Sunday evening in Hong Kong and, from his suite on an elevated floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Jamie xx can see — just — tonight’s gig. Squatting down there by Central Harbourfront, flanked by a glittering big wheel and the even-more-glittering skyscrapers of the city’s financial district, are the multiple stages of Clockenflap.
It’s the final night of the three-day music festival. The south London-raised DJ, producer and sometime member of The xx is one of the closing acts, performing alongside fellow bill-topper Jack White and succeeding the previous days’ headliners Central Cee, Suede, Air and excellently-named Japanese hip-hop duo Creepy Nuts.
This is the festival-bossing level at which the in-demand musician finds himself. He’s released two acclaimed, dancefloor-igniting solo albums; remixed/produced big hitters including Florence + the Machine, Radiohead, Adele, Drake and Alicia Keys; scored Wayne McGregor’s ballet Tree of Codes; and composed the music for Romain Gavras’s film The World is Yours.
With The xx on hiatus since 2017’s third album I See You, Jamie xx is arguably currently bigger than the band with which, as a shy teenager, he enjoyed success straight out of the gate, their self-titled 2009 debut winning the Mercury Prize and becoming a global phenomenon. Certainly his solo career has outpaced the individual records released by his more forward-facing bandmates, co-vocalists Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft.
(Getty Images for H&M)
Clockenflap is quite the line-up, then, in quite the location. But no matter the prestige, or indeed the pressure, of entertaining a festival audience with a slimmed-down DJ set — pared back from the dancers-in-the-crowd and xx-bandmates-on-stage spectacular that packed out Alexandra Palace over two September nights — it’s just another gig for Jamie xx. When you’ve a touring itinerary that, over the past couple of weeks, has had you pinging between Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore and Manila (“and Palm Springs”), you have to maintain a cool mindset. That way good mental health lies.
“I definitely feel … older,” the quietly-spoken 36-year-old — born James Smith — answers with a smile when I ask what country-a-day routing is doing to his head. “Or maybe I’m more used to my own comforts. But I always missed home.
“That was a big part of my inspiration for making music on the road,” he continues, referring to last year’s second solo album, In Waves, a kaleidoscopic club record recorded in his homes and studios in Los Angeles, London (he has places in Clapton and Soho) and on the move on a tour that’s been running, on and off, since summer 2021. “The crowds have been great — just the fact that they’re still here after quite a long time,” he notes.
Still, having been touring for half his life, he knows how to do it “really well. I try and eat well and do all the boring stuff that makes everything a little bit better. But there hasn’t been that much time for socialising. Except for Tokyo. I had a couple of days and went record shopping. Did all my favourite things.”
Smith is already focused deep into 2025. His world tour continues well into summer, punctuated by an April pitstop in London to reunite with Sim and Madley Croft to resume work on The xx’s first album in eight years.
(Amit Lennon)
He’ll also be back home in early June, for his personally curated day at Victoria Park’s new Lido festival. “The daunting bit is it being my responsibility, and playing moments away from my house,” he says of his home in Clapton, a place of (mostly) rest as opposed to his “vibe” of a recording-studio eyrie atop a tower block in the heart of Soho (“I always dreamed of having a studio where I could see all of London”).
Charli xcx is also curating a day, so maybe we’ll finally get that sells-itself “Jamie xcx” collab. Although, for this devoted disciple of club music, purism will always trump opportunism. “I just see that as pop music,” he says, with shade-free mildness, of the singer’s all-conquering Bratverse. “She’s a raver, I guess, and she’s cool. She’s a nice gal. But I don’t really put the two together. Not my kind of dance music anyway.”
For his 2025 shows, Smith is scaling up his production. The economies of touring are in much-discussed crisis, yet he’s tripling his touring party. Does he still make a decent amount of money?
“Seems to be getting less and less. I’m more concerned about making the show really good. For Ally Pally, I ended up spending a lot more than the show cost. But it was worth it for the reactions.”
Still, he acknowledges his fortunate position. Both solo and as a member of The xx, he’s long-enjoyed a truly international footprint. “It’s always been like that, so I don’t know any different. That first xx record went global in a way that lots of [releases] don’t. I thought for years and years that it was normal that all bands go everywhere. We toured for three years non-stop on that first album, which was so exciting, and we were happy to do it. But it was bonkers.”
It was a whirlwind that kept Smith in a state of perpetual youth for over a decade. “I don’t think I really thought about any of it until I was about 30. Then I just felt a bit lost. Because, as you said, I’ve been doing this exact same thing ever since… well, from before I was an adult. I was wondering whether I wanted to keep doing it. What the point of it all was if I was just going to be away, missing home all the time.”
What sacrifices did he make, giving over the rest of his teens and the entirety of his twenties, to the life of a musician? “I just didn’t grow up,” he says flatly. “That’s what I’ve been working on for the past five years.
“That’s also what helped me be able to finish this album. The simple things — being able to take care of myself and getting my head around who I actually am, rather than the ego side of things. Thinking about how I’m seen because I’m in the public eye… I’ve had to figure all that out. And it took a long time.”
Therapy helped. So, he admits, did Covid, an emergency stop that brought much-needed “stability” to his life. “Also, when I bought a place in LA, I had a couple of years of putting myself out there and being out of my comfort zone, doing loads of sessions with different artists.”
Smith is in a relationship now, “seriously” for “about a year and a bit”. His girlfriend is a model, so she understands the travails of travels. “I’ve always been, up until now, very freaked out by being in a relationship. And again, being not very grown-up about all of it. Now I’m trying my best to go the other way.”
He’ll need that stabilising anchor, not least this month. Smith is touring North America at a turbulent time in US politics and society. “Not good!” he exclaims when I ask how he’s feeling about his inauguration-adjacent touring. “I love America. It’s all so different from state to state. It’s just too big for there to be only two [voting] options. LA feels like a completely different place to all the places that voted Trump in. But it’ll be interesting.”
Jamie xx at Coachella in 2022 (Getty Images for Coachella)
As for his thoughts on Keir Starmer’s progress, or lack thereof: “My head is not involved in UK politics at all. But he seems to be not a very flashy guy, which suits me.”
It certainly does. A couple of hours later, Jamie xx is onstage at Clockenflap, dressed in the same nondescript uniform of black trainers, blue jeans and dark-blue T-shirt. He stays wordless and bent over his decks, following not a pre-arranged track-list but building out what his tour manager describes as an “ad-libbed DJ set”. He might not engage with the enraptured, whooping, shape-throwing crowd, but his tracks do. It’s all Jamie xx — a teenager who future-proofed his privacy by hiding his (already anonymous) second name — ever wanted.
As he’d said to me earlier: “I don’t get recognised that much. If I do, it’s by very sweet people. When I was very young I remember talking to my manager about trying to be able to do it all, because not many people can. And now I can play big shows, and I can play [Berlin’s temple of techno] Berghain. That’s a really great place to be.”
A deluxe edition of In Waves, featuring a new track with Erykah Badu, is out now.Jamie xx’s day at Lido festival is June 7