Dear god,we love him

With a back catalogue of albums with titles like Fabulous Muscles, Fag Patrol and their latest, Dear God, I Hate Myself, one could assume the crowd at your average Xiu Xiu (pronounced ‘shu shu’) gig would consist of queer emo types, ready to throw themselves in front of the handsome, Morrissey-esque frontman Jamie Stewart as he sings their sorrows.

Not so, he insists.

“Fortunately, I don’t think I could categorise [our audience] — it’s not particularly consistent,” the singer-songwriter told Sydney Star Observer.

“It’s never only goth kids, indie kids, queer kids. It’s a real range of people.”

Stewart’s band — Xiu Xiu is essentially a solo project, with an ever-rotating list of back-up musicians — has gone through innumerable line-ups since the release of 2002 debut Knife Play. At last count, there were four times as many former Xiu Xiu members as there are current ones (the current line-up consists of Stewart and musician Angela Seo).

Stewart was happy to joke about his poor luck with band retention.

“It’s so annoying! I keep trying to get a regular band together, but people, for all sorts of reasons, keep leaving. Sometimes it’s for personal reasons — the drummer we’ve been touring with the past couple of years is going to start a family.

“But then my other band member before Angela, who’d been in the band for about five years, quit because she discovered she hated my guts.”

There were pros and cons, he acknowledged, to all this tumult.

“Once you’ve played together for a couple of years you really understand each other. The downside is you’re then less surprised by what the other person can do.”

The pair will perform in gigs across Australia this week, with the media release accompanying the tour trumpeting Jamie as a ‘queer indie icon’, something that’s apparently news to him.

“That’s a little ridiculous,” he laughed. “I wouldn’t say that I don’t consider us a queer band, but I also don’t singularly consider us as that. Our songs are about my life, politics, and the lives of the people close to the band. The songs frequently revolve around queer issues, because I’m queer.

“But the point of the band was not to be a queer band, the point was to write about life.”

And write he has. In the past eight years, Xiu Xiu have released no fewer than seven studio albums, alongside a string of EPs, a live album and even a greatest hits compilation (of sorts).

It would appear that music is something of a compulsion for Stewart.

“Oh, completely. And only more so as I get older — I would feel completely lost if I didn’t have it. It’s pretty much the centre of my life, and everything else orbits around it. I don’t really do a lot else.”

info: Xiu Xiu play Oxford Art Factory on September 2. Tickets through Moshtix.