The xx
Interview Kim Taylor Bennett
Photography James Pearson-Howes
Settle down, lean in close and cock your ear because if you don’t, you won’t be able to catch a word of what the xx are telling you. The soft-spoken, black-clad foursome sit in London’s empty Institute of Contemporary Arts bar, utterly devoid of rock star swagger. There will be no grandiose statements of genius. Apparently no thought has been given to world domination and a future of excess, glitz and glamor seems unlikely. What these shy 19-year-old South Londoners seem the most excited about is unleashing their newly-wrapped, eponymous debut album out on XL offshoot Young Turks in July.
What the xx lack in articulacy they make up for in peculiarly seductive and claustrophobic pop, swirled in chiming minor chords and silken, boy-girl trade-offs courtesy of guitarist Romy Madley Croft and bassist Oliver Sim. The duo have known each other since they were two years old (Sim jokes that his first impression of Croft was to wonder why she was hogging the Play-Doh), but it wasn’t until they were 15 that a summer of boredom drove them to cover Wham! and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The band finally coalesced shortly afterwards with the addition of Baria Qureshi (keyboards/guitar) and Jamie Smith (beats/MPC sampler), bonding in music class, smoking outside the school gates and skateboarding. Pooling and distilling their collective love for artists as diverse as Aaliyah, The Kills and CocoRosie, songs like current single “Crystalised” and their cover of Womack and Womack’s funkadelic “Teardrops” are bewitching and twilit and prove that shouting isn’t always the best way to be heard.
Oliver and Romy, you two have known each other for nearly all your lives. Was it embarrassing to suddenly start singing in front of each other?
Oliver: It was the strangest and the hardest thing for me. It took ages. A lot of, ‘You sing first,’ ‘No you sing first.’ So we sang together at the same time as a compromise.
You’ve said that you think R&B is a really free genre, but I actually think it’s one of the most hemmed in types of music.
Oliver: I’m not sure where I was going with that R&B statement. I’m just a big fan of melodies and how we can incorporate that into our music.
Romy: Oliver got me into R&B via his sister. I just picked up on it being fun to sing. It’s expressive, but I don’t know if I agree with the free genre.
How do you feel when you’re onstage?
Oliver: We’re getting there. It’s so much easier because we’re with our friends. When people talk about their bands and maybe about how they don’t get on, I find it strange. I hadn’t even though that your bandmates aren’t your best friends.
And the black aesthetic? Will you ever don a hot pink T-shirt?
Oliver: I think that’s Romy’s influence on me. I used to be quite a colorful person and I’ve gradually sunk into the darkness!
Romy: I’ve always worn black and so has Baria.
Baria: Which is ironic because I used to work at Uniqlo – folding, folding, folding! I only wear color in the summer. If there’s a reason to wear color, I’ll wear it, but I didn’t open my blinds today so I didn’t know the sun had stepped up.
How do you write your lyrics?
Romy: Everything I sing I’ve written and everything Oli sings he’s written.
Oliver: The Sugababes complex.
Romy: We heard in an interview that everything they sing, they’ve written themselves and they really feel it. Then we met the writers of all their songs who wrote the lyrics as well. Disappointing. But I quite like the idea that everything I’m singing, I feel. It gives the songs two different angles. We’re singing along the same theme but from both of our experiences. But I’m never ever singing ‘I miss you’ to Oliver because it would be weird and he’s my friend.
Oliver: It’s not a Sonny and Cher kind of thing.
Are there any overriding lyrical themes on the album?
Romy: There’s quite a lot of the sun, moon, sea and the stars; nature and the zodiac. I like relating themes of romance, and using lot of the word ‘you.’ But I like to make it cryptic, so a person wouldn’t know straight away it’s about them.
How about “Crystalised”?
Oliver: It’s about someone pushing you faster and further than you’re ready to go.
Romy: Oliver found out that now you can get your ashes turned into crystals, so the first lyric is about that. I thought it was amazing taking the idea of that pressure, and applying it to a relationship.
“VCR” seems to be an ode to romantic domesticity.
Romy: I think I wrote that song before I’d even ever met anyone! I like it, but it is me at 16 years old, so it has elements, of like, looking at a baby photo and cringing!
Oliver: That’s the strange thing about a debut album. You’ve got all the songs you’ve written in your lifetime next to songs you wrote six weeks ago.
You tried to work with producers like Diplo, Kwes and Lexxx (Golden Silvers, Esser), but ultimately ended up with Jamie on production. Why?
Jamie: They did really help and the album wouldn’t have sounded like it does now if we hadn’t worked with all those people. There are certainly elements of what they did in it, but it was easier doing it ourselves. I’ve only ever produced one other band and my own stuff and I don’t really use live instruments on my own so it was quite a new experience.
Romy: Working with the other producers it just ended up sounding more like them than us and we were really trying to keep the sound of our demos.
Did you have a lot of music around you as a kid?
Romy: I owe a lot of my taste in music to my dad. He used to play a lot of Velvet Underground when I was quite young, some Jimi Hendrix. He’d always play good music at dinner. I’d ask what it was and then I’d go tell someone about it and they’d be like, ‘Where did you hear about that?’ And I’d be like, ‘I found it myself!’ Ha!
What was it like growing up in southwest London?
Baria: Nice. Quite family orientated, but still easy access to the city. We live 20 minutes away from each other.
Romy: And an hour and a half away from everyone else in the world! Where I live I never see young people anywhere. Directly ‘round my house there’s a massive school, but there’s no community of places to go hang out and be social. I drove past our school the other day and I was just like ‘Oh my God.’ It’s in the middle of an estate and it’s not that nice. It was a great place. That’s where we met and stuff, but I’m quite happy to be grown up. I don’t want to go back particularly.
Elliot Secondary School, where you all met, has educated the likes of Hot Chip, Four Tet and Burial. Is it a particularly musical school?
Romy: It’s just a comprehensive. Maybe it has a good music department because they just left us alone.
Oliver: I don’t know if they were giving us freedom or just neglecting us! You were given a lot of time to do your own thing, which I’m thankful for.
Besides music, what can’t you live without?
Oliver: God, I don’t know. Water!
Romy: Music is my love and everything relates to it. That’s how I meet and connect with people, how I build up relationships. It’s all connected to music. It completely encapsulates everything for me.
