Fuse Q&A: Kele Okereke on the Rise, Fall and Rise of Bloc Party
It's been four years since frenetic London rock quartet Bloc Party released their last album Intimacy, and since then, the group has endured near-constant rumors—not all of which were unfounded—of infighting, acrimony and break-ups. In 2009, the band decided to take a year off and regroup a year later to determine if Bloc Party had a future. Thankfully for fans, there's a happy ending (for now), as the group's appropriately titled fourth album Four is arriving on August 21.
For frontman Kele Okereke, though, the break didn't mean a stop to his creativity. In 2010, he released his debut solo album The Boxer, continued working on his novella and just "talked to people in bars and overheard conversations" during his year-long escape to New York City. Right before taking the stage at BBK Live Festival in Bilbao, Spain, the singer reveals to Fuse just how close the band came to breaking up, why he lies in interviews (current one excluded!) and how it feels to be back.
So is “Welcome back” the right phrase for the band?
Kele: Well, it’s a little bit strange for me because the others in the band are saying how weird it feels to be back on stage. Our drummer hasn’t played for like two years. For me, it just feels like a continuation since I was touring in 2010 and 2011.
Was the band ever officially broken up or was it more of an extended hiatus?
Kele: No, we never officially broken up but we hadn’t really left on the best of terms. We knew that we were going to have to get together in a year’s time from announcing the break to discuss what we were going to do. I think until us meeting, we had no idea if there was going to be a future. It was either going to go one of two ways.
But last year, you told NME that you followed guitarist Russell Lissack in New York and saw the rest of the band outside a rehearsal space, where they were playing without you. Was that legitimate beef? Band misunderstanding? A misquote?
Kele: No, that was completely not true. I have a bit of a habit that if I’m not engaged in interviews, I just start making stuff up. We weren’t allowed to talk about what we were doing because we really didn’t know if anything was going to come out of this, so I just spun this story and it ended up being like this huge trending thing on Twitter and everyone was freaking out that they were making an album without me. I just thought, to be honest, it was funny and if anyone had actually read what I said, it was so obviously ridiculous; the hiding behind corners spying on them. But if people wanted to believe that, that’s fine. I had a perverse laugh about it.
So how close did it really get to being over?
Kele: In 2010, I didn’t even want to think about music. I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a band. I thought the only way it would be possible is if we became a different band and our personal relationships and our music turned into something else. I didn’t want to go back to how it was.
In a post announcing the new album, you said that "in the past we have tried to hide the passion with which we perform, tried to obscure it, manipulate it so it didn’t resemble us anymore." What’s different now?
Kele: I think there’s a sense of perspective having had time away from the group. We had a chance to have lives outside of the band. One of the big problems we had in 2009 was we’d go from touring around for a year to going in the studio to making another record to going back out to tour another year. It felt like we were on a conveyor belt. There’s only so many times you can do that without a certain amount of friction starting to arise. How do you diffuse that?
You've said, "I wanted to watch the world from a distance… but then 2011 happened." What specifically were you referencing or was it the general tone and sentiment of what was going on in the world?
Kele: Yeah, I think it was more the fact that when I was living in New York, I was quite isolated; I wasn’t really watching much television or feeling aligned. I’d go three or four days without even speaking to people; I was just working on a book. I wasn’t really keeping track of global events, but whenever I did turn on the television, it felt like something awful was happening somewhere, and I guess that started to fit in with how I was viewing the world. And I started to question what it was I was doing and my purpose. I started seeking out music rather than avoid it, and it became clear that these ideas and songs are going to have to find an outlet and form of expression.
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