James Blake, by Ben Beaumont-Thomas

It’s a great moment when you realise a brilliant producer can also sing. Recently it happened with Sampha, crooning Bobby Caldwell in the Boiler Room, or when Jamie Lidell emerged from behind the warped static of Super_Collider to let his soulboy vocals off the leash. And this time last year James Blake, who up until then had let pitch-shifted R&B starlets do the talking, released his cover of Feist’s ‘Limit To Your Love’, and suddenly the stakes were raised: he could go from the adulation of a scene to a wider audience, via the universal language of song.

“I never thought ‘Limit To Your Love’ would be the sort of thing that made people buy records,” James says. “I never thought that tune would go where it’s gone, and it’s been overwhelming and fantastic.” Where it’s gone is a major label record, huge expectations and hype, and the world tour that Blake is currently on.

“For me it was music for the recording’s sake – at the time I didn’t think about whether I’d do it live,” he says. But he teamed up with two school friends, and they’ve formed a kind of 21st century supper club band, Blake doing futuristic standards on piano as glitches and crisp drumming emanate around him. For someone more used to being behind some decks, and who admits he hasn’t seen much live music himself, there’s clearly been a learning curve. “I’ve certainly learned a lot about what people’s reactions mean, with regards to when you play a certain song. I wasn’t sure what to take from an audience being quiet – are they bored, are they reverent? If you don’t hear an audible rapturous applause you think, oh God, what am I doing wrong? But in actual fact, sometimes the quietest audiences are really absorbing it.”

James Blake – Limit To Your Love from HLAMOROUS on Vimeo.

Different audiences have reacted to different things. “In Europe they seem to go for the techno side of what we do, more four to the floor; conversely, they also go for the bits that are very ambient. In other places you’ll get people who respond to the hooks. Like the first melody of Wilhelm Scream comes in, and people sometimes switch on instantly, and sometimes they don’t.”

Blake, firmly embedded in the fluid scene that’s formed out of dubstep, knows how to craft a fine DJ set – when I saw him in Poland last year he seamlessly moved over the course of an hour from the lullabies of his own records to breakneck juke. “The importance can’t be overstated of the influence of DJing on the structure of my live sets. They are structured as if I was playing those songs on records; I want similar shifts in mood at the right time.”

As well as Feist, he’s covered a series of varied artists: Digital Mystikz, his own father James Litherland, and Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’. I put it to Blake that these, taken along with his sampling and his genre-blind approach, make him seem very much a musician of the Internet age, cherry-picking influences from across the globe and history, and fashioning something totally unique from them. “I am from the Internet generation, but on the other hand I think some of things the Internet also brings, along with the age of information and access to things that are very positive, an over stimulation, and this environment in which you can be incredibly self-analytical. And that’s the part of the Internet I’ve tried to turn off. If you get something written about you that’s not true, it’s hard not to say something about it, but really it’s just not that important. That’s the reason I don’t do Twitter – I think it’s very easy to use Twitter as a way of saying quite inane rubbish, which I try not to do.”

The tour has allowed lots of opportunity for writing new material, some of it quite different to what has come before. “There are some new sounds creeping in. I’ve written a few things at 125bpm that have been DJ tools for when I’ve been playing house in my sets, and I’ve found that house is a genre that seems to unlock a global predisposition to a certain tempo. Dubstep has a different vibe completely.” Is he falling in love with 4/4? “Yeah, when I went to Berghain there was a moment when I felt like that. But I still write 140bpm, and I love doing that. As Mala said, there’s still so much to do within that genre. There’s clubs and there’s nights where you’ll still hear the freshest sounds within that 140bpm thing. To me it’s an ethos, it’s not just a sound.”

His whole approach to composition is in flux too. “I still have a similar approach to production – although I feel like sometimes getting rid of the computer and picking up a drum machine. Just doing away with the screen, I’m getting a bit tired of the process. And I’ve opened up a bit where I’m using vocals in a different way – recently when I’ve been making tunes, I’ve been put off chopping up things and making them unintelligible.”