So much for the city. Bloc Party, the Britrock foursome who last year took a bunch of avant-pop cliches and re-imagined them as something frightening and compelling, have spent the past months holed up in, of all places, rural Westmeath. There, between going mildly insane and investigating local boozers, they wrote their new album: a weird, funk-infused piece of conceptual hooey that may well turn out to be one of the records of the year.
Or so we’ve been told. Understand, please, that we haven’t actually heard the LP yet. Not many people have. Bloc Party fret about the album (as yet untitled) leaking onto the web before it’s mixed. Hence, only a chosen few have been granted a glimpse of the work in progress (expect the album in the first half of 2007). Unanimously, they have declared the record a step up from its predecessor, the Mercury-nominated Silent Alarm.
Considering Silent Alarm has, in the year and a half since its release, gained in stature to the point where it can be judged the first classic of the modern Britrock era, that is not a trifling claim.
Curiously, Bloc Party are themselves rather taken aback when confronted with reports that they have recorded a masterpiece. This isn’t modesty – they appear genuinely oblivious to the buzz building around the LP.
“Do people like the new record, then?.” asks drummer Matt Tong, sipping a beer backstage at the V Festival in Staffordshire. “Oh, that’s nice. When you’re in the middle of the storm, you have a hard time telling the wood from the trees, so it’s difficult for us to tell how successful we’ve been.”
Damping down the hype is probably wise. After all, second time out, Bloc Party have chosen to flirt with ridicule by making – it’s true I’m afraid – a concept album. Well, a sort of concept album, says Tong looking vaguely mortified.
“I know, I know. The ‘c’ word. It’s something we’ve tried to avoid using. But there you go. It’s the story of a day in the life of a bloke living in a city. The guy is kind of an every-man. So hopefully it’ll have a sort of universal appeal.”
Rumours of a double LP are, however, false.
“I don’t think we’re all that way up our own arses yet,” Matt laughs. “Give us a few more albums before we get to that stage.”
Funnily, many people believed Silent Alarm did, if not vanish up its own arse, then at least orbit the cake-hole several times. In fact, it was the record’s vaulting ambition – pretension even – that won many over. At a time when The Libertines’ gut-bucket punk was what passed for arty, Bloc Party felt like something from a higher, cleverer, plane of existence. Partly that was due to frontman Kele Okereke’s lyrics, dense, ambivalent tone-poems, referencing, among others, the ‘50s English poet Anne Sexton.
But the music, too, played its part. Self-serious art-rockers pinching the best – the most solemn bits, anyway – of post punk, 79-81, were, and are, 12 to the dozen. What marked Bloc Party as more than dealers in second-hand angst was their ability to take an essentially hackneyed blueprint – Joy Division blended with Gang Of Four and left to fester in the rain – and mesh it into a thunderous funk groove.
Roping in U2, Snow Patrol and Missy Elliot collaborator Jacknife Lee as producer, Bloc Party travel deeper in the direction of Planet Funk on the new LP.
“It’s quite a groovy record,” confirms Tong. “But it’s a cold groove, a dark groove.”
His line of thought is interrupted by guitarist Russell Lissack, who’s been flouncing in the seat next to the drummer and now decides to launch himself into Tong’s lap.
“Bloc Party are a very tactile band,” says the drummer, slapping Lissack away. “We’re hands-on with each other.”
Bloc Party had originally planned on making the new album in London. Doing so, they realised, would’ve been to invite disaster (“We’d have gone out drinking every night,” chuckles Matt). Instead, they opted for Grouse Lodge Studio in Westmeath. Located on a sprawling country estate, Grouse Lodge is opulent but also rather lonely. Lissack and Tong quite liked the isolation; Okereke, however, recalls being driven mildly batty.
“I didn’t really enjoy it,” he winces. “You were in the middle of nowhere and after a while it felt like we were all living on top of each other.”
Nor did Okereke, perhaps the only member of Bloc Party to live up to the solemn art-rocker stereotype, find last summer’s exhaustive tour of the US to be exactly a lark. New York, in particular, did his head in.
“People there are quite stand-offish, but people in say Florida take to you more easily.”
In the US, Bloc Party also confronted the stereotype of what Americans imagine a British band should be. Agreeing to a radio show’s request for an early morning interview over ‘traditional English breakfast’ they found themselves participating in a Black Adder skit.
“It was supposed to be a typical English breakfast, but it ended up being all this ridiculous food like quail’s eggs and things that no one in England would eat,” recalls Okereke. “We laughed about it at first, but the interview was actually quite enjoyable.”
Before the new record’s release there’s the matter of a return to Ireland, where, last year, Okereke raised the hackles of just about every last person at the Oxegen festival by declaring how great it was to be in the UK once again.
Recalling the incident, Matt pulls a face.
“Kele’s useless at geography. Absolutely crap,” he says. “We were all mortified, obviously. As soon as he opened his mouth I was like ‘oh you silly fucker’. He realised straight away also. But, I don’t think there are hard feelings. All the Irish people we’ve spoken to said they thought it was hilarious.
Coming back for Electric Picnic, Bloc Party feel they have some making up to do: “The last festival we played in Ireland, we were basically not very good. We weren’t happy with the set at all. Gordon [Moakes, the bassist] was so pissed off he trashed two grand’s worth of equipment.”
Asking which Electric Picnic acts they hope to catch elicits a round of blank stares – apparently, Bloc Party haven’t had an opportunity to investigate the rest of the bill. Learning that the Pet Shop Boys are to headline, Lissack and Tong nod in approval.
“Oh, Kele will like that – he’s been a Pet Shop Boys fan for years,” divulges Matt, looking around his shoulder for the singer (Kele, prone to wandering off, has made himself temporarily scarce).
Speaking of headline acts, Bloc Party caught some of Radiohead’s V2 set in Chelmsford the previous night. A group that has retained critical credibility while maintaining a career trajectory, are Oxford’s mopiest an example to be followed?
“Actually, I think they’ve sort of lost their direction,” Tong proffers. “Some of their old stuff I like. But I think they’re not sure where they’re going and what they want to do anymore. So, no, I don’t think we want to be the new Radiohead.”