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Bloc Party “I feel like we could do anything” Kele Okereke on synths, heartbreak and crap rock bands.

Text:

Chris Cottingham

When Bloc Party released their third album, Intimacy, last year, it polarised opinion. The London four-piece had been steadily shifting towards a more electronic sound for some time, but Intimacy was the tipping point. The spiky post punk guitars that dominated their 2005 debut, Silent Alarm, had been replaced with drum machines and studio trickery. It cost them a section of their fan base. However, it’s also their most adventurous record. Speaking before a one-off gig at Berlin’s defunct Tempelhof airport, frontman Kele Okereke says, “ Everything I’ve ever wanted, everything that I’ve ever said about what I want Bloc Party to be, it feels like we are right now.” In April, the band start a 20-date UK tour with their biggest headline show to date, a two-night stand at Olympia in London. “ We’re on a roll,” says Okereke. He’s not wrong…

Intimacy is very electronic. Why?

I’m a big fan of electronic music and pop; I’m a big fan of R’n’B. That’s how I hear music now. Rockier songs on the album like Halo and Trojan Horse don’t move me in the same way that some of the more electronic ones do. I think I’ve realised something about myself right now with this record. I just feel really energised.

Even the guitars on the new album sound artificial…

That was definitely the point, to make a record that sounded like it had been manipulated and distorted. It’s almost like all the humanity has been bleached out. I wanted my voice to sound like it had been fucked with. I wanted the drums to sound like they’d been put through a blender. On songs like Banquet, She’s Hearing Voices and Price Of Gas [from Silent Alarm], we were trying to rip off an electronic aesthetic. All those songs came about from me going to clubs. That’s still what we’re doing now, but whereas before I’d get Matt [Tong, Bloc Party’s drummer] to play in the style of a drum machine, now we would just use a drum machine. I didn’t want it to sound like the four of us in a room making authentic rock’n’roll music. That’s the last thing I wanted.

Why did you want to bleach all the humanity out of the record?

The idea that rock music is a more authentic mode of communication compared to electronic music is something I hate. It makes me sick that a band like The Kooks or the Arctic Monkeys are seen in higher terms than someone like Squarepusher or Boards Of Canada. Electronic music is much more exciting to me. It puts us in a weird position because we are a rock band with an electronic edge, but some people who buy our records only want to hear the rockier stuff, which doesn’t necessarily excite me the most. We played Jools Holland last year. I watched it on YouTube. All the comments were about the fact that I was wearing a baseball cap, slagging me off saying I was trying to look like a rapper, or something. I don’t want to make music for people who think I have to look a certain way. When I encounter stuff like that I just want to run the other way.

A lot of the lyrics on Intimacy are about failed relationships. Is it a break-up record?

All the action in the songs occurs between two people. It’s about how lovers and friends and even enemies relate to each other. It’s about moments of shared vulnerability. There was a lot going on in my life towards the end of 2007. I guess when you go through heartbreak it turns the world upside down. I always maligned that type of songwriting, songs about splitting up, but when you go through it you realise that it’s such a traumatic psychic experience that it’s the only thing you want to talk about. But it isn’t a break-up record as such. It isn’t just about the end of a relationship. There are songs about being in love and falling in love. It’s not all about things falling apart.

You don’t like talking about your personal life, do you?

I’m big enough and ugly enough now to realise that if there’s something I don’t want to talk about, I don’t have to talk about it. I made a promise to myself, which is why I haven’t done much press in the UK for this record. I didn’t want to talk about something that was a personal situation between two people. I didn’t want to go into detail about it because it’s a two-sided situation. It’s not fair if you’re the other party. It wasn’t necessarily fair for me to make a record about it. That’s an opportunity that the other person doesn’t really have. That’s why I don’t want to talk in detail about what the songs are about. It isn’t fair and I haven’t.

If you write songs about your private life, people are going to ask you about it…

I’ve chosen not to do a lot of press. That’s how I’ve dealt with it. It’s been an effective strategy. And although it has the appearance of being personal, it’s still embellished. It’s based on aspects of my life, for sure, but I haven’t just written a diary.

Bloc Party seem to polarise opinion. Some people love you, some hate you. Why do you think that is?

I do think that as a band we do that. Some journalists don’t believe that the praise that Silent Alarm got was justified.

What do you mean?

We get criticised for things that no one else does. No other band seems to be scrutinised the way we are. I’m not sure how much I should talk about this. How do you feel that we’re perceived?

That you’re too clever for your own good, perhaps?

Maybe it’s because we do see ourselves as different. I don’t really understand it. Maybe it’s like Radiohead. They’ve never won the Mercury Prize even though they are by far the most interesting British guitar band around. It’s because they don’t come across as particularly personable. Or like Yannis Philippakis from Foals. People say he’s a bigmouth just because he’s a smart guy who can talk eloquently about what he believes in. People don’t like that. They’d rather have some crap rock band who don’t have any opinions.

Do you like confounding people’s expectations?

I guess I want to prove a point that things aren’t black and white, that the boundaries aren’t set in stone, that you can like R’n’B and indie rock, electronic music and metal, that it’s completely possible to be as influenced by Nine Inch Nails and Blur or Destiny’s Child. That’s always what we’ve been about as a band. I guess growing up as a black person into alternative music already you’re on the periphery looking in. You can see how absurd this idea of genre boundaries are when you’re on the outside. Everything we’ve done has been to try and shock that musically. It’s not about being willfully perverse. Or perhaps it is. I don’t know. But someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to go and make records like this.

What do you care about outside of the band?

Friends, my future, the people around me, reading. My house was the first thing that I spent my pop millions on. I’d like to study again. I didn’t finish my degree. I’d like to finish that. I was doing English Literature. After that, I’ve got no idea. I’ve always liked the idea of being a teacher. I like kids — kids are awesome. But there are plenty of more records to make before all that. I feel really energised at the moment. I definitely see us making more music, whereas there have been times in the past when I haven’t been so sure. I think this is our best album. It feels like we could do anything.

Bloc Party’s 20-date UK tour starts in London on April 11.

www.blocparty.com

• 16.02.09
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