The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Eye to body, eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, arm to shoulder, arm to waist, mouth to mouth, hand to head, hand to body, mouth to breast, hand to genitals, and finally - finally - sexual intercourse.

These are the 12 stages, as mapped out by behavioural psychologist Desmond Morris, that our relationships must all one day stroll through if we’re to laze in the precious and tender glow of real intimacy. Halt there, though, gladsack; eyes back in pockets. Something seems off. There are flaws here. That final stage could just as easily have been replaced by the words ‘the police arrived’ or ‘the man did not move any more’. At least then there’d be the implication of hazard, something Morris seems to omit altogether from his flat pack instruction manual to undying love. It’s not Ikea. It’s fucking, Desmond.

Except it’s not that either, at least not always and not with The xx. Their intimacy is curiously sexless; but like fucking, and all other intimacies, at their best they are emotionally ambiguous, awkward, treacherous, done in the dark. As such, they are impossible to reduce to 12 easy steps.

The xx are a band that happen in the dark. Their debut album xx was written and recorded over the course of four teenage years and still seems to exist nocturnally, in silence broken by night’s edge, reverb and mysterious bass loom. Camouflaged from head to toe in various shades of black garb, you always get the sense with them that things are being figured out away from the distractions of an awake world. That sense is piqued by the emotional honesty in the throats of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, whose love-bitten confessionals are so candid they may as well be heart murmurs.

Oliver and Romy aren’t always easy to listen to. Their young voices stand naked against the austere musical backdrop beckoned into being by his bass, her guitar, Jamie Smith’s Akai MPC drum machine and - formerly, now - the additional guitar and synth work of Baria Qureshi. Such minimalism is unforgiving - every moment of doubt or unease, every affectation suddenly becomes as desperate for attention as Fred Astaire. You hear the tips of their fingers sneak back across guitar strings. You hear the tongues moving in their mouths, and you end up stranded somewhere between confidant and voyeur. Teenage girls from America might roll their eyes and declare the experience ‘Awkward,’ or, ‘Cringe’, but discomfort is a cheap price to pay for a record with such a rare ability to draw you into its empty, silent spaces - for a record that seems to tender real intimacy.

“The big thing for me, lyrically, is that I’ve always written with the thought in mind that no-one else will really hear it,” admits Oliver, peering out from backstage at the crowd gathering ahead of tonight’s show in Brighton. No one apart from Romy, anyway. So it’s gonna be weird writing again, with the thought in the back of my mind that people might hear this at some point.”

Might?

“Maybe I won’t put it all out there next time.”

Oliver is six-foot-plus, slick hair, stud-earring, south London. It’s hard to figure out whether or not he needs to be timid about letting his emotions show.

“The lyrics come first,” Romy explains from behind her swept fringe. “It’s a case of me and Oliver working alone, getting the confidence up and building a skeleton of words. Then we add our bass and guitar to that skeleton and Jamie and Baria will help flesh it out.”

This interview, it should be noted, happened on the day before Baria left the band.

“A lot of that minimalism [on the record] comes from the fact that I have an MPC,” says Jamie, whose fingers hammer and poke at the MPC’s drum pad to provide The xx with a reticent but reliable, juddering heartbeat. Jamie also produced the debut album.

“We spent about a month before recording in the studio just taking stuff out of the songs,” he explains, before Romy delves further into the band’s past: “When we first started, Oliver had only had a couple of bass lessons and I was teaching myself guitar. A song like ‘VCR’... I listen now and think, ‘That’s such a simple guitar line,’ but at the time it was all I could play. So it sounded right, I think. I like that because it’s having limitations, but not consciously.”

I read somewhere that, in your own words, “It started out as a joke” - that The xx were originally just like every other teenage gang of four you find hanging around the school music-block at lunch time; blaring out loud, distorted punk covers. So when and why did you decide to pare things down?

“I think that actually, underneath the jokey thing, I was already writing in a way that was more personal,” Romy explains. “But on my own. I was writing poems, things like that. When we first met it seemed scary and it took a while to get more serious words out. The first step was the singing part and so we had to do that as a joke, but as we got more confident we found we could sing more personally in front of each other.”

“Me and Romy aren’t necessarily singing to one another,” Oliver explains. “She’s my oldest friend.”

The phrasing here is vital. When Romy and Oliver sing, ‘voice to voice’, it is very much in front of one another, rather than to each other. There are only ever four people involved in the stories The xx tell - one is whoever’s singing, be it Romy or Oliver, while the other just listens. That’s two. The third is the person they’re singing about - the ‘you’ who crops up in every song to provide both the affection and the subsequent, inevitable angst. The fourth is the listener. As such, all the lovelorn vows to “cross oceans” and “give it all on the first date” are directed outwards, and suddenly there’s tension within The xx’s intimacy, because even though that’s where the songs exist, it’s not what they’re necessarily about. They couldn’t be, because Romy and Oliver aren’t singing to each other - they subvert that traditional, lovebird duet-dynamic in the most dazzlingly logical and extreme way possible.

A friend of mine interviewed you recently and she said she asked about your sexuality and you didn’t want to go into it...

“I don’t think you liked that interview,” says Oliver to Romy. “I just don’t think it’s particularly relevant,” he says to me. “It’s relevant to us as people, but maybe not musically.”

“It’s not like we’re in the music personally,” counters Romy. “We just wanted to be people doing it separately. We never wanted to be that band with a face before the music. We’re putting ourselves out of it and the music is what it is.”

You can see why it does intrigue people - because the music draws you in, but there’s that certain step that has to stay hidden...

“Oh definitely, I can definitely see why it’s interesting.”

Romy flicks her fringe, smiles awkwardly.

“It’s just er, I dunno...”

Something you wanna keep back?

“Yeah, it’s just something we’d rather not project. The songs are anyone’s, you know?”

She shrugs and holds out the faces of her palms, referring once again to that desire to draw people in. People get confused when they don’t know where the sex is, though. Have you ever had boyfriends or girlfriends who’ve been threatened by the closeness of your relationship?

“No, I think it’s very much a friendship,” says Romy.

“I’ve got an older sister,” Oliver explains, “it’s very much the same kind of relationship.”

So how long have you two known each other?

“Since nursery,” says Oliver. “Since we were about three, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, 17 years.”

“17 years.” Oliver again. “Wow. Our parents were friends. You know when your parents are friends and they try to push their kids together? Good choice mum made. We went to primary school, secondary school, sixth form and now this. We’ve been side-by-side most of our lives.”

Haven’t there been times when you’ve drifted apart, belonged to different peer groups? Have you always been best friends?

“Yeah,” says Oliver.

“Yeah,”says Romy.

“Always,” says Oliver.

That’s pretty amazing.

“Yeah,” says Oliver, then laughs.

“It’s nice to have somebody that you’ve been through so much together with,” says Romy.

So a track like ‘VCR’ (lyrics: “You, you still have all the answers / And you, you still have them too / And we, we live half in the day time / And we, we live half at night / Watch things on VCRs, with me and talk about big love / I think we’re superstars, you say you think we are the best thing / But you, you just know, you just do”) - that’s not about the two of you?

They look at each other.

“Well ‘VCR’, you instigated that song,” says Oliver.

“Yeah, well, ‘VCR’ is, y’know, I wrote it when I was 16 and it means something to me now that it maybe didn’t mean then.”

Romy continues: “They come from so far back, those lyrics. I can connect with them a bit more now. Things that have happened to me... I want people to listen to it and be able to adapt it to their own lives, ’cause that’s what I’ve always done with music I’ve loved. And I kind of don’t want to know everything about the songs I love. I prefer to keep it that way, keep it a bit of a mystery so people can have it as their song.”

But there’s never a ‘them’ in the lyrics, Romy - there’s never anyone there apart from the two of you and whomever you’re singing to, usually lost and slightly beleaguered on this harsh, minimal landscape your music conjures up. It does seem very direct. That thing you do, maybe, when you’re in love and everyone else is unimportant, so mentally you cut them out of the world...

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” she says. “I mean, yeah, it is like everyone else is shut out. I like that our voices and our lyrics cross over and don’t exactly meet.”

The xx have said in the past that they got their name just fucking about on Microsoft Word, but I’m going to ignore that and point out how the axes of each ‘x’ work in a similar way to those narratives spun by the singing pair, crossing over at points, resting and reliant, but each, ultimately, holding another at bay. There are times when The xx sound quite like other people - like The Kills, The Cure, Chromatics and Young Marble Giants; Chris Isaak, Everything But The Girl, Rihanna and Mario Winans. But there’s never a single moment when the intimacy sounds anything other than their own, because the contradiction at the heart of that intimacy - the “dazzlingly logical and extreme” thing that ultimately limits it and prevents Romy and Oliver from going beyond ‘arm to shoulder’ - is so unique.

The source of all The xx’s empathy and tension is the relationship between their singers. Each is an x holding the other at bay, repelling ends of twin magnets, keeping a lid on it all, protective of that awkward, simmering and unsaid thing like small talk at a dinner party, or pubic hair.

The four of them are out on Brighton Pier, trying to keep stony-faces fixed for posed photos. The weather is pretty terrible. A wind’s got up and is toying with Romy’s fringe, and squawking arcade machines don’t help the quest for seriousness. Smiles lurk just beneath the surface and they emerge when a gaggle of kids - slightly awkward, early teens - approach, asking, “Are you The xx?” They get their photo taken with the band and briefly everyone seems happy about it, before the goofy teens lollop off with their disposable camera and Romy, Oliver, Jamie and Baria troop back to the venue.

It’s the last time Baria will play with her bandmates. The next day she bails on a show at the Village Underground back in London citing exhaustion, Oliver explaining from the stage that it’d been “a really tough few days for us” and that “this is the first time we’ve played as a three piece. It’s devastating not having Baria here with us but you all being here has made us feel better. Thank you very much.”

She’s quiet the night before in Brighton, not once approaching the dictaphone as Oliver talks about how the touring has “gone steep onto another level - more and more and more and more, further and further away from home”. He talks, too, about the 12 shows they played - around three a day - earlier in the week at New York’s industry marathon CMJ, describing them as “good” but “really intense”.

You can’t help but feel the last four months on tour contrast starkly with the four years previous spent writing and recording xx in their bedrooms, and at their label XL’s in-house studio. Did they invite too many people in, too quickly?

Backstage, again, in Brighton: if you were to go back to those quiet days you had before, would that be OK? Or would you miss what’s happening now?

“All I want now is to go back to that,” says Romy. “I crave that. I crave it so badly. [gesturing at Jamie] But we discussed this - you came home and said you sat down for five minutes on the sofa and were bored. So I think if I had a week of it and went back to touring that’d be ideal for me. Just to pause and reflect on things. I think we’re all quite slow people, and things have got faster around us.”

A few days of rest later, I call Oliver to ask about Baria’s departure. He seems more upbeat.

“We’re a three-piece now. We’ve been in a band with Baria since we were 16 and known her since we were 12,” he says, (the four of them first met at Elliot comprehensive school in Putney, which also counts Burial, Four Tet and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor among its alumni).

“It’s just been a case of, I suppose, growing apart? It’s a big jump from 13-years-old to 20. I think we’ve just grown into different people and I don’t believe touring was for her, really.

“It’s been ridiculously sad, but I’m quite looking forward to seeing what spawns from here. For the first time in a long time we sat and worked, jamming in a rehearsal space trying to build up the live set again and have moved a bit further away from the album, after a stage of just reciting it.

“I feel like we’re going somewhere else now - being a bit more creative, trying to put on a bit more of a show.”

Putting on a show doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would come naturally to The xx, but then how would I know what’s happening inside their skulls? Perhaps the biggest mistake was thinking that they might know themselves, that they might understand what it is they’re awkwardly feeling their way towards, because for all their intimacy, The xx ultimately seem a band as unknowable as the algebra of their name.

Back to the drawing board, Desmond.