With their sparse guitar lines, hushed vocals and enigmatic stage presence, The xx are a band who have come to personify cool understatement. As for their fans? Sometimes less so.
“Couples have come up to us after the show and told us how they got together with our music,” said Romy Madley Croft, singer and guitarist with the British band whose 2009 self-titled debut was hailed as a minimalist masterpiece and won the Mercury Prize a year later.
A few are also prone to over-sharing, in terms of how the band’s music has inspired them in the bedroom.
“It’s a little bit awkward when that happens,” she said on the phone from Reno, Nevada ahead of the band’s upcoming Asia tour that takes them to South Korea’s Valley Rock Festival on Friday and Japan’s Fuji Rock festival on Sunday, before shows in Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan next week. European and US dates follow in August.
Such friendly fan enthusiasm illustrates how The xx’s ghostly music inspires, even if the trio – Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, who started the band as a duo when they were 15-year-old school mates in London, and Jamie Smith – don’t exactly crave the spotlight.