Silent stars of Electric Picnic, The xx are the hotly-tipped act who actually deliver, holding audiences rapt with their whispered vocals and beautifully muted guitars. Enigmatic but utterly down-to-earth, the London twenty-nothings stole the show from seasoned eighties acts and flamboyant upstarts like Florence and the Machine. Their album tracks are minimal and confident beyond their years. Their quietly devastating cover versions will make you cry. After seducing a packed-out Electric Arena into spellbound silence, singer and guitarist Romy Madley-Croft joined Totally Dublin for a chat behind the pie stalls, to talk about art school, the witching hour, and Womack and Womack.
This must be your first year of doing the festivals..
Yeah, we just came from the Secret Garden Party, it reminds me of a smaller version of Electric Picnic. There were lots of really cool smaller attractions, quite like this.
You’re all still so young; going to a school with famous musical alumni, when did it dawn on you that things were getting serious, that being in a band was realistic career option?
It still hasn’t dawned on me. Its just something we’ve always done, for the love of it. I was going to study art, I’d been doing a foundation course in graphics in college and was going to continue. Then the music started to go really well…
Weren’t you signed for two years before releasing anything?
Yes, it was all very gradual. We started working with Young Turks, but there was never any pressure about releasing. They gave us a rehearsal space, then when we were ready we gave them the album.
It’s interesting, I first read about the XX two years ago in a magazine, you were alongside Ipso Facto and The Horrors as ‘the new wave of gloomy youth’!
I didn’t know that!
Did people ever try to groom you to fit alongside different ‘waves’ and trends?
No, not at all. We’re all quite reserved people; we didn’t set out just to make friends, or get in with certain groups. I mean, I’m friends with the drummer from Ipso Facto, and they’re a really great band, but I wouldn’t place us alongside them. We’ve never found ourselves part of any particular London scene. I think people find it hard to describe us in any one genre; we sort of missed out on that.
Listening to your album, the sound is very restrained; it seems to have been more about taking away. Could there have been a very different version of the XX, say if you’d stuck with Diplo as a producer?
Definitely. But I think luckily, well I don’t mean luckily, but you know… we had a very strong idea about how we wanted to sound. We liked the demos just how they were. So when it came to recording the album, we realised that actually we should keep as close to the original demos as possible. We found that there was quite a lot of space as well, which at first we hadn’t realized was there.
The silence is, in a way, what makes your sound so distinctive.
Our whole aim was to preserve the original sound. We liked how we were playing it live, so we tried to make it sound as true to the record as possible. There was an 8-track – we had the two vocals, guitar, bass and drums, and then just this space. I think perhaps some producers would have seen that as a gap to fill with their signature sounds. It would have sounded more like them than us.
Is it difficult keeping up that sense of restraint, now that you’re suddenly in much bigger venues?
Well yes, I mean that (the Electric Arena) was crazy! We just play it and hope for the best, I suppose. I don’t know if it changes in transition, if certain elements come out. There are riffs in there influenced by dance music. I think the loudness and the reverb, as well, come out much stronger.
The band seem to draw on such a mixture of influences; do you think of yourselves as part of the internet generation, with the whole idea of grabbing anything in sight and taking from it what you want?
Yes I think our generation is much more about that, you can get any kind of music you like instantly. I mean, I really like straight-up pop music, r’n’b also… I’d like to think that our generation is less snobby, that there are fewer people listening only to rock, or only listening to dance.
Your covers of Aaliyah and Womack and Womack have won lots of acclaim; have you got your eye on any more unexpected ones?
Yeah I always want to do more , especially anything that’s really different to what we do ourselves. I couldn’t say exactly what, but we’d definitely like to do some pop.
Maybe a bit of Arctic Monkeys-style song-swapping, then?
I’d love to do that! I’d love it if the Sugababes did a cover of us..
Growing up, did you have a Smash Hits idea of what life would be like in a band? Is this how you expected it to be?
Don’t know… when I first got into music I was into the Distillers and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Kills. Those were the bands I looked up to; Brody Dalle was my idea of what a singer should be.
Did you have any models in mind for your style of singing?
No, it really just came out this way! I did try at first to sing like Brody Dalle, when I started playing guitar. But the thing is, she’s smoked a lot of cigarettes in her life. No matter how much I tried I couldn’t get that low.
Do you ever want to top the silence and restraint playing live and cut loose Brody-style?
When we first played gigs, in pubs and stuff, you’re on at like twelve o’clock Friday night, everyone’s pissed and its quite loud, and people talk through the gig. We thought we’d have to make our music more loud and danceable, that we had to compete. But it turned out the quiet songs were the good ones. A couple of songs have been scrapped on the album, but I’m happy we realised we could just be ourselves, rather than trying to make dance music.
The experience of psyching yourself up must be completely different to louder bands..
I could never listen to hyped-up music before going on stage, it would just feel completely wrong. So we don’t really talk or have any pre-gig rituals; we just walk around for a bit and then go out.
The album seems so themed around youth; there’s this self-deprecating tone that’s very teenaged, that idea of small, personal dramas played out like they’re big. Like the track ‘VCR’, with the line ‘I think we’re superstars’…
I’d definitely see it that way. There are those times when you think something is really big; I wanted to play that out in our songs. When I’m writing its often about things that are very sad, very personal, but by writing them down things somehow work themselves out. It depersonalises things a bit; I can move experiences into imagery or themes like the stars, more romantic imagery. So that sort of balances it out, so I’m not singing about what happened word for word ,or talking directly about how I felt. I use writing as a therapy a lot; I write about how I’m feeling , just to get it out. But then in getting it out I sort of spin it.. I really like to just sit and write at home, though at the moment we’re all so busy its hard getting to do that.
Does it feel odd sharing the more personal lyrics with strangers?
It can be crazy seeing a crowd like that, playing them songs I wrote in my bedroom last year and knowing that they know the words. When I started I didn’t want to perform in front of anybody, I couldn’t sing in front of anyone. I still get that, sometimes.
So much has been made of you and Oliver’s decision to write the lyrics separately, then piece them together into songs. Do you ever feel the need to explain your lyrics to each other?
No we never do! You know what it’s like when you hear a song you love, and you make up your own meanings for the words.. If I heard a song I loved, then found out it didn’t mean what I thought it did, it’d be like ‘shit!’, so I really think its better just not to tell each other.
That translates into a really great sense of tension on stage...
That’s good! We’ve known each other so long, we know the ins and outs of everything and we’ve seen each other even through that awkward stage when you’re eleven. But I quite like that idea of keeping some mystery between us.
I’ve read that you write your songs at night; the album certainly had a night-time ambience to it.
Yeah definitely. When you stay up past a certain time, I think you just get far more creative, you get that odd kind of madness, where things are a bit more warped. There’s a whole other set of things to think about… I’m much more of a night-time person.
With a debut tied up so much in being young, where do you see the band going in future?
Right now we’re just concerned with getting the album played to people live. That’s the most important thing, so people can come to see us, and know all the songs.. My idea for the next album is based around playing live, just working out what it is we like to play. That’s always a part of how we write our songs. When we come together it just comes out; its not this premeditated thing. I think we re getting much better at playing, too. So I’m intrigued to see what’ll come out, once we get the time to be creative.
The xx’s glorious debut album is in record shops, good and bad now.
