Oliver Sim

When ‘xx’ – which with its intimacy, moodiness and lyrical tension built on intense longing is arguably the ultimate nocturnal record – was released, the band, still in their teens, were so diffident on stage that they played with their backs to the audience. Now, they have grown into their twenties and instead of sheepishness they exude authority.

With two singers and no drummer, their line-up looks unconventional. In front of a giant, clear perspex letter X, keyboard player and percussionist Jamie Smith – known as Jamie xx – triggers the rhythms and sonic textures that characterise the band’s sound. To his right is Romy Madley-Croft, chic and composed in a black jacket and trousers, possessed of a voice deeply charged with yearning. And then there’s Sim. Dressed entirely in black, his neck grazed by the strap of his bass and adorned with a leather collar, he has shed his nervousness of The xx’s early years to become a vulpine and charismatic presence, swaggering instead of hiding in the shadows. He’s an alluring amalgam of his childhood heroes – Placebo’s Brian Molko and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme – his voice, deep and gravelly, loaded with smouldering carnality.

Oliver is having a beer. It’s early in the afternoon. He looks muscled and toned; his face is angular and striking, his hair slicked. The simple earrings he’s always worn lend an air of androgyny to his figure, bestowing upon him the combination of butch and fey that has excited pop fans since the days of Billy Fury in the ’50s; an embodiment of the tension between opposites – masculinity and femininity, soul and indie, passion and repression – that makes up The xx’s allure.

In conversation, Oliver is courteous and friendly, seemingly unaware of his own charisma. Musically and visually, he has a model’s ability to radiate presence and emotion without doing very much at all. On the first album, his voice doesn’t appear until over halfway through the second track, turning sleepily uttered lines into a grand entrance. Live, his stillness creates a tension so intense it can be released with a single movement. “He’s very beautiful,” says Jamie-James Medina, the documentary photographer who has followed the band’s tours since 2010. Despite all of that, Oliver claims that The xx have never been natural performers. “I see people like Florence Welch and think, ‘You’re born to do this,’ but performing is something we’ve really had to work at,” he says. He also struggles to think of himself as a musician. “When I’m filling out visa applications and get to ‘occupation’ I always think: ‘What should I write?’ It still feels a bit unreal, that that’s my job. If a taxi-driver asks me, I say that I work in music, but that I work for a label. Otherwise, you end up having to answer questions you don’t really want to deal with.”

The pair would frequently play truant from Elliott School, a comprehensive secondary with 2,000 pupils in Putney. When the pair were 12, the US government launched airstrikes in Afghanistan. They both bunked off to protest. Later, they used to get the 14 bus to school and stay on it all the way into Tottenham Court Road. “We’d go into Soho Square, drinking energy drinks and people-watching,” Oliver says. They met Jamie Smith, often said to be so withdrawn that he makes Oliver and Romy look like motor mouths, when they were 13.

“Jamie’s become very good at talking now,” Oliver says, when I ask about his friend’s bashfulness. “He made his own record, a remix album for Gil Scott-Heron, and he was forced to go out and talk about it on his own. He’s literally been forced to speak and it’s nice. He’s very articulate.” (When I try to get Jamie on his mobile later, however, he doesn’t respond to texts or pick up the phone.)
Inspired by a visit to the Reading Festival at the age of 13, where, with Oliver’s mother, they watched Peaches and The White Stripes, and by his elder sister’s love of Aaliyah and En Vogue, the three friends formed a band playing cover versions in their bedrooms and writing their own songs late at night. Oliver and Romy would write lyrics together via e-mail or instant message.

By the sixth form they were playing proper concerts and rarely bothering to go to school; Oliver puts his attendance record at 35% and he resents the way the school has since tried to take some of the credit for The xx’s success. Musicians from other bands, including Burial, Four Tet, Hot Chip and the Maccabees also attended Elliot, but Oliver puts this proliferation of musical talent down to the sheer number of pupils rather than to any particular musical tuition they received. “It wasn’t this haven where they played us great music,” he says. “We were given loads of freedom but it was probably neglect. A lot of kids were pretty naughty and we weren’t, so the teachers concentrated on them, which meant we could go off into the music rooms and just play.”

Their first album was recorded over Christmas 2008 in a small studio at the headquarters of their label, XL Recordings, also home to The White Stripes and Adele. Music journalist Jude Rogers was one of the first to interview the band a few months later. Oliver picked her up from the station to take her to the band’s “horrible” rehearsal room. “It instantly struck me that he’s incredibly charismatic even though he’s very quiet,” she says. “He was very polite.”

At this point, The xx had four members: guitarist Baria Qureshi, another school friend, had joined after their first few gigs. She was kicked out of the band by text message, she claims, in October 2009, two months after the release of the album. “It’s the most ruthless thing we’ve done as a band,” Oliver tells me, “but it wasn’t something that just happened one day; it happened over months. About a month after the album came out we saw how much touring we had ahead of us. We knew we would just be further away from home, and at even closer quarters and for longer periods of time and it couldn’t have kept on going. It still makes me sad. We’ve not spoken since October 2009.”

Losing a band member did nothing to damage their momentum, however. Somehow on their first album, the band had created a completely modern kind of soul music, which fused guitar-based indie with the kind of dark, seductive atmosphere found in some R&B and dub-step records. The vocal interplay between Oliver and Romy, loaded with melancholy and lust, layered itself on top of a sound that managed to be both minimal and packed with epic emotional drama. “It’s fascinating there are two front people in the group and they coexist – literally, as that bloody new album title seems so accurately to suggest,” says author and pop theorist Paul Morley. “He seems very strong and very powerful, with that focus that a cult leader often has. He and Romy blend into each other and swap over telling stories in their own voices and yet in one voice. I like the idea that, in fact, they were fans of something like Whitney Houston and ended up accidentally sounding like Durutti Column. Like all great pop music, it aspires to be something and in its failure it becomes something else.”

The band steadily picked up famous fans. In New York, Courtney Love appeared backstage at their gig at the Bowery Ballroom, while the after-show party was attended by Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles. “She was all over them,” says Rogers, who was covering the show for ‘New Musical Express’ “Romy retreated a bit but you could see Oliver starting to enjoy it.”

Even so, an air of reticence surrounds the band. Oliver goes so far as to claim that he is the most outgoing member, then adds “but maybe that’s not saying too much.” Indeed I find that, the more I probe, the more he closes up, and that, the more he does, the more intriguing he becomes, in the same way that the most emotionally charged elements in The xx’s music are the silences and the almost subliminally deep bass sounds. As in a Harold Pinter play, the most significant moments are the pauses, before Madley-Croft’s guitar chimes in or the two vocalists smokily swap lines. (Interestingly, they never harmonise. “Maybe on album three,” Oliver laughs.) “All I can hope is that people will connect with the music,” says Oliver. “That’s why there are no ‘hes’ and ‘shes’ in the lyrics, and why we don’t like to pinpoint a certain time or place.”

On the subject of ‘hes’ and ‘shes’, Romy came out in a joint interview with her girlfriend in ‘Tourist’ magazine – she’s dating the fashion designer Hannah Marshall.

Oliver was outed in the first interview he ever gave. “I felt frustrated about it to begin with,” he says. “I hadn’t wanted it to be a crucial part of who I was.” On reflection, though, he’s pleased that it was said so early on. “It doesn’t seem a huge part of what we’re doing as a band anyway,” he says.

In September of that year, the band won the Mercury, and by year’s end, their music had suffused so far into British culture that the prime minister, David Cameron, and his wife were said to be fans. “I heard that they liked cuddling to it,” shudders Oliver. “It’s something you don’t want to give too much thought.” The band was displeased that Cameron took to the stage at the 2010 Conservative Party Conference to ‘Intro’.

More happily, Karl Lagerfeld used their music in his Autumn/Winter 2011 show, and last year designer RAF Simons told this magazine that he had listened to the album every day for a year. One year later, he still has ‘xx’ on extreme heavy rotation. “It will be the first thing I’ll put on when I arrive,” Simons says via telephone while he’s driving to his rented summer house in Italy. He recalls contacting the band to perform at his menswear show in the summer of 2011, a collection that featured shirts and coats covered in diagonal crosses. “That was effectively a direct result of me listening to that album all the time,” he says. Alas, due to conflicting schedules, the designer and the band never met.

Meanwhile The xx were embraced by R&B and hip-hop superstars. Rihanna sampled ‘Intro’ on her song ‘Drunk on Love’. In March, the band met breakthrough rapper Drake backstage at his gig in London and chatted about their mutual appreciation of Sade, the famously reclusive jazzy singer whose sultry sound can be seen to anticipate The xx. “Me and Romy have been pretty late to Sade and it’s got to that teenage point where you look up her interviews,” says Oliver. “She takes quite complex emotions and delivers them quite simply. I think that’s brave and honest and it speaks to me.”

Of the emotions delivered in his own work, Oliver claims that his lyrics on The xx’s first album were mainly fantasy scenarios (he was 15 when he wrote them and had had little real-life romantic experience to draw on), but that this time round, with ‘Coexist’, they are direct and literal. “I was surprised I was able to be as open as I was,” he says, explaining that he has swapped places with Romy, whose lyrics on the first album were autobiographical. She agrees. “We’ve opened up to each other and let a wall down,” she says. “Before, we were writing almost like solo artists and collaging it together.”

That seems to be a prospect he is nervous about. At the moment, Oliver rarely gets stopped on the street. Despite the pervasive success of the first album, and despite his peculiarly striking looks, he can walk amongst his fans in his east London neighbourhood unnoticed, which, by all accounts, is something he enjoys. Romy claims that when the band are back in London, Oliver “really does just like to spend time in his flat, watching films.” “If I do get recognised I get called Jamie,” Oliver says, when I mention how surreal it must be to be waiting in the wings of giddy global fame.