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The Dot to Dot festival, Nottingham. It’s the first day of summer and a few people are in an airless room at the Bodega Social Club, whiling away the afternoon with the bands at the bottom of the bill. When The xx loom, a rumour goes round that we are about to see xx Teens, the politically inclined noise-rockers from London. But then four teenagers file in wearing black clothes and frightened expressions, and a breathy keyboard introduces a band of a very different stripe.

 

A hush descends on the room. A boy and a girl sing an octave apart, never straying into harmonies. The girl’s voice smoulders, incongruous against her baggy clothes and shock of short dark hair. “Can I make it better with the lights turned on?” she asks, over deadened guitar lines and the pulse of a drum machine played by a boy with only his fingertips. Between songs the band are silent, which only heightens the feeling that some sudden magic is brewing here.

 

Out in the sunshine, the stillness stays with me. I see the male singer lugging his guitar out and try to congratulate him; he scuttles away, murmuring thanks. Nothing else sounds that new for a while to come.

 

 

The xx launch their debut album “xx” with an intimate gig for family and friends in a dark basement in Shoreditch. A few reporters peer between the heads of proud mums and dads as the male singer, Oliver Sim, tearfully thanks everyone for their support. Later the four band members sit grinning behind a table adorned with Xs and a big x-shaped cake. It’s a big kids’ party for a band in their infancy. They’ll never look more comfortable than they do now.

 

Two days later I interview Sim, the drummer Jamie Smith and the keyboard player Baria Qureshi in the backyard of a London record shop. The three of them, and the other singer Romy Madley Croft, got together in 2005 at Elliott School in Putney, south-west London, a comprehensive whose alumni include members of Fleetwood Mac and Hot Chip. Someone from Young Turks, an imprint of the indie label XL, saw some of their early gigs and offered them a space to rehearse. “That’s all it was for about a year—playing shows, writing songs,” Oliver says. “It’s only in the last year that we’ve started working towards an album.”

 

Those years gave The xx space to develop a sound that only grew more minimal. “We worked with some producers, but everything we did ended up sounding more like them than us,” Jamie says. “I kind of realised I was a control freak, and I had to do it all myself to be satisfied with it.”

 

“We wanted to stick to our original sound, and Jamie knows what we want,” Oliver adds. “Romy got a new amp that had reverb, and I’m not a very loud singer, so it didn’t make sense to make loud music that I couldn’t compete with. I wouldn’t describe it as an accident, but it was quite natural rather than intentional.”

 

Oliver and Romy exchanged lyrics over iChat, while Jamie pieced the music together on a computer at dead of night, in XL’s studio. Often they weren’t even aware of what the songs meant to one another. “I find it weird that [the lyrics] seem to match up quite well,” Oliver says, although he and Romy did become friends as toddlers. “Romy’s like a sister to me, so all the songs are addressed to something outside of us.”

 

As they’re talking, Romy sticks her head round the door, only to shy away. A publicist apologises for her absence and we continue. Of all of them, Romy is the least quoted, and yet her voice and guitar are part of their signature. Reticence, as much as music, characterises The xx. While they’re happy to talk about the songs, questions about their personal lives are greeted with blank stares. Yet this is only the beginning of the questioning they will face in the year to come.

 

“Since the record release, everything’s changed,” Baria says. “It’s kind of scary.”

 
AUGUST 2009: SIGN OF SUCCESS

 

Over the bank holiday, I watch The xx play to a modest crowd at Leeds festival, where they are way down the bill on the small Festival Republic stage. It’s the first time I’ve seen them play in daylight and the effect is an odd one, like listening to a private conversation over a loudspeaker. As they play, street teams appear, handing out black T-shirts and badges emblazoned with white Xs. On the scuffed grass beneath our feet, Xs appear in black duct tape, marking fallen kisses or buried treasure. The transition from schoolfriends to international stars is under way. Oliver said in an interview that their name was chosen for aesthetic reasons. They can scarcely have imagined how iconic those two Xs would become: both mathematical and romantic, one X short of obscene, and a nameless signature for a band who recoil from personal attention.

OCTOBER 2009: ONE DOWN

The xx release their second single, “Islands”, which makes the top 75, just—peaking at 65. Meanwhile they are still touring heavily. They spend four gruelling days at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York, playing to the American industry. Two days later, they have a gig back in London, at Village Underground in Shoreditch, and Baria doesn’t turn up. “It’s been a really tough few days for us,” Oliver says at the gig. “It’s devastating not having Baria here.” They cancel a European tour, citing exhaustion.

 

Within hours, the internet is awash with rumours that Baria has quit. Two weeks later, these are confirmed. “Baria has left the band,” Romy tells NME.com. “I guess ‘personal differences’ would be the standard way to say it. It’s just the intensity of being on tour, things are so much heightened.”

 

Christmas is a gift for new bands: it’s the time when the music papers do their best-of-the-year lists, and an album can officially become a critical hit. The xx’s album comes 2nd in the NME, 9th in Rolling Stone, and 10th on metacritic.com, which aggregates dozens of reviews, mostly American. In January, they get a page to themselves in the New Yorker, which covers only a few new bands every year. By the end of the month that iconic X is appearing everywhere from art installations to television adverts, where it hangs suspended on a black screen for 20 seconds of silence. 

The Guardian First Album award goes to...The xx. Romy accepts it on the phone from Australia, where they are touring. “This seems genuinely more about the music than about us,” she says. But then comes another blow. Romy’s father dies suddenly, and The xx are forced to cancel another European tour—although only six performances are scrapped. Their next shows in London go on, bearing out Romy’s point that the music is their priority.

 

Britain goes to the polls to put millions of Xs on ballot papers. The BBC uses The xx’s song “Intro” as the soundtrack to what becomes a strange, elusive election. With its sense of space, The xx’s music is made for soundtracks: it has already been used for the Winter Olympics, “Cold Case”, “Lie to Me”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Gossip Girl”. When the BBC relives the election in July with a documentary called “Five Days That Changed Britain”, The xx are there again, part of the second draft of history as well as the first.

 
JUNE 2010: STARS AS FANS

 

At Glastonbury, Shakira performs to a crowd of 100,000 on the Pyramid Stage. “This”, she tells them, “is by one of my favourite bands.” She plays “Islands”, the song that got stuck at number 65. The xx play two sets themselves, and at one they are joined by Florence from Florence + The Machine, who sings “You’ve Got The Love” with them. They go on to play to vast crowds at festivals across Europe. The songs have taken on a life of their own, bigger than the four teenagers who created them, exploding into sub-bass where before there was none, those two lonely voices carrying with the breeze. The iconic X dwarfs them on stage. Oliver has started flicking his head on the offbeats; Jamie and Romy still barely move.

 

The Mercury prize shortlist is announced. The xx are installed as favourites at 5/2, ahead of bigger names like Paul Weller and Dizzee Rascal. The Mercury has a history of choosing outsiders as its album of the year. If The xx do not win the £20,000 prize on September 7th, it will be because they are too obvious a choice. Their album has sold half a million copies while still not reaching the top ten. They have proved that if the music itself is strong enough, the rest will follow. (Ed's note: The xx duly won the Mercury prize. They said they would spend the money on a studio.)

 

 

(Hazel Sheffield writes about music for the Daily Telegraph and at hazelsheffield.wordpress.com)

 

Picture credit: jamieleto (via Flickr)