‘Not having a phone is the dream’: Jamie xx on dance music, modern life and getting hooked on surfing

Jamie Smith has been incommunicado. He's just returned from a holiday in Norway: a remote cabin in a quiet valley, where he had to catch his own fish for dinner. Best of all, he says with a blissful expression, there was no wifi or mobile phone reception. Smith talks about his phone like it's a ravenous predator he has to go to great lengths to evade. It took him five days to stop instinctively reaching for it. "I have a lot of hang-ups about the phone," he admits. "I'm annoyed how much control it has over me. It seems like that can't be good for the brain."

It's funny hearing Smith rhapsodise about the hermit life because he makes his living in loud places. As Jamie xx , he is not only one-third of the xx but perhaps the most far-reaching British DJ-producer of his generation – a cultural superconnector whose work transcends the club and bridges the spheres of pop and art. Yet at the same time, he is always trying to slow down and live in the moment. He does yoga. He surfs. He meditates, sporadically. He tries to read books in the evening instead of watching screens. He fantasises about giving it all up. "I love the idea of living in a beach shack and going surfing every day and that being it," he says wistfully. "Not having a phone is the dream."

We're sitting in an otherwise empty bar on the 10th floor of the Standard hotel in King's Cross on a weekday afternoon. Far below, beyond the glass, London churns busily like a giant machine. Tousle-haired and bashful, Smith will never be the loudest voice in the room – even this one – but he is far more forthcoming than he used to be. For years, hiding behind his xx bandmates Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft in interviews, he was so taciturn that he might have been mistaken for someone who says little because he has little to say. But his friends describe a man of substance: curious, thoughtful, steadfast, empathetic. Only now is that person rising to the surface. "I've done hundreds of interviews with him and I've never seen him be the Jamie that I'm friends with before," Sim tells me fondly. "The Jamie I know is very animated. He can sometimes be quite a camp straight man. I think he's the most open and confident version of himself that he's ever been."

Smith is 35 now. He was just 20 when the xx released their Mercury-winning, double-platinum debut album, transforming three introverted school friends into the toast of their town. Their haunting minimalism was sampled by Rihanna, underpinned countless TV shows and informed the sound of pop for years to come . At one intimate show in New York in 2014, they looked up to find themselves eyeball to eyeball with Madonna. It was a lot to take in for a band whose music looked inwards. "We all pushed one another and we all leaned on one another," says Smith.

While Sim and Madley Croft took time off between albums and tours, Smith's extracurricular work kept him on the treadmill: studios, clubs, airports, hotels. He took on high-profile remixes (Adele, Radiohead) and production gigs (Drake, Alicia Keys) and DJed in as many as four clubs a weekend. He scored Wayne McGregor's acclaimed ballet Tree of Codes, which led to further adventures in modern dance and art installations. And he released a breakout solo album, 2015's In Colour, a vibrantly outgoing counterpoint to the xx's nocturnal investigations. "Jamie is an unusual creator," says the Californian artist Doug Aitken , a friend and collaborator. "He's very polymedia, looking at a lot of strata of culture simultaneously. He's constantly unearthing new things, culturally and intellectually. That's an attractive trait."

All well and good on the work front, then, but when Smith looked at his friends – settling down, growing up – he worried that he was treading water as a human being. Rarely at home, he was insulated inside a touring bubble. "It was very easy to carry on in an adolescent way," he says apologetically. "Especially in dance music, which is a very young person thing."

He felt as if he went years without having proper conversations, hiding in the noise, lagging behind his bandmates. "I think those two have had things going on in their lives that forced them to go deep. But it took me a lot longer to come to terms with some things." Eventually he started asking himself why he made music at all. He thinks an album should tell a story about where you are in your life but he didn't know the answer to that question, so most of the tracks he attempted with a view to following up In Colour were functional and lifeless. "None of it felt like it deserved to be out there."

Smith only stopped when the world did. He agrees that it's weird that he enjoyed the 2020 lockdown as much as he did. "I didn't know I needed it. It did make me stop and reflect on everything that had happened since I was a teenager, which was all amazing but very fast-paced and kind of the opposite to how I am. I had a chance to think about all the other bits that make you a human being that are not your job. My whole self-esteem was built around work, and that makes it hard to make music that's going to connect with anyone, even yourself." Being forced to rebalance his life set him on the four-year path to his extravagantly enjoyable second album, In Waves. "The fact that people are still interested is really heartwarming, especially as everything seems to go faster and faster in the world these days," he says, sounding about 70.

Jamie xx doesn't have a signature sound so much as a signature feeling: an embracing joy with a twist of yearning. Aitken astutely calls it "euphoric melancholy". If a track doesn't promise to deliver that emotional fullness, it doesn't get finished. "I've tried so hard to make a linear dance track and it's just so boring," Smith says. "I think in terms of a verse and chorus even if it's instrumental. It tells more of a story." Not a lyricist himself, he expresses himself through guest vocalists (Robyn, Panda Bear, his xx friends), crate-digging samples and, increasingly, spoken word: the dreamy dancefloor recollections of American singer Kelsey Lu on Dafodil, a monologue by yoga teacher Juliana Spicoluk threading through Breather's big-room techno. The album's cathartic finale, Falling Together, reworks a piece he made with the Belfast dancer and choreographer Oona Doherty for her 2022 show Navy Blue . "I said, 'Jamie, there's no hope in this show and we need to end on hope,'" the roaringly charismatic Doherty tells me. Now he has re-edited and reframed her monologue of "existential dread" as a healing sermon. "I think he's taken the good bits out of me – get out of your own way, Oona! He's not really a dread kind of guy."

One of Doherty's phrases seems to sum up the whole album's quest for transcendence: "the great let go". Smith deploys these other voices to explore why people come together to dance. "I thought a lot about that," he says. "It can be such a simplistic answer but it can be a lot more than that if you want it to be, especially if you dedicate your life to it." It might get a bit pretentious, he allows with a soft laugh, "but there's loads of more pretentious dance music out there".

Smith is a romantic about club culture. In Colour was his "nostalgic, rose-tinted" homage to a dancefloor era he was too young to experience. On the rave fantasia Gosh, he sampled the kind of pirate radio chatter that once beckoned him into an exotic, mysterious world. "It seemed like the coolest shit ever," he says. "I wanted to be there but I had no idea where it was. I'd made up a whole story in my head before I'd ever been to a club." Given that he now headlines festivals and venues as big as Alexandra Palace, it's interesting that his introduction to proper clubbing was almost solitary. The first time he went to Plastic People in Shoreditch, the hub of the post-dubstep scene until its closure in 2015, "there was, like, three people. That seemed ideal to me. I could stand in a dark corner and learn to dance by watching people."

During those strange temporal grey areas in lockdown, when the country was tentatively half-open, he was cheered up by the illegal boat parties that took place on the canals near his east London home, seeming to echo the merry outlaw tenacity of early 90s rave culture. "People really wanted to do it so much that they were making a big effort," he recalls. "Everyone was so happy to be back together in one place. Even if the music was terrible, the vibes were great."

Was the music terrible?

He winces, laughs. "Oh yeah. But I'm so glad that they can exist."

Smith's parents were more old-fashioned music buffs. His mother, a teacher, loved Stax Records and his father, who worked in the housing department of Ealing council, had been a folk-rock drummer in the 1970s. One album he played on – 1975's ultra-rare Jack With a Feather, by the preposterously named Spriguns of Tolgus – is the most valuable record in his son's collection. After Smith met Sim and Madley Croft in his first year at Elliott School in Putney, they bonded over music, movies and skateboarding but he had no musical ambitions to speak of. Sim remembers walking back from school one day when they were 13 or 14: "He was like [shruggingly], 'I'm not going to make big waves in this world and I'm totally cool with that.' Whereas the rest of us were like, 'I'm gonna be a rock star!' There's still part of him that's like that. He genuinely has a lot of humility."

The other two formed the xx in 2005. Smith declined to be their drummer ("It seemed so wrong to be smashing drums next to Romy and Oliver's beautiful quiet voices") but found a role playing rhythms on an MPC synthesiser. (A fourth member, Baria Qureshi, left in 2009.) Perhaps he is the xx's George Harrison, his talent potentiated by proximity to two more driven songwriters. "I was a bit of a late bloomer in many ways," he agrees. "They're the reason I get to do this. I still feel like we're just friends at school and I'm so grateful that they're letting me be in the band. I never imagined any of it was possible."

He sought out situations where he had to overcome his doubts and deliver. After various big-name producers failed to capture the fragile magic of the xx's demos, he put himself forward to produce their debut. "I wasn't elbowing my way in but I was trying really hard to prove that I could do it." It was similar when XL Recordings founder Richard Russell asked him to remix Gil Scott-Heron's 2010 comeback album, I'm New Here – Smith's first solo project. "I'm glad that I was very naive. If I had to do the same now, I don't think I could do it."

Smith likes to work with people he knows well: the only album he has produced for someone else to date is Sim's 2022 solo record, Hideous Bastard . "He took a step into my world," says Sim. "It takes a total lack of ego not to push himself into the music. I think he did that with the band as well, on the first record. If there was space in the music, the other producers tried to insert themselves, and he just left that space." For Smith, making the album was as much about friendship as music: "I needed it as much as he did. We'd spend all day at the studio and then go home and play video games and watch TV and eat Nando's. It was like being back at school."

In Waves completes the trifecta of overlapping xx solo albums, following Hideous Bastard and Madley Croft's 2023 dance-pop extravaganza Mid Air , to which Smith also contributed. Recently, they've been back in the studio to plot the first xx record since 2017's I See You, but they had to spend four days talking before they could pick up their instruments. "It's proving to be hard," Smith reveals. "They're struggling with collaboration now that they've had complete creative control. I'm quite eager to not have complete control. It takes a lot of communicating, which we're not very good at."

Even after all these years?

He laughs. "Yeah. We do [communicate] in our lives but not when we're together. We just revert back to our young selves."

Smith's happy place is the ocean. He describes his first surfing lesson, in Hawaii in 2014, as a life-changing epiphany. "It blew my mind in a way I didn't think could happen to me at 25. I was instantly hooked. I'm a city boy, I've never been about silence or nature, so that discovery was big for me." He loves the "trippy, spiritual vibe" of surf culture. "For him, it's not so much a sport as a reason to escape – to be in the moment," says Doug Aitken. Smith agrees: "It's very calming and fulfilling. It really makes me not want to make music. I've done surf trips where I also have a studio and the music I make is terrible because I'm just so happy."

But perhaps there is a connection between surfing and music, after all. He says he can sometimes find that same flowing, out-of-body sensation of being subsumed into something bigger than himself in the middle of a six-hour DJ set or in the studio, when a whole day of work can feel like half an hour. What he says about surfing is true of In Waves's long gestation, too: "A lot of it is about being patient. Letting other people go and waiting for your moment."