James Blake says he’s looking forward to playing the eight festivals that he’s booked to play this summer, including Glastonbury, the Pitchfork Music Festival and San Miguel Primavera Sound in Spain. But during Blake’s 22 years of growing up in London, he didn’t actually go to that many. The pianist and singer, who incorporates a dubstep sound, says he attended the Exit Festival once, but didn’t spend much time looking at the stage.

You’re playing so many different festivals this summer. And I first saw you at the SXSW festival in Texas. Do you ever get to check out any of the other acts?

There are some people I’m really excited to see. I was fascinated by Odd Future at SXSW. To me, it looked like that festival kind of broke them. They did really well to show people what they can do. I saw them twice. The second time it took me a while to get in. It was like ridiculous hype, to the point that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

Well, some might argue that the hype surrounding you comes close.

I just think it’s a different kind of hype. It’s gone at different speeds and I think they’re burning at a different temperature.

It has been interesting to watch the online thermometer, so to speak. There was the hype and then there was the backlash…

I loved the backlash. It was really cool.

Oh yeah? Why?

Because once the backlash happened, there was a backlash against the backlash, and it was really interesting to see. To be honest though, I’m not really part of it. I think that’s what I’ve liked about it.

Are you saying you don’t have a Google Alert with your name?

(Laughs) I don’t think anyone can say they’ve never done that, but I think it just matters so little to the creation of music what six million Internet people think that it didn’t really bother me too much. But from what people told me, for every negative thing that was written, there were about 100 positive things.

When I saw you play live I was really blown away by how deep your bass sound is. When did you first realize its power?

In London, in several clubs that I went to that were just playing dubstep and grime and some garage as well. But it was mainly dubstep, because dubstep just harnessed that power that dub had. It harnessed that sort of sub-bass pressure and just made it a bit more snappy, I think.

When you first started writing songs for your album, did you know that you wanted that to be an element of your sound?

It wasn’t really an epiphany as much as an odd process of making a song.

With (Feist cover) Limit to Your Love I just recorded the song and then I was writing a beat alongside it, but not related to it, and thought, Well, maybe these things go together. They’re at a similar tempo. Maybe I could just put a beat under that and see how it sounds.’