By Bassia Dinnen
Having just performed at Splendour In The Grass, British trio The xx will be returning once more in January to present their latest album, I See You, live.
Performing three dates in spectacular, open-air venues, The xx are set to deliver a magical experience this January alongside sizeable support acts Kelela and Earl Sweatshirt. With I See You spawning lush singles like ‘On Hold’ and ‘I Dare You,’ it’s also proven to be their most ambitious full-length yet, setting the stage for the unforgettable headline experience that we’ve been waiting for since getting a taste in July.
A production mastermind in his own right, Jamie xx has been an instrumental force in the latest direction taken by the band. Ahead the The xx tour next year, we chat to him about his creative process, I See You and his experiences as a punter. Read below, and grab your tickets to The xx shows right here:
You’ve just released your own remix to ‘On Hold,’ how’s the response been so far?
I’ve played it a few times at clubs and people seemed to really like it. It’s very fun to play, so that’s good… I started it when I went to Iceland and I finished it within a couple of days.
You’ve also remixed everyone from Radiohead to Florence and the Machine, and produced for everyone from Drake to Alicia Keys. You’ve even written a musical score for a ballet which, but within all of this there seems to be a lot of people involved. How do you find you work best?
Every time it’s different, but I prefer for ease and for my own, well just looseness, I prefer just to be on my own, just make stuff up and not have any pressure from anybody else in the studio. And it’s quite similar when I’m working with the band as well, because they’re my best friends and we can just fuck around. I also feel like sometimes, some of the best stuff I make actually comes from the pressure of having other people in the room, even though it’s not so enjoyable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqflFMhkqHM
Working with the band, and then against working independently, how do you kind of compare the experiences?
I’m so glad that I have both, because it gets to the point where you’ve been touring for a long time with a band and then you really want to go back in the studio, but you also don’t want to spend any more time with these people that you spend every day with for a year, or two years, or however long the tour is. But, I always want to be making music. I walk into the studio, and it’ll just be me for a while, and then I get sick of myself and I have the band to come back to. So it’s really nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blJKoXWlqJk
The latest xx album ‘I See You’ – it really takes on a brighter tone than the previous works. I know some people obviously relate The xx to a melancholy feel – what kind of pushed that lighter tone do you think?
I think it’s a mixture of things… Aspects of the band got a lot bigger, so we ended up playing much bigger stages than we’ve ever done before, and big festivals. And so when we got back in the studio, we kind of had an idea about which kind of stages we’d be playing again. So in the back of our heads we were making music for bigger crowds in some moments… but also a lot of it was just not thought about. We were just finally feeling quite free and fun in the studio, and not thinking too much about what anybody else thought, which was very different to when we made Coexist. So we were just embracing that and throwing things into the pot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh2uNrIgGf4
Would you say maybe because you guys were a little bit more in your element from ‘Coexist’? Obviously you had found your ground and established that success… Do you feel maybe you guys felt a little bit more creative freedom to kind of just do what you felt?
Yeah. I think that we all thought that we had that freedom already when we made Coexist. It was really after seeing how fun it was to make I See You that we realised that we actually were very tied down by our preconceptions of what the band was and the pressure from the outside. The two albums, the process of making them were drastically different.
As a concert go-er, so what was the last gig that you actually went to? Didn’t go to perform, or because you knew a dude who knew a dude, but just literally for the tunes?
I went to this festival in Joshua Tree last week called Desert Stars, and I didn’t know anybody on the bill, but I loved the venue. It was a placed called Pappy and Harriet’s, which is in the middle of the desert and, I saw a bunch of artist that I never heard of and some of it was really great, and it was a beautiful place to see it.
