Romy Madley Croft, sometimes of the band the xx, is somewhere on stage, veiled in a thick fog of dry ice. Amniotic beats throb in the distance. We’re nearing the end of the first night of her two London Club Mid Air sets in which Romy’s celebrated solo debut album of last year, Mid Air, tours the world in the company of DJs, lasers, fat bass frequencies and the very occasional special guest.
Accompanied by musical director Francine Perry on a bank of electronic gear, Romy has been singing of new love and nursing some old hurts, all to thumping 4/4 percussion, rave stabs and the odd house piano. It’s a masterclass in bittersweet feeling, delivered through euphoric rhythm. Suddenly, a familiar voice takes up Romy’s lyrics.
The mist clears to reveal Oliver Sim, also sometimes of the xx, Romy’s childhood best friend. Wearing a sparkling crop top, crooning her words to her, he approaches Romy slowly; eventually, they clasp hands. The track is Enjoy Your Life, perhaps the most freeing moment of Mid Air. Built around a sample of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s moving song La Vita – “My mother says to me: ‘Enjoy your life’” – the track is an unabashed hymn to having fun, taking risks and being more authentic. It helps to know that Madley Croft lost her own mother at the age of 11; her father died in 2010 at the height of the xx’s sudden ascent to fame and then a close cousin died shortly after. The song is an emotional sucker punch about overcoming grief and, perhaps more poignantly, overcoming fear.
In the xx, Romy made no secret of her sexuality. But in that band’s lyrics, the objects of her (and Sim’s) affections were never clearly spelled out. Enjoy Your Life – which mashes in some of Sim’s solo track Fruit – climaxes with Romy and Sim suffused with coloured lights, bouncing around cathartically to house music and hugging. It’s all a very far cry from the cool, restrained monochrome shades of the xx – who are, incidentally, meeting up with a view to making some new work. “Thanks for singing with me again,” Romy tells Sim, “I’ve missed it.”
One of the many understated pleasures of the xx was hearing two queer singers duetting, sort of at each other, but past each other as well. The introverted ache in their respective voices stood in for all sorts of trials, not just romantic pain. Strong, another Mid Air highlight, closes Romy’s set with a vitamin shot of wise empathy (“You don’t have to be so strong,” she counsels).
All three xx members have, in their own way, spun off from their band’s foundational elegant restraint: producer Jamie xx released his variegated solo debut, pointedly called In Colour, in 2015; Sim’s own candid solo album, Hideous Bastard, came out in 2022. Romy wrote for other people – Dua Lipa, Kelela – sometimes with super-producer Fred Again, whose work dots Mid Air.
The album is giddy, high; full of unambiguous love for Romy’s now wife, whom she first met years previously – the meat of a moving song called Twice. Loveher describes falling for this erstwhile friend, delicately portraying hands held under a table as “just for us” rather than an act of shyness or shame. Romy cites Peaches, the 00s sex-forward electroclash pioneer, as a role model for this new phase of her work. Peaches was the special guest when Romy played in New York recently. Her remix of Romy’s track Did I – a tortured set of questions of who did what to whom in a relationship – came out at the start of the month.
Robyn – the queen of bittersweet club pop – also looms large tonight. But then as now, Romy’s voice draws more generously from Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn; a bittersweet timbre that transfers eloquently from nuanced indie rock to eloquent dance music.
A new song, as yet untitled, feels pleasurably of a piece with the rest of the album. “It’s OK to be sad,” croons Romy over a deep bass judder; soon, she’s interpolating words from Donna Lewis’s 1996 hit I Love You Always Forever. But if there are any shortcomings to Romy’s emotive, freeing set, it might be that the 4/4 grid – with echoes of 00s Eurotrance – sometimes feels a touch samey.
A remix of the xx’s track Angels also borrows from Olive’s 1996 hit You’re Not Alone. It’s another act of loving homage, often to songs held to be less than tasteful by indie snobs. This could be in keeping with 21st-century retromania, but you wonder whether Romy might be a touch overreliant on these songwriting prompts.
But these are minor cavils: Romy’s Club Mid Air is both elegiac and therapeutic. In the midst of it, one of the most gooseflesh moments has no beats at all. DMC, or “deep meaningful conversation”, is an interlude that finds Romy, atop a swirl of atmospherics, intoning “just breathe” and “don’t look down”. It’s as though she’s still geeing herself up for this leap of faith into love, into club pop, into showing up as herself.
