The Next Big, Big Thing

18 July 2013 | 10:00 am | Cyclone Wehner

"It’s a much better set, in my opinion. It just has a bit more snap. We’re playing some dance music and it does get kind of a bit ravey – and danceable."

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James Blake has beaten himself at his own game. His latest album, 2013's Overgrown, quickly became a critical darling, surpassing even his soulfully discordant and cerebral eponymous debut, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Now he's hitting Australia for the second time this year, following two sold-out East Coast gigs in April. The Brit, headlining Splendour In The Grass, will play national side-shows. But, first, Blake, conducting nocturnal phone interviews in his South London home, must deal with an intruder. 

“Oh, God!” Blake shudders down the line. “I've just had a huge spider walk past me in the house... Sorry. It's fucking massive! Oh my God.” Presumably, he won't thump it. Blake is a vegetarian, after all. “Well, I'm not gonna fucking eat it,” he blurts out, half laughing, half panicking. Blake, a reluctant hipster sex symbol who towers at 6' 5” (a little over 195 cm), isn't the kind to freak out. He's typically reserved with the media. Conceivably, some of it is the shyness of an only child. But Blake shields his music as well as his privacy. While his answers are direct, he'll occasionally utter a vague “I don't know” as if to prevent himself from saying something contentious. Yet Blake has a dry English sense of humour. He laughs frequently – and at himself. If Blake is quietly – and willfully – perverse, he has to be. He really is a musical retrograde. Blake is also almost incomparable to any other artist, the exception being David Sylvian of the New Romantic band Japan. Sylvian crossed over in the '80s with an implausible electro-soul rendition of Smokey Robinson's I Second That Emotion, in addition to the abstract (and drumless) pop song Ghosts. Blake, unfamiliar with Sylvian, intends to Google him.

The North Londoner has music in his genes. Blake's guitarist dad James Litherland co-founded the prog-rock outfit Colosseum (Blake is Jr's middle name). Blake, who picked up piano in childhood, attended a selective grammar school strong on music, but students were dissuaded from pursuing it as a career. “I meet a lot of old school friends who did music at my school but were encouraged not to [professionally],” Blake says. “They wanted to be musicians and they wanted to be producers and they were encouraged not to be. They're happy, but it's just pretty clear that school stamped something out of them – that whole process of being there and what their parents would have wanted for their grades and those kinda things really sidelined music as a hobby.” Blake subsequently enrolled in the Popular Music course at Goldsmiths College, but was more into the dubstep he discovered at the FWD>> nightclub. He'd join Mount Kimbie's live band. Meanwhile, the bedroom producer – and occasional DJ – premiered with 2009's Air & Lack Thereof on Jack “Untold” Dunning's Hemlock Recordings. Blake, still secretly a singer-songwriter, soon transcended the bass underworld with his viral 'blubstep' cover of Feist's Limit To Your Love, foreshadowing his first album with its spare avant soul paradigm. He came second to Jessie J in The BBC's Sound Of 2011 poll. Between LPs, Blake dueted with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon on Fall Creek Boys Choir. And the loner fell in love – with Warpaint guitarist Theresa Wayman. The American, eight years older and with a son from a previous relationship, “got” him. 

Overgrown has received universally rapturous reviews. The lead single, Retrograde, championed by triple j, quickly attained cult status, becoming Blake's preferred signature tune over Limit...

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Overgrown exquisitely balances sonic experimentalism, sublime songwriting and soulfulness as no Jamie Lidell record ever did. It has clubbier moments (the garagey Voyeur), but overall it is more intimate – due in part to Blake relying less on Auto-Tune, but also because the lyrics are so obviously informed by his passion for Wayman. Blake has stated that, in contrast to James Blake, Overgrown is fully realised. “I'm really proud of it,” he says. “I really like it. I think, when I came out of the studio, and had been out of the studio for a while, listening to it at home after a couple of months of not listening to it, I got a real sense of how minimal and intricate it actually feels in a way that could have only been made if I really spent a long time on my own making this music.”

The title-track, a meta-commentary on artistry, was prompted by Blake's encountering Joni Mitchell, whose folk song A Case Of You (off 1971's Blue) he's cited as his favourite song and often covers live. The pair talked about longevity, Blake proclaiming her “an oracle”. “She is an incredible woman,” he says simply. “She's just an amazing character.” Mitchell, 69, has disengaged herself from the music business in recent years, 2007's Shine supposedly her last original album. But Blake indicates, albeit tentatively, that the Canadian has resumed writing. Overgrown's biggest revelation, however, is Blake's track with the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, Take A Fall For Me, orchestrated over the Internet. “I sent him a beat and he rapped over it and I basically superimposed it on the beat without changing virtually everything – and then it was done,” Blake says. They've since met, performing together at Coachella. “He's a really good energy, RZA.” In the album liner notes Blake has sole writing credit for Take..., suggesting that he, not RZA, penned the rap – an omission that embarrasses him. So Blake didn't write that cute line about “fish and chips with vinegar”? “No! Although I can completely recite it – and when we did [the Coachella] rehearsals before he was there, I was doing the rap,” he cracks up. 

Blake has hailed R Kelly “a borderline postmodern genius” – and '90s R&B soundtracked his childhood (he sampled the likes of Aaliyah on 2010's CMYK EP). Blake himself now has an elite audience in the contemporary urban scene, among his fans Drake, Jay-Z and Kanye West. His post-dubstep balladry, briefly termed 'nightbus', might be the British counterpart to the illwave R&B of Frank Ocean and TheWeeknd. Does Blake feel an affinity with those artists? “Yeah, to some extent,” he replies, “because there's a lot of kind of homemade music coming out – and it's just interesting to hear what that sounds like.” Blake was reported to be contributing to West's Yeezus. (Coincidentally, both were billed at SITG 2011.) Today Blake maintains that a collaboration was never a possibility: “I was on tour the whole time, so all the time that these rumours have been surfacing I've pretty much been travelling and touring. So I've watched from afar as people have photoshopped me into tracklistings and all this kind of rubbish.” But would he work with Yeezy if schedules allowed it? “I don't know,” Blake pauses. “If the right track comes along... I just don't know.” Back in 2011 Blake, responding to The Guardian's prediction that he'd be a “future go-to producer of UK urban-pop” insisted that he's “not really for hire”. But now even Tinie Tempah wants a 'collab' with him. Is it hard to resist these overtures? “No,” Blake laughs. “I mean, I do music for musical reasons. I've got a way of working.” Nevertheless, the self-contained muso did value teaming with ambient pioneer Brian Eno for Overgrown's spookstep Digital Lion. “I think that is why it worked, because he already has some sort of eccentric or, maybe, no, not eccentric, [but] just leftfield ways of working – interesting ways of working.” 

Though critical of the 'brostep' phenomenon, Blake hasn't abandoned dance music. He DJs alongside friends in London. “I think there's a lot of quite serious dance music around – and it's nice to [support it],” he says. It is surprising, then, that there should be no remixes of Blake's tunes, leading to a proliferation of unofficial ones, including the popular Finn Pilly space disco edit. Blake apparently approves of such bootleg mixers. “That's amazing that they do that! Because I haven't got any official ones, there's this kind of space that is left and people on YouTube are occupying it – people are loading up remixes and they're having a go. That's amazing, if you can inspire that. Because, for me, remixes were always something I did for the love of the tune itself. It wasn't enough just to listen to it. I had to have a go with it – take the parts and do something with it. I think when people are doing that on YouTube, then that's a massive compliment.” It is perhaps Blake's devotion to underground dance music that keeps him in London. Indeed, he shows no desire to move to Los Angeles to be near Wayman. “I love it,” he says of his hometown, spiders and all. “I really love the city. It has something that only it has.”

Since earlier this year Blake has refined his new live show – for theatres and festivals. “It's a much better set, in my opinion. It just has a bit more snap. We're playing some dance music and it does get kind of a bit ravey – and danceable. We have a few more strings to our bow this time.”