Jamie xx: ‘AI means the possibilities are endless’

For someone who has built a career out of playing very loud music to packed rooms of people, Jamie xx’s quietness might seem jarring. 

We’re photographing the DJ, producer and musician for Time Out London’s latest cover shoot in a former tram depot in Upper Clapton. Its jungle-like interior – with sunlight dappling down through a vast skylight, vines cascading from the ceiling and roots wiggling like biro scribbles along the walls – feels more like a glossy greenhouse than a home. Jamie, whose real name is James Thomas Smith, arrives unannounced and offers a murmured hello as he shakes everyone’s hand. Mute apart from a yes there, a no there; he never asks questions and mostly communicates via nods and gentle smiles. A radio in the corner fills the gaps between camera shutters with Dionne Warwick’s classic ‘Walk On By’, and Smith gently taps his foot, almost imperceptibly, in time with the rhythm. 

Even for one of Britain’s most-recognised DJs, who sold out two nights at Ally Pally in September and has shaped the sound of a generation since the xx’s double-platinum 2010 debut, Smith’s near-silence never translates as aloof. It comes off as assured, patient and measured. He’s not disengaged; he won’t hesitate to veto the more contrived pose requests, or offer to re-arrange some cushions in the shot. He just prefers to be an observer.

Once the crew clears out, we sit down at the kitchen table to talk. We discover both of us live locally and immediately discuss all of the neighbourhood essentials: the mindblowing pizza at The Spurstowe, the best canalside pubs (he regulars the Princess of Wales, I prefer the Anchor and Hope), and the turnout for the Hackney Half Marathon, which took place the day before. ‘I was cheering it on from my balcony,’ Jamie says. ‘It kind of made me want to do it next year.’ 

Now 36, Jamie has just spent a rare full month in London, and he’s yearning for more routine. ‘I saw my friends every day and had real weekends,’ he says. ‘I like the very simple things. Riding my bike on the marshes. I’m learning to cook for myself, taking care of myself in general.’ After weeks of recording new music with his xx bandmates, Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft, and hanging out with his two grey cats (Otis and Patti, named after the music greats), he’s gearing up to play two or three festivals a week until September. ‘The easiest bit is the actual being on stage,’ he says. ‘All the traveling and the airports and the buses are tiring. I’m older now and I miss home a lot more. But I also try not to take it for granted.’

One of those weekly festivals is the latest new addition to London’s day festival circuit, LIDO, which Smith is headlining this Saturday. ‘I’m excited slash nervous, because everybody I know will be there and I want to do a good job,’ he says. Conveniently, this one won’t require too much travel – being in Victoria Park, he can hear it from his back garden.

Rose-tinted goggles 

Summers spent on the road are nothing new for Smith. He left home at 17 to tour, shortly after forming the xx with Romy, Oliver and original band member Baria Qureshi, all of whom he met while attending the Elliott School in Putney. Smith stepped up to program beats in place of a drummer, shaping their now-signature sound: Oliver and Romy’s slow, whispering lyrics juxtaposed next to his indie-edged electronica. The band’s self-titled Mercury-winning debut arrived in 2009, and it wasn’t long before Smith emerged as a solo artist. His Gil Scott-Heron remix project was released in 2011, followed by early Jamie xx singles ‘Far Nearer’ and ‘Beat For.’ From then on, it was touring – constantly. ‘If you’re in a band, you make an album and then you tour it, and then you have a break,’ he says. ‘But with DJing, you can just go forever.’

Smith credits his discovery of electronic music to the soundtracks of skateboarding videos he watched as a teen, but he didn’t encounter club culture firsthand until later – despite living out a romanticised version of the underground music world in his head. ‘I have these records which remind me of my nostalgia-tinted version of Hackney before I was old enough to go out and see it for myself,’ he says, describing a stack of grime white labels with early Dizzee Rascal cuts and raw Kano verses which he inherited from a friend who’d lived there in the early 2000s. 

In reality, the first venues Smith went to were ‘terrible indie clubs’ that overlooked fake IDs, like the long-departed Metro club under Tottenham Court Road station. But then came the seismic pull of early dubstep: the Black Sheep Bar in Croydon, The Church in Brixton, and, later on, FWD>>, the seminal club night in Shoreditch. ‘It was just a bunch of lads with their hoods up, standing in the dark,’ Jamie says, of that scene. ‘It was very different to dancing around to indie music. It felt special then and now I realise how special it was, because it was one of the last underground music scenes independent of the internet.’ 

Born and raised in Wandsworth, it wasn’t until Smith was 22 that he found the time to move to east. ‘East was as far away from where I grew up as possible, while still being in London,’ he says. ‘It just seemed so much more open to being arty and strange than being in south, which was quite tough.’

East London seemed much more open to being arty and strange than south

The mid ’00s through to the early 2010s were an especially exciting time to be creative in the capital – or at least that’s how the story goes, if you lived it through Vice articles and Tumblr blogs. There was the burst of indie bands playing venues like the Old Blue Last, alongside the emergence of dubstep, grime and garage music filling out basements in Kingsland Road and playing from pirate radio stations like Rinse FM. But cities change. ‘I left central Hackney just as all the clubs were closing down,’ Smith says, aware that the artistic, DIY energy he chased east has now shifted, or else been replaced by student housing blocks and Gails. ‘I used to live right next to my favorite club in the world, Plastic People. And, you know, me being one of those people that moved to east is part of the problem. But I still love it around here.’

It was his memories of Plastic that inspired him to create The Floor, a temporary club night he launched at Venue MOT in south London to mark the release of his latest album, In Waves, last September. ‘It really felt as close to a time machine as I could get,’ he says. ‘It was about having a place where people weren’t documenting everything and the sound was so good, you just wanted to listen, not shout over it.’ He misses the days when that kind of experience didn’t have to be so engineered. When asked whether he feels the difference in a no-phones club, he inhales sharply: ‘Yeah. Especially in small clubs’.

But it’s not just the pre-smartphone era that Smith longs for. Dancefloor nostalgia permeates his work; you could even argue it defines it. His 2014 release ‘All Under One Roof Raving’, featured vocal samples from contemporary artist Mark Leckey’s ’90s rave footage film, ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’. A New Yorker review of his solo album debut, In Colour, which turned 10 years old on May 29, compared its audio samples to a ‘ghostly radio documentary’, creating a sort of patchwork love letter to electronic music history. Meanwhile, In Waves reflects a yearning for the real, physical dancefloor. Though undoubtedly a party record, filled with euphoric highs, heady beats and Smith’s signature hazy introspection, there’s definitely a sense of distance to the sound: for him, it’s a reminder of the long, suspended days of lockdown. ‘Lying in the garden at whatever time of day, with endless time, between making music – it was very good creatively,’ he reflects.  

Even though that era has passed, the distance between people and the dancefloor hasn’t returned to normal. If anything, it feels more pronounced – particularly for Smith’s fans, many of whom came of age during the xx’s breakthrough and are now navigating adulthood. Priorities have shifted, but we also seem to be living through a time when club culture feels increasingly intellectualised. Scrutinised in newspaper think pieces, celebrated in museum exhibitions and catalogued in documentaries, the economy around it is booming – except, perhaps, in actual clubs, where ticket prices are soaring and young people are reportedly trading nights out for gym classes. 

‘Club culture has become this sort of romantic idea – it makes for a very good coffee-table book,’ Smith says, noting the shift. ‘But I also think that stuff is consumed a lot by people who are too old to go out anymore, and have that rose-tinted view of it. It does seem like the cost of clubs is an issue. But I hope there’s a whole new young contingency throwing raves that I don’t know about because they’re cooler than me.

‘Club culture goes in waves: things get difficult, so it moves to the underground, and then it gets popular, because the underground is cool, and it just goes back and forth. It’s a pendulum. Really good stuff comes out of people having to do stuff in a new way.’ 

Square one

2025 feels like a pivotal moment for the future of music, and for the creative industries more generally. The government is currently trying to push through an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill which would effectively allow tech companies to use copyrighted material to train their models – but just this Monday, the House of Lords rejected the proposal for the fourth time, arguing that artists deserve greater protection and that AI firms should seek proper licensing. ‘I was watching Elton John on the BBC this morning, talking about this,’ says Smith. 

‘He is absolutely right. It’s so bad that the government is approving that copyright is being ignored. We’ve had copyright law for music and film and all that stuff, forever. There’s simple ways to make sure that big tech companies have to abide by it.’ For now, the proposed legislation is stuck in limbo. But Smith is no hard and fast sceptic: he already uses AI tools in his production, including a couple of tracks in In Waves. ‘You can use AI to be creative in a good way,’ he says. ‘Now, every kid in the Western world has access to making music software, probably more than picking up a guitar – which is great, and has led to a lot more electronic music out there in the world. AI means the possibilities are endless, but it also means making music takes even more time than it did before.’

It’s so bad that the government is approving that copyright is being ignored

Smith winces: this is no small blow for a man who is notoriously slow to put out music, with a decade gap between his solo albums and a whole eight years since the xx’s last release. That said, it’s no longer a secret that the band have been back together in the studio. (After this, Smith tells me he’s heading to Oliver’s to talk about ‘what to do next for the album’, before going home to watch The Last of Us.) One clip from the band’s Instagram, posted three weeks ago, shows Oliver holding a long note while Romy and Jamie nod along to the beat. ‘WE ARE SOOOOO READY!!!!’, they comment under the post. Could this mean new material arriving this summer? When asked, Smith dutifully shakes his head: he has no intel on releases yet.

‘I mean, we’re gonna try to be a little quicker –’ he says, laughing when I point out that, knowing the band’s glacial pace, ‘quicker’ could still mean five years. ‘– Just for our mental selves. But I don't know exactly when that is.’

With so much time spent apart, there’s been a need to re-learn each other as people and as friends. ‘It’s been both very difficult and really joyous,’ Smith says. ‘There was an adjusting period, to get back as a three, to compromise again. If you’re a solo artist, you basically get carte blanche over everything, you know you’re the boss. Whereas, the three of us, being very old friends, plus all wanting to have our way... it just took a minute.’ He doesn’t go into specifics, but he alludes that not all of the meet-ups went smoothly: ‘after the good hangs, the music became a lot easier.’

Each member of the band has gone off in their own direction. Smith’s solo career has been the longest-running, and arguably the most commercially successful, but Romy made her dancefloor-focused debut with ‘Mid Air’ in 2023, while Oliver released the more rock-leaning ‘Hideous Bastard’ in 2022, produced by Smith himself. Does he ever feel the pressure of being compared to his bandmates? ‘Eh… I think it’s all quite different, so probably not,’ he says. ‘Because I started doing my own stuff so long ago, it just doesn’t feel like that. But I also don’t pay that much attention. I really try not to read anything about my career’. That’s probably very healthy, I say. ‘Maybe, but it’s also just being avoidant in another unhealthy way,’ he says. ‘Who knows.’

Comments like this might tempt you to categorise Smith as a compulsive over-thinker – and he was, he admits, until recently. It doesn’t help that the more left-leaning parts of his creative career – like his scoring of Wayne McGregor’s contemporary ballet Tree of Codes, his film soundtrack with Romain Gavras, even his pop production for the likes of Drake and Alicia Keys – tend to be overlooked in favour of the big name DJ. ‘There was a part of my life when I thought about that, even though I probably wouldn’t have admitted it,’ Smith says. He talks about the difficulty of having his identity so closely tied to his work, and how it all came to a head when he realised he’d been touring almost non-stop since his teens. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to keep going.

Really good stuff comes out of people having to do stuff in a new way

‘I was going through Saturn returns,’ he says, holding up his hands to mime inverted commas. ‘The period of your life, from around your late twenties to early thirties, where you re-evaluate everything that’s happened and hopefully come out the other side more grown up’. He recounts how, during that period, his ex-girlfriend made him a video of all the best parts of his life. ‘Like, two percent of it was to do with me making music,’ he says. ‘The rest of it was just being humans together. It really switched my brain around and made me realise that it doesn’t have to be all built around my career. It just balanced everything out.’

Doing it right

Out the other side, Smith realised he does want to keep touring – but to tour in a way where he’s actually enjoying it and is still wanting to make music alongside (he admits, however, it’s all too easy for bookings to get piled on). ‘Now, I’m just extremely grateful to be able to play big festivals, play small clubs, do ballets, do the band, and nobody’s really questioning it yet,’ he says. ‘I just feel very lucky that I can keep doing it in the right way’.

He seems genuinely excited about LIDO festival, which is taking over part of Victoria Park for two weekends with headliners Charli XCX, London Grammar, Massive Attack and an Outbreak special. As well as topping the bill, Jamie is curating the line-up for one of the days, and has invited friends, or people he’s long-admired, to join him: the likes of Arca, Sampha, Romy, Panda Bear, DJ Harvey and John Glacier, as well as two recently announced back to backs. ‘Skrillex is so energetic, which is the exact opposite of me, but it kind of works,’ Smith says. ‘And I’ve never played with Nia Archives, so I don’t know how it’s going to turn out – that’s part of the fun.’ The plan is to try and recreate The Floor by building a club-like structure with low ceilings: all pitch black, except for one red light and some strobes. ‘I’m still finalising a lot of it, so fingers crossed,’ Smith says. ‘I really wanted to get the council to let me open up The Floor the night before, but I don’t think that’s going to be allowed’. 

As for the rest of summer? ‘I will go to Glastonbury,’ he says, through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll have a good time when I go, but at the moment, I'm kind of dreading it. I’ll try to do a little secret thing, that would be really fun.’ After festival season ends, the plan is to do a run of his favorite small European clubs. ‘I think Corsica Studios is still one of the all time greats,’ he says. ‘I heard that they might be closing, though, soon. So I’m going to try and do a party there, before.’ (Corsica Studios has neither confirmed or denied reports of a potential closure to Time Out.)

Exercising ownership over the gigs that bring him joy, and a sense of purpose, has freed up precious head space for Smith, too. ‘The last year has taught me to be a lot less precious, I think,’ he says. ‘It had been so long from In Color to In Waves that the time really started to play on my mind. I really got stuck into the minutia of it all, but now, I’m really enjoying making music. I made a track last week that I’m mixing and mastering today, which is so nice because it’s all so fresh to me. I can play it in Victoria Park and hopefully release it before and it’ll all be fresh, rather than it being this slog.’

The slog speaks to the perfectionist part of his personality, but he admits procrastination was often just as much to blame.

‘It’s not that I care less – ’ he says, before we leave the room. ‘– well, maybe I do care less about what people think. But I know the benefit of just taking it all slightly less seriously.’

Jamie xx is headlining LIDO Festival on Saturday 7 June at Victoria Park. Tickets are available now at www.lidofestival.co.uk

Photographer: @jesshandphotography
Design Director: @bryanmayesdotcom
Senior Designer: @818fpv
Writer: @chiarawilkinson
Grooming: @makeupbydexter
Location: @claptontram