THE SILENT INSURGENT

Your mum used to say that it was always the quiet boys you need to watch out for. But Jamie Smith, AKA the hushed man of electronics in The xx, is getting louder and louder.

Originally published in Clash Magazine 
Cover Story June 2011
Words: Matthew Bennett
Photos: Samuel John Butt

The xx ripped through our record collection two years ago with a spacious, naïve and beautifully distanced debut. Since then Jamie has grown into a role that as a self-confessed shy boy, he never thought he’d dreamt of playing.

On the eve of his debut solo single (released on the increasingly essential Glasgow label Numbers) we caught Jamie as he emerged fresh off the plane from a DJ gig in Israel and midway to rehearsals for The xx’s second album.

At this juicy crossroads we both sat down in Dalston to give Britain’s bass culture a health check, and run the rule over the endless revivals before delving into his fears that The xx may have lost its vital innocence ahead of writing their sophomore effort.

“When the second xx album drops I’ll miss DJing,” quietly ponders the twenty-two-year-old. “But I really enjoy both sides of the performance, and I never thought I would. I was the quiet kid at school. I never imagined I would be getting up in front of people and playing sets.”

Jamie famously attended Elliot’s Secondary in London, also the proud educators of Hot Chip, Burial and Four Tet, and from this list we suspect the dinner ladies have been shaking in some special ingredients to their culinary creations. Just like these above alumni, Jamie is obsessively engaged in tinkering with the DNA of our thriving dance scene.

Britain’s bass culture is restless. It’s also unnervingly sensitive. Not since the early-’90s when rave splintered so categorically into separate genres has there been so many fledgling sounds to mingle within. Since the ground zero of acid house in 1988 our shores have witnessed an eternal search for a reformatted beat. Now in 2011 we see genres such as funky, juke, future-garage, dubstep, grime and dubbage all slithering and mingling in each other’s shadows and imperceptibly influencing this network of cousinly niche.

Rarely before has our scene lacked such rigidity, or has it been so keen to mutate so quickly, and, fascinatingly, seldom has it defied any sort of description as we have now. Post-dubstep anyone? Fuck off!

“Well, I like the fact that it’s all so convoluted now,” agrees Jamie. “I like how quickly it all moves. It seems like there isn’t even a thread to follow now. There is just so much music out there. I definitely can’t listen to enough. I like the fact that in two months I can go into [Shoreditch club] Plastic People and between the two occasions the music has evolved already.”

One thing is for sure: Jamie Smith is at home in a nightclub. He’s a regular punter at FWD>> and a repeated performer at London’s bass-video-blog-wet-dream that is The Boiler Room; a weekly and exclusive private club session, tactically deployed on a Tuesday evening during pub hours and featuring a who’s who of current bass manoeuvres.

Ironically, Jamie’s creative input into the spaciously arranged xx album brewed the force that unleashed a calm breeze of influence that now blows through clubland two years later. In January Clash’s cover star was James Blake, who deployed his equally quiet revolution in electronic music, adding if anything more space to his throbbing sub-bass epistles. Add in the pregnant pauses of Darkstar, the low-flying intimacy of Pariah and the sparse genius of Actress and there’s a silent wave of sway that now engulfs Jamie as he stands on the dance floor in his beloved Plastic People.

Yet he and his band members remain at a loss as to why listeners were so keen to embrace their serene music, which was so against the noisy trend in August 2009: “We don’t know,” Jamie admits. “We have no idea about this. We are very appreciative of the support but we can’t understand why the public has embraced our music so deeply. Maybe because there was so much over-production going on in the last ten years that it was refreshing to have something that’s not purposefully produced to sound like it was made in a bedroom. Rather it was ACTUALLY made in our bedroom.”

Whatever the cause, Jamie’s MPC sampler has subtly triggered ripples that have brought back new exciting music to his own ears borne from others’ hands. As such we take a quick health check of some his influences found emanating from the nation’s clubs, cars and headphones recently.

First up: was Jamie ever into grime? And where does he stand on it now? “Definitely,” he concurs. “I was listening to grime more then dubstep a few years ago, stuff I heard at [the Brixton club] Mass when I first started going out. They’d just play grime instrumentals, which is what dubstep evolved out of. And our tour photographer, Jamie-James Medina, used to photograph the whole grime scene - all the Rinse FM dudes - so he collected old grime records and he gave me PILES of great grime vinyl. They are so nice to have! Even (DJ) Martyn, who plays a lot of house and techno, has started playing old grime, just a bassline and beat; it’s really deep stuff. It’s like the new deep house.”

Grime had a funny experience over the last twelve months. After many had said the genre was on its knees, it hit the glitz of the charts. Propelled by the fame of Tynchy Stryder, its Radio 1-sponsored acceptable face, a host of others found success such as Tinie Tempah, Skepta and Chipmunk.

So what future does grime have going into the summer of 2011? “I think it has a massive future,” he nods. “But not in the underground. All the people that were doing grime did it because they loved the mainstream stuff. There were so many people trying to make rap music, and it’s hard for people to get to that point. But they are finally there, at that MASSIVE place - I think Wiley pretty much invented that whole sound, and he needs to have more credit.”

Secondly: where does he stand on dubstep? Is it over? “I think the word ‘dubstep’ is over. You can’t really say ‘dubstep’ anymore without there being certain connotations. But there is still very innovative half-step music out there, but I don’t think it’s called that anymore.”

Over the last two years, and since The xx crept into our ’pods, the biggest trend (or fad perhaps?) to reap its way through dance music (though predominantly only in London) was the tenuously termed genre of UK funky. Spawning dance moves like the ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ or the ‘Migraine Skank’, it certainly struck a nerve with school kids. But its legacy looks fragile; its busy tribal drums are perhaps just a symptom of a house revival surfacing in an incongruous spot. And Jamie wasn’t impressed either: “I think it’s pretty much over. Some of the better records influenced some deeper music, like with the whole Soca rhythm thing,” the youngster admits. “And there’s some good house music going about now with those same rhythms but I always saw UK funky as having cheap production. I never really got into it, it’s definitely fading out.”

The next genre we discuss is that of juke, the fast Chicago strain of house music that has infected our strains of bass: “You can tell that this has been the most recent influence,” Jamie observes. “Joy Orbison’s latest release [‘Wade In’ on Hot Flush] is completely hard house, it’s great! There’s loads of stuff on Hessle Audio now as well that’s very jukey. There was a period last year when juke was getting really big so everything was getting boring, but we have come away from that now.”

Having seen Jamie play a few DJ sets recently it’s been hard to ignore his growing appreciation of a house groove. A trend particularly driven home as he played back-to-back on the decks with the stunning Yasmin on Valentine’s night at the Boiler Room. “I think that house thing happens to all DJs!” he smiles. “I got into house like most other people, going to clubs and wanting to have a proper dance. I love the 4/4 rhythm and I love making something interesting around that structure, that same standard thing that’s in every house track. It’s way more hard to make something unique that way, than already having an interesting rhythm to start with. So when you hear something good, then you know it’s really good.”

But fans of Jamie’s remixes, and admirers of his melancholic ‘Far Nearer’ anthem on Numbers may be most comfortable with his subtle manipulation of the garage beat. Throw in his well-digested remix of Florence And The Machine’s ‘Your Love’ alongside the stoned ‘Basic Space’ remix that’s almost half-time 2-step, and you can see how the irrepressible rhythm that dominated both pirate and commercial airwaves a decade ago is still very much alive.

When he was at school, one of Jamie’s friends in fact kept buying him garage records. For example, tunes like ‘Body Groove’ by Architechs, which at the time were straight-up Radio 1 gouda. Now he drops them in his sets: “I find it interesting because it’s NOT 4/4 but still really danceable. Also there was NEVER any US music that used the garage rhythm - they never got into 2-step - and I always liked it. But I haven’t been listening to that much new garage. I loved going to record shops, trawling through white labels and finding tunes that you have no idea who even made them. I like to drop a couple of those into a set. It has a lot of R&B influence - I got into R&B through Ollie in The xx.”

Jamie’s formative musical experiences were passive listens to his parents’ jazz and soul records in the house. After years of playing instruments as a child, his uncles, who were both DJs, gave him a set of decks. He reveals how young these talents were incubated: “I was ten! So I started from there. But I never played gigs for a long time. Then I started to DJ at a bar in Camden, this was before The xx - one bar was called Lock 17 and the other one was called Under Solo. Back then I was DJing soul and jazz.”

And here we were thinking Jamie’s DJ career was a recent fad of the famous. Clearly not the case, and in speaking to him the knowledge and appreciation of musical genealogy and generations quickly comes out - he understands the cyclic nature of music. “I do feel that,” he declares, “but maybe that’s because I am young and haven’t lived through the first cycle. I am sure there are cycles within the cycles. From collecting albums you are aware of a broad sound, but I think if you grew up within that sound then it would be different. Like, if I grew up within the late-’60s and ’70s during the whole soul music thing then there would be whole sections that seemed quite distinct from each other.”

It’s perhaps this delicate fostering of history that led Richard Russell, AKA SL2, head of XL Records and former hardcore producer, to hand over his acclaimed recent project with Gil Scott-Heron to Jamie to remix. Russell found Gil Scott-Heron in jail before writing a hand-written letter to broker an understanding that the former rave lord was going to help Scott-Heron break his sixteen-year-recording hiatus. The sixty-two-year-old went on to lay down the acclaimed ‘I’m New Here’ over a landscape of wonky beats that resounded as one of 2010’s strongest releases.

Did Jamie know of Russell’s background before the label boss tentatively bestowed such an intense, proud and unique story on Jamie to rework? “No, not at all,” he says. “I mean, I knew about The Prodigy and the rave history. I didn’t know his records and his DJing history. I don’t usually get on that well with many people, or rather I am not often that able to talk to people, but with Richard I really can. I suppose we are into the same music, we just get each other.”

Rather than this just be another remix project, XL Records promoted the whole thing as very much Jamie’s release, changing the name to ‘We’re New Here’ - evidence of how much the label had their faith invested in the then twenty-one-year-old. And Jamie, normally so quiet and shy in demeanour, was possessed by a vision. He stated after the album came out that he was keen for the album to be “50% about Gil Scott-Heron and 50% about Jamie xx”. Some would say this was bold and ballsy? “Well, like with all my remixes, I wouldn’t be very happy if I just messed around with someone else’s sounds,” he counters. “I need to do something with it that I am proud of, that sounds like me, that has an element of the original. I have never been into remixes that sound just similar, so I wasn’t going to change that for Gil either. Richard’s album complemented Gil in a certain way. I wanted my album to be completely different.”

The finished album took the soul of Scott-Heron but lit up his voice with a more colourful, nocturnal bed of music that was a direct broadcast from the dancefloor of Britain in 2011. However it wasn’t all smooth sailing: describing Gil as “scary”, initial meetings were muted, as Jamie explains: “I didn’t speak to him for that long. I don’t think that he gets on with many people either, so it was a bit hard for me to speak to him. He gets on with Richard really well, which is why the whole thing worked.”

Some people handle stress in certain ways. But how did he handle the pressure of remixing one of XL’s most startling albums in years, featuring the man credited with inventing rap, and a mystical figure he’d heard for years over Sunday lunch with his parents? “I didn’t think about it - if I started thinking too much it wouldn’t have worked. I listened to what Gil was saying on the album, but I couldn’t think about who he was or what had done in the past. It was only after I had finished it, that I had met him and he had heard it that it dawned on me! I produced it naively - which works. And it works for The xx as well, working in a naive way. We didn’t have a clue what was going on when we made that record.”

As we speak Jamie, Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim are working on The xx’s second album. Our conversation inevitably started to migrate towards that topic next, as Jamie openly reveals his hopes and fears when I ask about the nature of the conversations pre-writing. “We haven’t really talked about it. We just started making music again. We have a studio just down the road - a cave with no windows, and just two amps. We wanted a really simple set-up again so we didn’t overdo it. It’s going slowly but well - like the last one did, except without having to go to school! And that’s a fact that I hope things will move a little more quickly.”

When probed on what the second album sounds like in comparison Jamie smiles and plays the air bass guitar. “Oliver has this bassline that he’s been playing where he can change between the sound of the first album and the sound of the second album, and it gets slightly darker. And maybe more dance influence in there.”

Their debut album was unique in a storm of hypey dance music in 2009. Whilst the club trends focused on attention deficient disordered breakdowns, distended build-ups and narcotic, fidget basslines, this trio used silence as its main weapon. It was forged at night, by a group of outsiders, isolated in society but tethered together as marginalised individuals.

But does Jamie worry that all the distance and disenfranchised voodoo that made their album unique may have been washed away as the trio traversed the world as acclaimed musicians? “Yes. That is the worry,” he confesses. “The naivety of the first album was a really big part of it. [Pauses] But we had a short break in London where we lived like we would have if it were three years ago. We acted like kids, because we didn’t get that before. We just went away on tour. So we had a break, and found time to get back to our normal lives. And it worked out I think; we are back together making music that we really like and we’re not considering other people.”

He goes on to describe how the new songs see Romy and Oliver swapping their traditional roles. Whereas Romy used to be quite mystical and Ollie was quite straight-up and literal, now they seem to have crossed paths and are playing opposites roles. How this may affect the sound of the record we can only wait to hear.

To this backdrop how does Jamie feel that he may have changed in the last two years as an artist? “I feel like I know what I am doing WAY more. Also, I am open to a whole new world of music that I probably hated before. Now I love it all; the last two years has made me a lot more appreciative of all of that music. I’m lots more confident. I am able to talk to people slightly better. Before I didn’t really meet that many people. Now I meet SO MANY people.”

Our time was nearly up, but before Jamie vanished to meet the others in that windowless basement, we had time for one more question: what is Jamie’s biggest fear? “I’m not sure,” he puzzles. “I guess having to go back to setting up your own stage. Something stupid like that. Or going back to doing really small, horrible gigs where people don’t listen to your music. Again.”

If these are his darkest fears then it seems the age of naivety is still well in place. “But if it didn’t work out then I don’t think we’d go back to that,” he continues. “We would just start to make different music.” And with that he wandered off to meet his two friends, to piece together the next stage of their quiet insurgency.