He’s one third of a Mercury-winning band, an acclaimed remixer and a producer by appointment to pop royalty, such as Drake and Alicia Keys. Jamie Smith explains why going solo with his debut album, In Colour, suits him just fine

Jamie Smith thinks his interest in dance music might have come from his family. As a kid, two of his uncles were DJs. The first lived in New York: “He played in bars. It was around the whole chill-out thing, he was playing Latin music. He used to send mix CDs over every Christmas.” He has a vague memory of going to New York to see his uncle play. Or at least he thinks he does: “I have this thing in my head that I did go to a bar and hear him, but I don’t actually know if it’s real. I might have just made it up when I was younger, because he talked about it all the time.”

The other uncle, who taught the 10-year-old Smith how to mix two records on a pair of turntables, was based in the slightly less glamorous environs of Sheffield. He played house music on a pirate station, then got his own show on Kiss FM, and it was there that Smith – better known these days as Jamie xx – made his radio debut. Or rather didn’t make his radio debut. “He took me to the studio in Sheffield and tried to get me to speak on the radio.” There’s a pause. How did that go? Smith frowns. “I didn’t speak.”

It’s tempting to suggest that here is an example of an artist starting how he meant to go on. Twenty-six-year-old Smith may be many things – one third of the xx, an acclaimed DJ and remixer, a producer by appointment to R&B royalty including Drake and Alicia Keys, and the author of a fantastic solo album, In Colour – but one of pop’s natural raconteurs isn’t among them. I meet him twice: in a cafe around the corner from his home in east London; and in Liverpool, before he DJs at Freeze: an event that takes place in a ruined church. There is little eye contact, some awkward silences, and a lot of terse answers: a question usually yields a couple of sentences in response, rephrasing it gets you a few more words. His manner isn’t in any way surly, rude or difficult. I can’t work out whether he’s incredibly shy, a bit diffident, or just really doesn’t like talking about himself. Ironically, when trying to explain how he makes music, he occasionally sounds not unlike the sampled voice you hear at the end of SeeSaw, a track from his album: “I just … the world just …” it stammers, before lapsing into silence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oliver Sim, Jamie Smith and Romy Madley-Croft make up the xx. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose

You do find yourself wondering how someone apparently so introverted gets on in the studio with big-name R&B stars. “It’s hard, really,” he says. “Hip-hop, in particular, is really difficult because you have to smoke a lot of weed while you’re doing it. I mean, I’m happy to say ‘no’ but, at the same time, you feel like a nerd. Weed doesn’t help me at all: it just makes me fall asleep or want to be sick.

“It’s like being a producer for hire. You meet a lot of people, consider everybody’s opinion. I’ve learned a lot.” A pause. What have you learned? “Mostly that I like working on my own. But it’s good to push myself.”

He says he only made a solo album because it would force him to finish a load of tracks he had lying around, some dating back six years – “I can make something for a long time, and just not come up with an ending. It’s finishing things that I don’t enjoy” – but In Colour is far, far better than that suggests. Smith is exceptionally good at what you might call “dancefloor melancholy”, something you find a lot on old disco and early house records: an odd, ineffable sense of yearning amid the euphoria, a nod to the fact that the elation of dancing in a club is a transient thing and the real world still waits outside. The tracks with lyrics are filled with people temporarily lost in front of the big speakers, subsumed by music. “You want to change your colours just for the night with no word of it following you home,” he says, as his bandmate Oliver Sim puts it on Stranger in a Room from the album.

Smith says he works best when he’s feeling miserable. “Well, I don’t need to be, but I find that it helps. It’s not like I force myself to think of sad things, but … it’s more that I make music because it makes me happy.” So, if the music you’re making lifts your mood it’s an indication that it is a success? “Yeah, that’s it.”

In fairness, Smith is a positive chatterbox compared to the first time I met him, in 2010, in the company of his bandmates. In my memory, Smith didn’t utter a sound for two hours but, checking the recording, that’s not the case: at one juncture, he yawned and muttered something about drum machines. The xx were barely out of their teens and seemed a bit dazed by the success of their debut album, which was critically lauded, already on its way to going platinum and winning the Mercury prize. Smith had produced it “by accident” – they’d tried working with other producers, including Diplo, but ended up coming back to his original recordings – and he was already being hailed as a visionary figure by his label boss at XL Recordings, Richard Russell. “I found him really inspiring as a beatmaker in quite a specific way,” says Russell. “He was playing the MPC – which is a piece of studio equipment you’re supposed to use for recording and sequencing – as an instrument. That idea sort of blew my mind: that you could play something live and still have the sounds I love, the sample sounds. I started doing it myself straight away, on Bobby Womack’s album, on the stuff I was doing with Damon Albarn.” (“I didn’t realise you weren’t supposed to do that with it,” shrugs Smith. “I still don’t know how to use one properly.”)

Smith began DJing aged 15, playing jazz and soul in a bar in Camden, and picking up dance tracks after hearing them on skate videos – “The American ones are all punk, but the English skate videos were quite tasteful: a lot of hip-hop and electronica” – but his style changed after a visit to the legendary dubstep night FWD» at east London’s Plastic People. “Before that, I wasn’t really old enough to go to clubs and, like, actually feel it, so I didn’t really understand it: I used to think house music was just boring. Then I went to FWD» and the amount of bass that they had … it had a kind of physical effect. That made me want to make it, on a faster tempo.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smith turned Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here into a startling reinvention that marooned Scott-Heron’s voice over heaving bass and washes of electronic noise. Photograph: Mischa Richter

He began DJing alongside Mount Kimbie, James Blake and Joy Orbison, all artists who would make their mark on the post-dubstep dance scene – although, at first, Smith says he “didn’t feel like I was part of it, because I was in an indie band”. He began producing low-key remixes for Jack Peñate and Florence and the Machine, but the real breakthrough came when Russell asked him to remix Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, I’m New Here, in its entirety. He turned in a startling reinvention that marooned Scott-Heron’s voice over heaving bass and washes of electronic noise, its 21st-century sound flecked with samples from 60s and 70s soul. “I think I had an inkling [that Jamie] was part of the same thing I see myself as,” says Russell. “A bit of a continuum of pirate radio-influenced music [Russell began his career as a pirate radio DJ, before recording and remixing rave tracks under the names Kicks Like a Mule and the Valentine Boys]. And I realised I was kind of in an interesting position because Gil was 60-odd, I was in my late 30s and Jamie was just hitting 20, so there were these three very different stages of life. I felt like between the three of us, something interesting would come out of it.”

Smith released a slew of acclaimed singles under his own name, including the remarkable All Under One Roof Raving, a strange, hypnotic confection of sparse percussion, steel drums and snatches of dialogue from early-90s ravers taken from Mark Leckey’s short film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. There’s a kind of sequel to it on In Colour’s opening track Gosh: a warped take on an old hardcore rhythm topped with a gorgeous, wistful melody – the latter a homage to Orbital’s heartbreaking 1991 end-of-the-night anthem, Belfast. (The samples of MCs from Radio 1’s mid-90s One in the Jungle show are enough to make dance music fans of a certain age dewy-eyed.) A toddler when Belfast was released, Smith says he’s not obsessed with the past. “I just like the lineage and the heritage and the fact that British dance music is still progressing. I’m from London, I love London, and I wouldn’t know how else to show that love in musical terms. There’s something about British stuff that’s a bit faster, a bit harder-hitting. Just tough.”

Aside from his DJing career and the forthcoming third album from the xx, he’s scoring a ballet for the Manchester International Festival, based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s experimental book Tree of Codes. “The music’s less concise than on my album.” And there’s talk of performing some of In Colour live, at least for a TV show – the prospect of which doesn’t seem to fill him with delight. “I’m dreading it,” he says. “I have to be in front, for one thing, and then I have to orchestrate a whole band of people I don’t know – as well as Ollie and Romy, if they’re up for it – which I’ve never done. Again, it’s a good thing to do, because it’ll be a learning experience.” He doesn’t look convinced.

We head around the corner to the bombed-out church. He’s a fantastic DJ, unafraid to take risks – midway through the set, he puts on the completely beatless Stranger in a Room – maintaining a frenzied atmosphere without playing anything obvious. He stands half-hidden in dry ice, rarely looking up from the turntables. Sometimes he turns around to pull another record out of his box – he’s playing vinyl – and, with his back to the audience, dances on his own. He looks like a character in one of In Colour’s songs: momentarily lost, subsumed by the music.

The records that made Jamie xx



The Stax/Volt Revue Volume 1: Live In London by various artists (1967)

It was one of my parents’ records. They were big soul and folk fans, they liked Fairport Convention. I just remember the cover: black, with loads of different pictures of people onstage. It wasn’t that that appealed to me, though – it was the music: Otis Redding, Sam and Dave. I listened to it over and over again.

The World Is a Ghetto (Special US Disco Mix) by War (1979)

It’s nine minutes long, or something: four really long solos, a harmonica solo in the middle, this really driving disco beat. It just works. It’s not so much influential as something I like – it doesn’t get boring no matter how many times I listen to it. I play it out a lot. It’s got to the stage where I try not to, but it’s very tempting.

Dummy by Portishead (1994)

I first heard it when I was 11, probably. One of the tracks, Wandering Star, was on this skate video I liked. I bought the album just after that. I think it was the production that appealed to me. Obviously, I didn’t know about how to produce or anything then, I didn’t even know what a computer program that made music looked like, but every bit of it sounds so satisfying, it’s obvious they spent a lot of much time on it.

Double Figure by Plaid (2001)

For years, I always pronounced their name “played” – I never met anyone else who knew them or what to call them. “Played” makes more sense, actually. It’s like, techno but not techno. They use really odd chord progressions, they change keys from minor to major in the middle of a riff, which is kind of unsettling. I’d just never heard anything that was like that.

There Is Love in You by Four Tet (2010)

It was when Kieran Hebden started making stuff with a 4/4 rhythm to it. I’d listened to him a lot before, but this … It came out when I met my girlfriend. We listened to it over and over, so that’s quite a special album. It was before I really knew him. We’re friends now. He has an amazing record collection. I mean, his dad is a jazz record collector, so he had an in, but still. He always says he forgets that he made this album.

Jamie xx’s debut solo album, In Colour, is out on 1 June