On Discovering Music From The Avalanches, The Dior Homme Campaign & David Attenborough Syncs

As Oliver Sim, from The xx, opens the door to one of Grand Hyatt Melbourne's corner suites he immediately extends his other hand out for a handshake, smiling warmly. We sit on couches placed in a perpendicular configuration and admire the city skyline views from high up in the Paris End of Collins Street. Sim wears all black and his trousers with subtle zip detail look familiar. Are they from the Dior campaign Sim starred in early last year? "Yes, yeah," Sim enthuses. Sim gracefully accepts this scribe's compliment on that truly beautiful Dior Homme Spring/Summer 2016 campaign ("Oh, thank you") before explaining how it all came about: "Well we did a show for Dior at the end of 2014 at the Guggenheim in New York and then it came through that." It turns out that one of Dior's designers saw Sim performing and thought he'd be a perfect fit for the brand. "I did it for the free clothes," Sim teases. That's him sorted for stage clothes, then.

Sim was just a teenager when he formed a duo — the beginnings of The xx — with Romy Madley Croft who attended the same school (Jamie xx joined later). Other notable former students from Elliott School include Joe Goddard (Hot Chip), William Emmanuel Bevan (Burial) and Kieran Hebden (Four Tet). According to Sim, the pair initially had "no ambition to play [the music] outside of the two of [them]". "When we started playing gigs, there was bands in our school that would put up, like, posters for their gigs and be like, 'Everyone come!' We kept it top secret, didn't tell anyone... because it was easier to play to strangers but, yeah! I think now we're quite ambitious people." There's a knock at the door. "Sorry, I just ordered a coffee."

"I was really eager to be in love and [there was] lots of, like, peering into other people's lives around me."

After offering to share his coffee, Sim double-checks ("Are you sure?"), before pouring himself a cup and picking up where he left off: "And slowly it became more and more from kind of a confident and ambitious place. But it was just like an age where we were falling in love with music, going to gigs, and it was just, like, 'Why not try it for ourselves? And we don't have to play it to anyone — don't have to be taking ourselves too seriously'."

When asked how he thinks The xx's songwriting process has evolved over the years, the bassist/vocalist offers, "[I'm] just working from a place of experience now. The first record [their debut, Mercury Prize-winning xx set] was like an album of love songs and I hadn't really experienced love firsthand. It was still personal, but it was like teenage expectations; I was really eager to be in love and [there was] lots of, like, peering into other people's lives around me. And now it's very much like working off events, and people, and working through them [laughs]; it's been helpful for life, writing these songs."

Recorded over two years and in various geographical locations, Sim says creating their latest I See You set was "technically" a lot of work: "we finished this album quite a few times and revisited it." What Sim found "really hard" was "feeling like you're finished, spending a bit of time away from it and then maybe realising you've got more work to do. And when the finish line feels so close and it's pushed off into the distance, it's like..." Sim sighs loudly. "Being on the other side of it definitely feels rewarding and I'm very happy with it," he adds.

The presser details recording for this album took place in New York, Texas, Reykjavik, Los Angeles and London, but Sim clarifies, "I think actually most of the recording was done in London... each of those [other] sessions just turned into, like, writing and experimenting; we thought each session was going to be the one where we recorded the album but we didn't, no." Trapped in a vicious cycle where they just "kept on going", The xx eventually had to come to terms with the fact that they would probably never be "entirely happy": "I think there's a point where you just have to accept that this is what we can do now — draw a line under it."

On The xx's two previous albums, Sim acknowledges his band wrote songs with the "mindset" that they should be able to be perfectly replicated them live "as you hear it on the record". For I See You, however, they relaxed the rules. Through "letting go of that limitation", Sim observes, "We've been able to be a bit more adventurous in the creating of the songs.

"It was just being as free as we can with songwriting, 'cause I think making Coexist was... the first time we'd make that record with an audience; there was a lot of putting ourselves under a microscope and thinking, 'What do people like about us? 'Cause we should hold onto that.' Ah! So people liked the space and the simplicity in the songs, which were really unintentional to begin with. So we kind of like pushed that even further and made a sparser record. So we've just tried to let go of what we think The xx should sound like... 'cause I think it's who we are as people that will kind of thread it together and make it sound the way it does."

He then reflects, "Coexist was hard to translate to big stages so we ended up changing the songs a lot live." Having now toured and played at a lot of festivals, Sim recognises The xx developed "a real incentive to have some more upbeat, joyous kinda moments... It's good to have light and dark. Like, we've got a lot of the dark, haha!"

Sim often breaks into loud-but-short lived bursts of laughter and has a very smiley, wide-eyed and interested demeanour that defies the dark nature of the majority of The xx's material.

On Hold, the first taste from The xx's latest release sees Sim and Madley Croft trading lines in trademark dialogue fashion during verses before a euphoric, upbeat chorus drops to make us temporarily forget the plight of our protagonists. And did we detect a Hall & Oates sample, I Can't Go For That (No Can Do), in this song? "You did, yes!" Sim confirms. One of the "earliest songs" written for I See You, On Hold had "been around for a long time and it wasn't quite right," Sim tells. Then Jamie xx "worked" in I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) - "we love that song" — and, voila! On how he discovered this Hall & Oates classic, Sim shares, "I got introduced to it through The Avalanches; they put it on one of their mixtapes and I loved it."

So how does Sim rate The Avalanches' new material? "Really good," he praises. "I haven't seen it live; I really wanna see it live. They came to England when I wasn't there, but there you go! There's a band kind of like taking a very long time [laughs]. But people were so excited!... A big part of finishing their records is just clearing how many samples there are."

When asked whether The xx ever come up against obstacles when approaching artists to clear samples, Sim reveals that the trio "had that happen twice on this album... where it didn't work out... I think the hardest part is just being rejected by an artist that you really like. But then we've had great ones like Sade; we sing a line from one of their songs and they were really generous. All they said was just, 'Yeah, give us a writing credit and you're good to go'... which was really nice 'cause we're massive fans."

We discuss the whole You Should Never Meet Your Idols scenario and Sim confesses, "I've definitely stopped myself from maybe going up to meet people just in fear — like, especially people that I loved when I was a teenager, 'cause I'd built them up so high and I'd be scared to kind of change that."

Sim believes that because The xx don't put themselves on their album covers ("we're not really up for it"), they tend to avoid public scrutiny. But what about fan encounters? "When we meet our fans — like, in a cool way — they're not particularly interested in us, ha! Lots of fans talk about songs, and about what [the music] means to them, but it's very rarely questions about us and our lives, which is perfect."

Just short of 35,000 fans have booked tickets to see The xx at Brixton Academy where they're playing a record-breaking seven shows — the longest stint by a band to date. "That was where I went to my first gig," Sim enlightens, of Brixton Academy. "It was The White Stripes. My mum took me, 'cause my mum was basically — is — a massive Jack White fan and so I was just like her buddy to take with her." Despite the fact that Sim loved the show ("it made me wanna go to more gigs"), he recalls, "It didn't make me wanna be up there... I had no aspirations to be on stage," before admitting, "It took years of gigging for it not to be painful being up on stage." Was this because he found it difficult to look out into the crowd? "Hard to look up, hard to relax enough to enjoy, like, playing with the idea of performing. Now I LOVE it, I love it a lot. I think I can speak for the three of us when I say we're not natural born stage people, but we're getting there," he laughs.

A list of The xx's syncs would need its own Wikipedia page so we ask Sim which ones he's most chuffed with. "I tell you what; working on Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby was really fun. He is a real character," Sim chuckles. "We had dinners where he wanted to talk about the film — about what he wanted — and we went in for all the strings being made, and Romy played guitar to the picture and, yeah! It was really fun and that was, like, a great experience. I would love to do that again or, like, an entire film... but, other than that, I think we got used on a David Attenborough TV show and he's my childhood hero, so that was a cool one."