Back To The Bloc

Four years after the release of their last album Intimacy, the four fertile brains behind Bloc Party have reunited to create their punky and ragged fourth album, the appropriately-titled Four.

Granted, their biography currently resembles a scene from Sesame Street, but Messrs. Okereke, Lissack, Moakes, and Tong are nothing if not thorough. In the case of their minimal album title, they do know that Beyoncé got there first, right?
“I mean if anything, that was a reason to call the record Four!” laughs Kele Okereke in his hotel room in Honolulu. “That wasn’t the sole reason, but I’m probably the biggest Beyoncé fan in Bloc Party so I don’t think that thought was going through anybody else’s head other than mine!”
For Bloc Party fans, it’s been an agonising wait, not least because Okereke has been purposefully leading the press astray at every given opportunity.
A string of recent rock reunions, particularly that of Manc indie legends The Stone Roses, have been met with a rather senseless sort of cynicism, from the throwaway (“Another group of has-beens gunning for an easy pay cheque…”) to the ludicrous (“Shouldn’t they live out their final years in a dank, cavernous pit so the fans can remember them at their productive, youthful best?”) Have Bloc Party come up against any such hostility?
“Not really, because we never announced that we were splitting up,” Okereke reasons. “I think it would be different if we’d been away for ten years and we weren’t making a record and we were just touring. We got together again because we wanted to make a record, there was something that we wanted to be created, there was something that we felt that we needed to say.”
The backstage cameras at German festival Melt recently captured Okereke & Co. having a little pre-show cuddle. Can we assume that it’s also rather nice just having the old gang back together again?
“Yeah, it is, you know,” he says. “Russell (Lissack) right now is the person I’ve known the longest in my life. I met him when I was in secondary school, we’ve been on this journey together and we’ve seen so much together and it is comforting to have them all back in my life. We’ve been through so much together and it’s nice to know that we’re going on another journey again.”
And the new record is certainly that. Marking a return to the band’s post-punk roots, it’s an urgent, aggressive affair that contains as many metal-influenced riffs as indie pop hooks.
“We were conscious about not repeating ourselves,” Okereke acknowledges. “We were very conscious of avoiding typical Bloc Party traits because this is our fourth record in and it’s very easy when you’re musicians to relax into the groove of doing what comes naturally, but there has to be an element of upset…
“It kind of dawned on me as we were writing these songs, if we were going to make a more jam, rock-orientated record there would be no point sitting back on it. We’d have to take it as far as we could take it as musicians, so I thought that was kind of interesting, making Russell suddenly become this super kind of metal Guitar Hero guy, because that’s not really been him in the past.’
‘To be honest, this was our most painless recording process,” he adds. “I’d come up with a riff and Russell would add his part and then Gordon would add this part and it would all come together quite organically, rather than us going in and one of us having a song or a set of ideas written and putting it to the others. It was important that there was like a natural collective synthesis. It was important that everyone came together, because we wanted to capture the sound of the four of us.”
The final track, ‘We Are Not Good People’ is one of the most harsh and striking on the album, which makes sense when Kele explains how it came about.
“That idea came from a realisation I had that Jesus and the Devil might be the same person,” he confides, “that the ideas of good and evil are really about perspective. Everything in life is duality and I’m seeing this now, I’m seeing this in every aspect of my life. I guess it’s about embracing aspects of your personality or aspects of yourself that you’ve been told to deny. It’s not about good and evil being opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s about them being opposite sides of the same coin.”
In a rare moment, he stumbles over his words. “I don’t know if that’s making sense…”
Oddly enough, it is. It’s something that often strikes me when I’m trying to figure out whether I love or hate a particular song. The emotions are so similar, it can be hard to figure out which is which.
“Yeah, and I think they’re completely necessary,” he agrees. “I think to experience joy, you have to experience sadness and to experience love, you have to experience the opposite. It’s something that you can’t insulate against and we try to as human beings all the time.”
Okereke himself is a true paradox; a renaissance man, definitely (his book of short stories is due to hit shops some time next year), but one who carries that all-too-rare mix of humour and earnestness, a serious-minded individual who also likes to watch Celebrity Big Brother. His blog at IamKele.com could be anyone’s; a video he posted of a fan’s reaction to Kristen Stewart’s infidelity (if you dare, type Twilight fan crying into YouTube) suggests that he’s just as bemused by the concept of fame as we are.
“That was something that somebody sent to me and I had quite a strange reaction whilst watching it,” he says. “One of the most troubling things about it was the idea that as a celebrity or someone in the public eye, you have such an effect on people. That girl in the video, it was as if she was grieving, it was as if she herself had been cuckolded by Kristen Stewart and I just thought that relationship was slightly frightening. I’ve always maintained that when you create something, when you write a song, it’s not yours any more, of course it’s other people’s.
“I understand that, because to be honest I don’t really want to know how the music’s affecting people. To be honest, I kind of don’t care… I’m doing this because I need to get it out of me and watching that video, it was just a little bit frightening to see the effect you can have on complete strangers.”
Okereke’s combination of fun and philosophy certainly makes for a fascinating interview, but balancing varying solo projects with his role as ‘Indie’s Sexiest Frontman’ (the very real result of a recent online poll!) can’t be much fun.
‘That’s what it is for me,” he argues. “It’s not a job, it’s not something I switch off from. I’m always thinking about self-expression because it’s a form of making sense of the world. I was lucky and I am lucky that I’m in a position where people are listening all over the world, like I’m speaking to you now, people all over the world care about what I have to say or what I have to put out there.
“There are plenty of creative people who are not in a similar position, who feel the exact same way as I do, but I have an audience. I need to express whilst I can, that’s just the bottom line for me, there’s no two ways about it. Whilst I have breath inside me, I’m going to be trying to express myself.”

Four is out now on Frenchkiss records.