The XX

“I don’t really know,” Jamie Smith sighs, all but transmitting his shrug through the phone line. I imagine him as he always looks on stage; sullen, dressed entirely in black, and not having had a haircut for a while. “I think we’re all too deep in to know anything anymore. We’re definitely closed off from it for a while.”

The “it” in question is Coexist, the second album from all-out musical phenomenon The xx, which, unfortunately for Jamie, is all anyone wants to hear about. Tired and muddled, the electronic prodigy is clearly struggling with the incessant emotional prodding that goes hand-in-hand with releasing what could very well be the record of the year.
Don’t get me wrong: the 23-year-old is perfectly polite, and happy to answer my questions, it’s just that coming up with the answers appears to be giving him a headache. Perhaps it’s an unavoidable side-effect of the band’s head-spinning rise to fame.
At the age of 20, Oliver Sim, Romy Madley-Croft and Jamie Smith had already achieved the kind of success that takes most bands a lifetime to accumulate. Barely a year after their first gig, they’d released their debut album xx to universal acclaim, bagged the Mercury Music Prize, appeared on every ‘Best Of’ list from here to Tokyo, and had some of their musical heroes become fans.
Their music started appearing everywhere; the albums of massive pop starlets (Rihanna, Shakira) the catwalks of famed fashion houses (Chanel, Alexander Wang) and the climaxing scenes of prime-time TV shows (Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl). All the while, the three school chums were blinkered by a hectic schedule of live dates and awkward
telly appearances.
A week before the band’s Friday headline date at Electric Picnic, I find Smith in the rehearsal
studio, “working out how to play some of our new songs live.”
“My head has been in the release date for months now,” he says, admitting to pre-album-release jitters. “We’ve got some feedback, but only from people we know and people who have been quite involved
from the beginning, so it’ll be nice to get some outside opinion.”
A lot’s happened between xx and Coexist; while the band ventured further and further into the wacky realms of fame, Smith earned further praise for his Gil Scott-Heron collaboration We’re New Here and even appeared on the second album by multi-million selling rapper Drake.
On the outside, things couldn’t possibly be more different; have Smith & Co. felt a change within
the group?
“Only really us getting closer,” Smith says. “We’ve grown up quite a lot since we made the first album. We were 18, so we understand in general each other
a bit more and understand the world, I guess,
slightly more.”
Having known each other for half of their lives, you’d almost expect the young trio to be operating through telepathy at this stage.
“We all think quite similarly,” he acknowledges, “and we have an idea where things should end up. Even if we don’t know exactly what that is, it seems like we’re all headed in the same direction.”
In spite of their inherent closeness, The xx have a somewhat unfriendly way of writing music. Sim and Madley-Croft have spoken about how they operate almost like solo artists until the final product
comes together.
“It always starts with the lyrics,” Smith explains, “and they’re usually just like poems. Romy and I send them back and forth over the internet or, on a couple of occasions on this album, they were written from scratch together, which I’d never done before.”
When a band rises to fame as quickly and triumphantly as The xx have, there’s always a risk that their enormous audience will become a part of the group, unknowingly dominating how things are done, as the musicians ask themselves, ‘Will our fans like this?’ As album number two started to take shape, did The xx find themselves thinking about this invisible fourth member?
“I think we would have done, if we had gone straight into recording after coming off tour, but we took a year off and just got back to our lives and kind of forgot about the whole… everything, really. It was nice just to feel a bit normal again, just to go out with our friends, so by the time it came to actually having some songs written and being ready to record them, we were just so eager to get them down that we didn’t really think about anything but finding the time to actually put them down.”
The new songs were mostly put down in a rather unglamorous-sounding room in London.
“It was just us three and we spent the entire time in that one spot, so it had to be right,” Smith says. “It wasn’t even a studio, it was just an apartment that I put curtains on the walls of and some speakers and some nice equipment, but it’s even less well equipped than the studio we recorded our first album in.”
He wasn’t tempted to go Rick Ross on it and pimp himself out with the best gear money could buy?
“I just knew exactly what I wanted, so I spent a good amount of money on a few specific items that I knew I could use and I could make things sound good with,” he sniffs. “I kind of wish I was back in the studio being able to do that again.”
As opposed to answering nosy questions about what it was like being in the studio?
“Yeah,” he laughs, in a rare cheery moment, “but it’s been interesting having to talk about the album, because we barely really talked that much when we were making it. It showed a lot about it that we didn’t even know.”
The idea of Smith, a notorious night owl, toiling away into the wee hours, cobbling together the fizzy beats on xx, is looked upon somewhat romantically by fans, but was he able to curb his late-night habits the second time around?
“I have a bit more of a life now,” he points out. “I didn’t go quite as far as I did with the first album. This time we were working from like 5pm ‘til sunset and we’d finish recording at like 2am and I’d carry on until 5am.”
It’s an affliction he shares with collaborator Drake. While we’re on the subject, how did Smith feel watching ‘Take Care’ being performed by the Canadian showman?
“I didn’t really know what to say. It was very, very strange for a track to go from something I made on a plane on my laptop to being played in the Millennium Dome to thousands of people. It’s just weird, but flattering.”
Next stop for The xx is something even bigger, a performance with the BBC Philharmonic.
“It’s gonna be live on Radio 1,” Smith tells me, “and at the moment we’re just working with an arranger and composer and working out which part of the set we can orchestrate with a 70-piece orchestra, so there’s quite a lot of work to put in... but it’s fun just to do something new.”
Half an hour later, my questions about crowd-pleasing and career trajectory are still troubling Smith. Whatever he said earlier, it’s clear that being forced to distil his craft into quotable media morsels is merely an unpleasant offshoot of what he likes to do most, ie. stay up late in the studio, fiddling about with bits of songs.
He tells me that his bandmates “never talk about what their lyrics mean,” and I’m beginning to think that Smith thinks of his sounds the same way; he makes them in one world, people listen to them in another, and never the twain shall meet.
It all becomes clear when I ask about the album’s title Coexist, which was discovered during Madley-Croft’s research into the artwork.
“There was a line she found which said that oil and water don’t mix, they agree to peacefully coexist…” Smith explains, and he needn’t say any more.

Coexist is out now on Young Turks.