James Blake is nervous, but he hides it well. His long expressive fingers dart from iPod to coffee cup, playing me a tune, spinning me a quote, reading me a poem. Less shit-scared cocky, more garret virtuoso, searching for his papers now the window’s open wide.

Blake has a lot to be scared of. He is the hype of 2011, ‘the next xx’, peddler of the nigh-unwieldy freight of bass music – and experimental at that – with gospel vocals, that makes him impossibly talented producer and impossibly talented vocalist in the same breath. Jamie xx, he tells me, “warmed the seat”, changing forever the way “people listen to that brand of sparse electronic music.”

Sitting in the back of a Brixton pub during the first week of snow, Blake is dressed bleak. Giacometti-long and dark in black scarf, fleece and hi-tops, he sits upright in his chair, hard, sharp nose and cheek bone set above pliant droop lips and two endearing big front teeth.

The xx’s debut album in summer 2009 changed a lot of things for Blake. Jamie xx’s sublimated landscapes made a new genre of music acceptable to the public, one which didn’t have to fight for your attention, which breathed. At this point Blake was ostensibly a post- producer, post-dubstep, post-house, whatever you want to call it, with contemporaries like Mount Kimbie, Floating Points, Untold, and across the pond Kyle Hall and the Brainfeeder label.       

Even at this stage, the ingredient that was exclusive to Blake’s sound was its space, its ease within itself, air-cushion solace in a world full of shit-talkers.  His production style ranges from the cardiographic bass pulses and funereal piano of his harder Klaviewerke single, to the plangent r&b samples, often compressed beyond recognition, of tracks like CMYK and the album’s excellent To Care (Like You Do) [This track has Blake himself singing]. In these cuts he is redolent of Burial, and in other tracks he uses squeaky upwardly flowering effects used by Mount Kimbie and Flying Lotus associate Nosaj Thing.        

The overall effect of his earlier stuff is dust-speck immaculate, with Sèvres china-high percussion that penetrates through its clean distinctness and meshes well with the top studio-recorded r&b vocals he borrows from.

The aforementioned space in Blake’s music is one aspect; in another noticeably mature attitude from the 22-year old, he also makes himself sing in a flat, unflashy style, something he learnt from singers like Sam Cooke. In the pub he plays me Sam Cooke’s Lost and Lookin’ to illustrate his point, one of various moments which he turns DJ during our talk.

The key to James Blake’s penetration can be summed up with a quote he trots out for me, which for all its cockiness, can be felt in his music:  “Bruce Lee used to say: ‘When I starting learning kung fu, a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick. When I had learnt kung fu, a punch was more than a punch and a kick was more than a kick. And when I understood kung fu a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick.’”

You’re definitely entering quite a rare musical space with your album. Mount Kimbie supported the xx last year – are you trying to join the dots between leftfield electronica and vocals?

Well I would always have said that the xx are an electronic indie band. The way Jamie xx does things is totally electronic. Now that he does that live it’s different, but the way that he produced their album was totally in an electronic way. It’s a DIY production just like Mount Kimbie and just like me. But they did it first.

Is there a blueprint that they inspired?

I can’t say that I was inspired to write my album because of the xx, but what I can say is that they’ve made it a lot easier for me. People are gonna be a lot less shocked by it now that the xx have released an amazing album. It’s prepared some of the ground for me. Actually some of the xx’s stuff did inspire me – some of the live stuff – I was inspired by Jamie, and by the two singers, who have an amazing stage presence. The whole boy and girl thing they have going on is great to see.

I would put Jamie xx in a bracket with you

Well…that’s definitely an honour, because he’s brilliant… [laughs] he’s brilliant.

Is there anything outside music that inspires you?

Growing up I loved William Blake, I loved the way he managed to sum up incredible ideas and complex emotions in two stanzas.

Take A Poisoned Tree – [recites]‘I was angry with my friend / I told my wrath / my wrath did end / I was angry with my foe / I told it not my wrath did grow’, see it’s quite complicated. [continues] ‘And I watered it in fears / night and morning with my tears / and I stunned it with smiles / and with soft deceitful wiles…[continues reciting for a few lines]’…So it covers jealousy, a huge gamut of human traits, in quite a religious way. I’ve always been fascinated by biblical writing, even though I’m not actually religious.

What do you think of comparisons to Jamie Lidell, who’s also had respect for his producing before putting out vocal cuts?

Not much. I’ve heard a bit of Jamie Lidell, I definitely feel a million miles away from what he is.

In what sense?

In the sense that I’ve always drawn inspiration from soul music, but I’m not a soul artist. Soul to me, and the act of trying to sound like that, doesn’t make sense. It’s a genre that’s been. And gone. It’s something that’s happened. And I listen to Sam Cooke every day, I listen to Stevie Wonder every day, but I don’t try and sound like them.

And Jamie Lidell does?

Well yeah he did a whole album like them, a soul album, he did try and sound like that. He’s done that. And that’s something I would never do. Not to say that he’s wrong to do it, but personally it’s not moving forward enough to do something that is basically a revival. What is essential to me is to be constantly progressing, moving forward.

I read that you got on better with the friends you met going out to dubstep than your school mates. What was Latymer [Latymer Upper School – a major public school in London where Hugh Grant studied] like – full of rich kids?

Nah – they weren’t really rich kids – there were definitely people there who had more money than they let on, but they definitely weren’t rich – or didn’t seem like that to me. They were quite intelligent people – there wasn’t a lot of pretence. I think a lot of people were….[interrupts]I quite liked the people at Latymer. It wasn’t that I had music friends, I had lots of different groups of friends.

I’d more spend time on my own playing piano in the practice rooms really – I was more into that than having meaningless chitter chatter at breaks – know what I mean – I dunno, I was just more into music than playing football.

You’ve been playing music since you could walk no? I read that you’ve got a recording of yourself on a Fisher Price, singing Sitting On The Dock of the Bay…

[Laughs] I’ve been singing since I was a young kid – my parents have got recordings of me singing when I’m very very young. I remember learning Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay on the ukulele, and When I’m Cleaning Windows by George Formby…also on the ukulele.

And you were later in a gospel choir?

I didn’t get into gospel through that choir, it was more later on. Funnily enough, when I was in the gospel choir I was more interested in what the pianist was doing than what I was singing – because I loved the chords of gospel. It’s an amazing harmonic language that they use in gospel – that’s what grabbed me – in the same way that Bach interests me from a harmonic perspective, like Bach chorales. For example let’s say you’ve got a Bach chorale, you’re dealing with Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass – so you’ve got four parts – and all of those parts need to speak to each other in a certain way. Bach had his rules for how those parts intertwined and made sense and formed the chords.

And in Gospel there’s a similar way of making music. There’s not the same strictness, but there’s definitely a way of playing that you would never stumble across unless you were involved in learning classical. So I got quite heavily into that. I was learning all these gospel chords through YouTube demonstrations of how to play the organ.

There’s a real gospel feel to Measurements [a track from the album]

Yeah definitely. On Measurements some of the chords are pretty conventional but there are definitely touches of the gospel thing coming through.

What inspired the lyrics of Never Learnt to Share – was it a lament at being an only child?

[Smiles] Possibly yeah – I mean I don’t think I thought of that at the time, but maybe you could extrapolate that from it. It’s sort of an in joke with myself really, because I don’t have a brother or sister, and I don’t blame them, because they don’t exist.

Your album is produced in a very spare unstructured style. Is that off your own bat, because I can’t think of anyone directly similar?

Outkast inspired me. They are a massive, massive influence – one of the biggest I have. I think they’re the best producer / rap outfit ever. Their attitude to production is so free. When they’re making something, it seems like whatever works for the vocal is justifiable. There’s a track called Royal Flush where Andre does this verse. He just cleans up at the end of it! [gets out his iPod and starts playing the tune through its speakers]

[Over the music] There’s something about how the voice works with his music that inspired me to allow the voice to dictate where the music goes – in which direction. Because Outkast seemed to have developed a way of letting their voices dictate. 

Do you ever find that you maybe disguise your voice through distortion too much because of insecurity?

I think initially there might have been an element of that. I felt that I wasn’t ready just to sing on a track, also because I hadn’t found a sound that worked for a full vocal…But I don’t think that’s insecurity, I think it’s the feeling of it not being right at that particular time, and instead felt that it was right to use it more chopped up. A lot of the time I care about the way words sound phonetically over their meaning.

But do you find it hard to put yourself on the line like that with a naked vocal?

No because I’ve been singing since I was young, it’s something I felt was most natural to me, so in a way it’s actually breaking out, and feels like liberation rather than insecurity.

There’s the whole dubplate culture in dubstep that you’re definitely not a part of. Do you prefer recording in a studio to the public experience of performing? It must be nice to play Limit To Your Love to people…

I love them for different ways. Playing on my own yields this creative satisfaction, while playing to a crowd, delivering that music to people later on, it’s another kind of satisfaction, it’s a gratification. Playing Limit to Your Love to people has been utterly unreal and slightly surreal, and glorious. Glorious moments of standing there in front of people singing, arms out, at the apex of this thing.

Because at the end of it all, for Blake it’s about moving people. Discussing it with him I find his album material has a new purpose: to relay and share the emotions he feels. I tell him about a time when I listened to his lyrics “My brother and my sister / don’t speak to me” on loop walking through London’s Fleet street in late autumn; the frayed drum pace matched my own through the leaves, the organ notes matched those from St Bride’s, and something in that couplet punctured me. He hears this, lets out a goofy tooth grin and tells me that’s the best he’s felt all day.

Clash Magazine 01/2011

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