritual quest that has taken them to more than 20 countries, from remote parts of China to the Amazon jungle.

Their first DVD/film and CD — also called 1 Giant Leap — came out in 2002 and now has a legion of global fans. Their new project, What About Me?, attempts to answer some of life’s difficult questions, including why we can’t sit still, why we’re insatiable, how need and love get confused, and why we avoid emotional pain.

For both men it evolved into a much more personal journey than they had ever envisaged.

“It became more and more about my relationship with Jamie,” says Bridgeman. “We ended up having to look at our own demons and find ways of dealing with them. It’s also an invitation for people to look at themselves through us.”

Their spiritual journey was far from blissful. Catto’s family — wife Jess, daughters India Rose, 13, and Lola Mae, 4, and son Memphis, 2 — fell apart in Tokyo as the pressure of his quest became unbearable.

“We were on a tightly organised schedule and it became too much having all my family there as well. Looking for baby food in Tokyo is a nightmare,” says Catto. “They left and went back to Mallorca. My relationship with Jess was in crisis, which meant I was in a lot of pain while we were filming. I wasn’t present in so many ways. Duncan felt abandoned by me.”

Luckily, their quest involved meeting wise people who could assist them. “It really did help when Eckhart Tolle explained about the pain body,” says Catto, “and that unless we let our feelings out at the time of the pain, we store them up for overreaction in the future. And when the author Neal Donald Walsch talked about the tendency to ‘confuse love and need’, that was just what I was going through. I learnt a lot. But it wasn’t until we were in post-production that I really came back into my body properly, after Jess and I had sorted out our problems.”

Meanwhile, Bridgeman got physically ill. “I was walking down the Uxbridge Road, in Shepherd’s Bush, crying. I’d had a love relationship that had gone wrong, Jamie and I were getting on really badly, I was thinking of giving up the project, and then I started peeing blood,” he says. Bladder cancer was diagnosed, and fortunately doctors managed to remove it without surgical intervention. “I think it had an emotional cause,” he says, “but it was as if I needed that challenge to get me back into a good place with What About Me? and Jamie. The shock made me realise how brilliant 1 Giant Leap is.”

By making What About Me?, which is, of course, all about them, they show themselves as vulnerable, imperfect human beings. At times it makes for uncomfortable viewing, but the pair believe that the world would be a better place if we could all admit how messed up and fragile we are. “It’s about world peace starting from the space where we can all confess to being f***ed up. If we weren’t so focused on keeping our masks on then we’d have a lot more energy to clear up global crises,” says Catto.

In the TV series, the pair talk about travelling and bringing back jewels of wisdom. “Tolle was amazing,” says Catto. “He said lots of things, but I love ‘Pain sculpted you into the beautiful person you are today’, because it allows you to see how positive emotional wounds can be. And Bhagavan Das says, brilliantly, ‘We’ve always got one foot on the banana skin and the other on the grave. It’s so hard to just let life happen.’ It felt so right for me.”

“We’re still healing,” says Bridgeman of the emotional strain of their quest, “but we both know that 1 Giant Leap projects are how we fulfil ourselves and our dreams. They are our golden goose.” And their quest for the meaning of life continues. “Surrender and forgiveness are our next themes,” he says.

What About Me?, the TV series, starts on Channel 4 on Wednesday. The DVD (a different film) is available at £7.99 from whataboutme.tv

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