The three members of the xx cross from Poland into Lithuania overnight, trying to sleep inside a bus that judders and lurches along an uneven border road. It is December, an unforgiving time to be touring eastern Europe, and snow that was coming in committedly when they left Warsaw still falls when they arrive in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. It’s cold here, beer-jacket weather, hot-toddy weather, get-messed-up-after-the-gig-to-distract-from-the-bite weather. But the band – Oliver Sim, Romy Madley Croft, Jamie Smith – travel in good, sober order. They toured their first album, in 2010, blinkingly, greenly, through a fog of personal tragedy. Two years later they got through a second-album tour mostly by partying wherever they went. (Moving from “encore to after-show… chasing the night,” as the band phrase it in a new song, Replica.) When we meet, the release of album number three, I See You, is looming. For various reasons they expect to take this one around the world in steadier, less emotionally hectic fashion.
Arriving in central Vilnius at 10am, the trio alight from the tour bus and teeter over icy pavement, straight to their hotel rooms for some extra sleep. I’m in the lobby waiting for them when they emerge, one by one, at midday. Sim (27 years old, bassist and co-vocalist) appears in a splendid fur-lapelled coat. His enormous green eyes lend him at once a striking handsomeness as well as the perpetual suggestion of worry. More so than Sim, Madley Croft (27, lead guitar and vocals) is dressed for her terrain: leather boots, hoodie, black-camo raincoat, a hat over her dark shoulder-length hair. A stitched image on the hat is faded and hard to distinguish and when I ask her what it is she answers in a soft, whistling voice: “Three babies dancing.” She says she found the hat in a skate shop somewhere. Smith (28, percussion and production) might have found his entire outfit in a Sports Direct somewhere. He comes down in Nike T-shirt, Adidas trackies, his copper curls sprouting over the strap of a backwards-turned cap.
There’s something drastic and strange about Smith’s appearance that takes a moment for me to identify. He’s smiling. I find this hard to reconcile with our last encounter.
In the hotel lobby, the band and I reminisce about meeting last time, more than four years ago, when I shadowed them for a couple of days as they toured through Los Angeles. They were about to debut Coexist, their second album, high in the British and American charts. Their first album, xx, had won the Mercury prize in the UK and gone gold in the US. Its sound – sexily gnomic lyrics sung huskily over precise and chilly synths – was exerting a blatant influence on the music industry, imitators of the xx springing up all over the place. Now Baz Luhrmann was courting them for one of his soundtracks, and he showed up one night in Hollywood to buy rounds of drinks. The band went to after-parties backstage at the Ford theatre, by the pool at the Chateau Marmont, on the roof of a downtown hotel.
I remember the experience for the hilarious difficulty of interviewing Smith, who was then emerging as the silent genius of the group, an unfeasibly talented engine-room operator who was responsible for so much of their music’s distinctive and influential texture. At the time he betrayed none of the weight or assurance of someone with great and growing industry clout. Instead he seemed to trust that if he stayed quiet enough during our encounters I might forget he was there.
These days Smith tells stories, tells jokes. While he speaks he taps his fingers in time to some imagined and apparently buoyant interior music. If there’s a reticence to him, still, it transmits as a cooler and more grown-up nonchalance. “Life,” is his deadpan explanation for the transformation. “I went from being 23 to 28. It happens to everyone.” Perhaps there’s a little more to say. Under his solo stage name, “Jamie xx” has long tended a fertile sideline as a DJ and a producer of other artists’ work. In summer 2015 he released an album of his own, In Colour, that was enough of a hit to fuel a substantial world tour. He was nominated for the Mercury and Grammy awards. “It’s easy to see how much Jamie’s changed,” says Madley Croft. “It’s obvious, because of his personal career – he’s more confident.”
Sim and Madley Croft made guest appearances on their friend’s solo record. But this was very much Smith’s project, one that “had been building up for quite a while”, and its gestation contributed directly to the years-long wait between the xx’s second and third albums. The band started writing material for I See You as long ago as 2014. But the “finish line”, as Sim describes it, “kept getting pushed further away into the future”. He is diplomatic about the difficulty “of Jamie just not being available. Even though he was really pushing himself, and not giving himself time off, getting face-time with him was tricky”. Smith is apologetic. “I was busy doing my thing. It was going well. I was happy in that way. But I was also anxious about finishing our [group] record. I definitely felt bad, coming and going. And I did understand that Romy and Oliver were really anxious to finish it. Because they didn’t have… They obviously had things going on. But they didn’t have a creative outlet.”
The band get ready to leave the hotel for an afternoon of rehearsals. Before we spill out into taxis I take Sim out of earshot of the other two, and ask: What about jealousy? We can’t always rely on ourselves, as humans, to be perfectly delighted by our friends’ achievements. What did you and Romy really feel while Jamie was flying solo?
“There were moments when I felt jealous of his time,” Sim says.
And of his success?
Sim speaks carefully. “I think of jealousy as: ‘I don’t want you to have this.’ And I felt proud of Jamie. I felt pleased for him that he had all of this going on. But, at the same time, I wanted this. Me and Romy wanted this. We wanted to be back up there, on stage, with a fire lit underneath us.”
The trio strongly believe the hiatus has been beneficial to their music. I agree. After his secondment in a more dancefloor-orientated world, Smith has brought back with him to the xx a sense of pace and playfulness, obvious from the very first hands-in-the-air bars of the new record. Across its length the album has a brewed, stewy, experience-enriched quality, subtly but importantly different from the older stuff, which always had terrific clarity but which could lack human warmth.
From a bald commercial perspective the band’s absence does not seem to have unduly alienated the fanbase. All tickets for seven nights at London’s Brixton Academy in March recently sold out. Still, there have been some surreal moments for Sim and Madley Croft during their semi-enforced sabbatical. They describe to me how bizarre it felt, trotting along to watch Smith play alone at Brixton, a spiritual home of sorts for the xx and a place they had played many times together. Only now two-thirds of the band were stood among the audience – craning like everyone else to see over the next head.
Rehearsals are taking place at the venue for tonight’s show, a mid-sized arena on the outskirts of Vilnius. I ride there in a cab with Madley Croft, who has a digital camera and takes occasional pictures of the bleak winter landscape. “Touring,” she says, “means seeing countries through the windows of cars.” Tomorrow the band will fly to Japan. After that Australia, then Scandinavia, and eventually back for those Brixton dates and four other UK shows. They were on a killer tour the last time we met too. Then, they spoke to me about how strange an existence it was, their every need taken care of while they moseyed from encore to after-party. They made it sound cloying but also comforting, “cocoon-ing,” in Madley Croft’s phrase. At the time I wondered what the effects might be, of the long tour finishing and all the machinery of the band falling away, leaving them to their own devices again.
It took an adjustment, Madley Croft says, of varying degrees for the three of them. She thinks Sim probably found it the hardest. “Oliver, to me, is the natural performer of the band. I know he gets a lot of confidence from performing. And I sensed he might not be quite sure what his place was, for a while, when we were off stage.” For herself, Madley Croft used the time away to address private matters she’d ignored for some time. “Stuff from the past. Losses I’ve had. It all kind of… hit me.”
We’d touched lightly on this in Los Angeles – her difficult backstory, intimately and pretty cruelly interwoven with the backstory of her band. She was only 11, in 2001, when her mother died. (This was a few years before she started writing music with Sim – a friend from school in Putney, London – as a form of escapism.) Her father died in early 2010 when she was 20. (By now, with Smith, another schoolfriend, the three were established as the xx. They were performing an early show in Paris when the news about Madley Croft’s father reached them.) Towards the end of 2010 a close friend of her’s, a cousin, died too. (The band had just won the Mercury and were becoming quite famous.) By the time I met them all in Los Angeles, Madley Croft was 22. She’d barely stopped touring or recording since her double bereavement in 2010, and I got the sense of a young woman putting a lot on hold.
“The last few years have been, for me, about facing all of it,” she explains. “At the time I just went for it.” Encore, after-party, encore, after-party. “It’s only on reflection I think how intense everything must have been, and how I just pushed it down. But everything comes up. I’ve learned that everything comes up.”
When we met before she was in the first months of a relationship with a designer, Hannah Marshall, who was then travelling with the band. They were sweet together, newly and sorely inked with matching tattoos – patently in deep, even though Madley Croft seemed a little awkward in a public setting, as if she was getting used to her band-life and love-life intermingling. “When we first got together Hannah was always so much better in social situations than me. I felt so shy. But through being with her I feel so much more at ease. I’ve noticed that’s happened in a different way with me than it has with the boys. And I know it’s because I’ve been with someone.”
The couple recently got engaged. It was the stability of the relationship, Madley Croft says, that gave her the grounding she needed to look squarely at her past. She went from pushing down thoughts about her parents to “actually kind of craving going to therapy and dealing with it... It’s an ongoing thing,” she says. “I feel like I’ve dealt with a chunk. With a hell of a lot more than I ever did before.” And the self-examination has borne creative fruit. Right in the middle of the xx’s new album comes its tenderest and most nakedly spiritual track, Brave for You, a song that Madley Croft wrote about drawing strength from the memory of her parents.
We pull into the car park of the venue, sure we’ve got the right place because we can see the steaming figure of Sim, shivering in his coat, smoking a cigarette. Together he and Madley Croft clomp inside, shed their layers, and walk to the stage. She takes up her Les Paul guitar, he his Fender, and behind them on an elevated platform Smith finds his place among an array of mixers and synthesisers. Performing for an empty arena, they play a few old songs and a couple of newer ones, including Brave for You. Smith taps out a high rhythmic pulse. Sim waits for his moment to apply some bass. Madley Croft closes her eyes and sings: “When I’m scared/ I imagine you there/ Telling me to be brave…”
The rehearsal lasts a long time: hours. I perch with Smith in his mixing station and watch over his shoulder as the trio pick through 20-odd songs. Sometimes the noise, ringing off the exposed concrete of the arena, is tremendous. During uptempo songs Smith starts dancing, big-stepping in time like a cowboy at a line dance, thrashing his head like a metalhead in a mosh pit. Impossible to imagine, Madley Croft says, the old Jamie doing this.
Sim, frowning, the least at ease on stage today, unsticks a printed set list from the floor. He thinks back to the previous gig in Poland and says: “Oh. I spoke in the wrong place last night.” After a lifetime trying to maintain belief in the spontaneity of artist-to-audience banter, it’s a little shattering for me to learn that the xx arrange their chatty interludes in advance. But these guys are precision workers, broody perfectionists; and they’re rusty in their stagecraft after so long apart. When they rehearse a mid-gig spectacular of mashed-up songs, the music builds and builds, smoke machines gushing, some glorious climax imminent… until at the clinching moment Smith slaps a button on his mixer and a deafening error-sound hums around the arena.
Everyone flinches. “Argggh,” shouts Smith. The mixer is unplugged and hauled away in machine-disgrace. The band take a break. Smith consults a roadie about a replacement. Sim drifts off stage. Madley Croft picks up her phone and taps out a message to someone.
I’m starting to see that these three took very different paths away from their last album. Madley Croft into domestic stability and a worked-for interior peace. Smith into self-affirming solo work. Sim’s route took him… where? He has always been the xx’s most elliptical member, a charming if skittish, ambiguous interviewee. Unlike Madley Croft he has resisted overt statements about his sexuality. And the particulars of his family background, apparently as troubled as hers, remain much more opaque. When the New Yorker published a deep-digging profile of the band in 2014, the reporter was obliged to include a vague line about Sim’s “early life, which was scarred by family dysfunction that he declines to discuss”. Madley Croft has grown over time into openness, Smith into sureness. Sim seems still on his way somewhere.
Maybe there’s a clue in the new music. I See You has a couple of tracks that come over as more direct and less cryptic than anything else in the band’s back catalogue. A Violent Noise, for example, seems to be about partying too much, overdoing it (“You’ve been staying out late/ Trying your best to escape”). In a subsequent track, Replica, chiefly written and sung by Sim, it sounds as if an unnamed parent is being addressed: “I’ve turned out just like you… They all say I will become a replica/ [That] your mistakes were only chemical… 25 and you’re just like me… Is it in my nature to be stuck on repeat?”
Away from the rehearsal I sit down with Sim and tell him the lyrics to Replica register, to me at least, as a kind of confession. A child of addiction, growing up to worry he has become an addict himself, wondering if the problem is unavoidable and hereditary or whether he can go down a different path. Does that sound accurate?
Sim, his large eyes open to their fullest extent, stares over my head for a while. Then he clears his throat and says: “Um. Well. That’s kind of bang on, your reading.”
He takes a breath. “Yeah. Just kind of… That was a big thing to deal with, over the past couple of years. Just kind of dealing with my relationship with using [drugs]. With drinking. And, um. And also my parents. Yeah.” He says it’s a shock to realise that the private matters underlying this song have come over so plainly. “This conversation is a bit of an eye-opener.”
He started writing Replica, he says, a couple of years ago. “Before I was taking any action. Or saying anything out loud.” The band’s 2012 tour had finished. “The pace we were moving at stopped, suddenly. It was a pretty flaky existence… Y’know, I left school thinking I wanted to live my life like a nomad, free-floating. Turns out I absolutely need some kind of structure.” Living back in London again, structure-less, he thought of his drinking and drug-taking as “blowing off steam”. Later, “I started to wonder if it was still charming to be the drunkest person in a room”.
His decision to seek help “took a while. A long, drawn-out decision.” Smith was away gigging. Madley Croft was travelling the US with her girlfriend. “I felt a bit lost.” The schoolfriends all describe this period – end of 2014, start of 2015 – as the farthest apart they’d been from one another, geographically but emotionally too. As Madley Croft puts it: “We weren’t in tune. Jamie was on tour. Oliver wasn’t being entirely truthful with me about what he was going through. Walls were up.”
When they did regather, Sim brought them the lyrics to Replica. Madley Croft recalls the moment. “I thought: ‘This is very real.’ Even though everything we do is real, this felt more – transparent? It felt brave. And I loved that he let me in, to discuss it.”
Sim makes it sound inevitable it should be writing, rather than talking, that helped bring down the walls between the band. “I’m a lot better and braver in songwriting than I am in conversation.”
He says he has noticed, of course, how much his two friends have evolved in recent years. “They’ve come on in leaps and bounds.” He says he feels more sluggish in his own progress, “a bit stunted… People are like, ‘So Jamie’s done his record and toured the world. What have you done?’ To be honest, I’ve just been at home, figuring stuff out.” He doesn’t seem to realise that he’s made the most progress of everyone. I ask him how long he’s been sober.
“Eleven months,” he says.
And?
And life’s been “transitional”, he says, smiling shyly. “Quite a shift.” Tonight’s show in Vilnius, for instance, the fifth of the current tour, will be the fifth show he’s done in his career without drink. “It’s why I don’t maybe feel so confident here. I don’t have that support. I don’t have my booze blanket. Everything feels more… raw.”
Are you happier?
“I’m.” He stops and considers. “I’m… Yes, I am happy. I’m sort of adjusting to a different pace of life. But yeah, I’m good. I feel anxious. About the next year [of touring], and being away from home. I wonder how it’s going to play out. But I’m excited too.” He might be about to experience the beginnings of a music career for a second time. “I realise I was never entirely present before. Booze took away the nerves. But it also, like, definitely capped the highs.” If he’s sacrificed some self-confidence, he says, at least he’s gained some self-understanding. Madley Croft agrees. “I think he’s getting to know himself. Who he is, as a 27-year-old, not as a performer on stage, but in life. I’m really proud of him.”
Soon enough their rehearsal resumes. There’s not long to go until the show now, and fans are beginning to appear in the snow outside. The band practise what will be the night’s final run of songs. They try Intro, one of the first things they ever wrote together, as well as a new track, a happy-sad doozy called On Hold, which explores the ways in which life can seem to move at different speeds for different people. Transitioning from the old song to the new, Smith turns a dial on his mixer. Madley Croft steps forward and sings her half of the shared lyrics, Sim his. Then they sway, gently, by their mic stands.
At the end of the song the two guitarists lay down their instruments. Smith tidies his things. Madley Croft walks around taking a few photographs of the arena before it fills with people. Sim, before he leaves the stage, attaches a small light to his microphone stand. So that he’ll be able to find his way back to it, later, in the dark.
I See You is out now on Young Turks. The xx play UK shows from 4-17 March
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