The Picture of Oliver Sim

“I’m ugly.” The first words you hear. First track, first question. “Am I hideous?” Oliver introduces his themes: fear, shame, loneliness, secrets, masks. A sonic storm brews, an angelic voice cuts through. “Be brave, have trust, just be willing to be loved.” Oliver counters with his coup de grâce. “Been living with HIV since 17, am I hideous?”

The revelation stalks his record, as it has shadowed his life. In that first track, Hideous, Oliver wonders if honesty will set him free. The hope and the tension are reflected in the twisted musical environment he’s created with Jamie, full of surreal little sounds that escape into the ether, breaking free.

Oliver Sim: “Hideous is the song that has kept me up the most. I remember I told my mum I had this song, and I’m talking about my HIV for the first time. And my mum was like, ‘Woah, woah, woah! OK, that seems quite drastic. How about you start speaking to the people in your life that you haven’t spoken to about it? As a test run. See how it makes you feel, and then go from there.’ So I’ve spent the past year playing people that song, having conversations first. And each conversation I’ve had, things have gotten a lot less heavy, and I felt a lot freer with it, which is something I just needed for a very long time. There are people in my life that I have maybe told, like thrown it at them, and then been, ‘OK, now we don’t talk about this’. And now I don’t have that. There’s no one that’s in my circle that doesn’t know, that I haven’t opened a door to where we can’t talk about it.”

In the endless days of Covid lockdowns, Oliver started reaching out to people – musicians, filmmakers – he loves, figuring they’d be looking for conversations like he was. One of them was Jimmy Somerville. First he wrote a gushing fanboy text, then he drove down to Brighton to visit him. He wanted him to be part of Hideous, and if not, just be there for the moral support. Jimmy provided the angel’s voice. “OK, that’s a real sledgehammer you have there at the back end of this song,” he told Oliver. “But don’t do this trying to be a martyr or a leader. Do this because you’re ready and you want to. And anything that comes from that, that resonates with other people, is the cherry on the top.” Elton John said much the same thing when Oliver connected with him. And the wondrous John Grant, who is also HIV+. “I love that he can have a sense of humour,” says Oliver. “It’s often the people who are a little bit dark that are the funniest. That was actually one of my objectives from the beginning.” “I don’t think it has come through quite as much as I thought,” he adds ruefully. “But this has to be for myself, primarily. And I believe that’s what I’m doing. Though when I was 17 and I found out, the only person I knew who was positive was Freddie Mercury and he was dead, so if I can, I would like to be more visible for other people as well.”

The visibility comes with The XX’s turf. When they first appeared it was almost unfathomable how fully-formed they were as barely 20-somethings. Everyone said things like that to them, to the point where they felt like frauds. “It was a bunch of mistakes,” says Oliver, “…no, not mistakes, but we were figuring things out,” one such being Crystallised, the greatest love song of the 21st century, and the greatest testament to friendship.

Bottega Veneta top & shirt

Charm is still his armour. Oliver has been taken up by the fashion industry, ironic in light of that lyric, but also a quintessentially queer development. Like a 21st century Dorian Gray, male beauty masking a heart of darkness. Although Patrick Bateman is probably a better analogy. He’s the spiritual godfather of Oliver’s record, one of his Unholy Trinity. “I love Patrick Bateman because he is the personification of the mask. Even if you’re not a victim of tons of shame, we all have the feeling that we’re hiding some kind of sick side which we can’t share with the outside world. He’s just the extreme version of that.”

The Trinity is completed by Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates. At least two of them make guest appearances in Run the Credits, in which Oliver positions himself as “a serial killer in a romantic comedy.” He has been a fan of horror movies his whole life. His pre-teen touchstones were horror and female rage, even better in tandem, like Alien, The Fifth Element and Carrie. He could never bring it to the band – “The other two are wimps,” he snorts – but he relished bringing Hideous Bastard to life visually, collaborating with one of his favourite filmmakers, Yann Gonzalez.

“Our friendship came first,” says Oliver, who spent a year sharing music, film and literature with the acclaimed director before even discussing a collaboration. “In terms of film and video, Yann knows me better than anyone else.” The result is Hideous, a film starring Fehinti Balogun, Bimini, Jamie XX, a glitter-covered Jimmy Somerville and Oliver himself. It premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and Oliver describes Hideous as “a queer horror film from Yann’s big heart and perverted imagination, and a dream come true”. Ambitious, provocative, revealing (and at times very funny) in equal measures, it’s a pitch-perfect visual accompaniment to the album.

“I finished the tracklist and there is no bow at the end,” says Oliver, conceding a naturally nihilistic bent. “There is no resolution. There are tons of open-ended questions that I suppose are only answered by me existing and putting out the music. I had a real wobble in the middle of making the album when I wondered if I was perpetuating this idea of the self-loathing homosexual. That’s not what I am trying to do. When I’m at my most self-loathing, the last thing I’m doing is talking about it. The fact that I’m writing about these things and putting them out into the world is the opposite of shame to me. I don’t see this record as being a Debbie Downer.”

So maybe it’s an exorcism? “It’s definitely an exorcism, bringing out all of these qualities that I thought have made me a monster, showing them to the world, and maybe realizing they’re not so monstrous. I mean, if I’m keeping them in, it’s just like a breeding ground for more monstrous things.” This sure sounds like catharsis. Could Oliver be wrong about resolution?

Run the credits.

Cue the sequel.