Rip it up and start again

In 2003, Kele Okereke—the industrious frontman for a then-unknown guitar band named Bloc Party—managed to sneak copies of his group’s single into the influential paws of both Franz Ferdinand vocalist Alex Kapranos and beloved Radio One DJ Steve Lamacq. Okereke’s hubris soon became the stuff of art-rock legend. With the help of Lamacq, and Kapranos’ offer to let the band open for Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party signed to Vice/Atlantic and released its debut long-player, Silent Alarm, in 2005.

Almost immediately, Bloc Party seemed destined to become another young, quasi-cursed band recognized more for its trail of hype—NME fawning, hipster clamoring, thin comparisons to Joy Division—than the sounds it made. Two years later, facing down a seemingly inevitable backlash, Bloc Party confronts a classic sophomore conundrum: How does a band tinker its formula to re-excite the streets, while still sounding enough like itself to stretch its cachet?

Okereke and bassist Gordon Moakes are in New York City promoting A Weekend in the City, Bloc Party’s hysterically anticipated second effort, and Okereke and I are trying to make lunch plans. The band’s publicist tells me Okereke is looking for something “really American,” and we arrange to meet at the Waverly Restaurant, a tiny West Village diner with an enormous plastic menu, wood-paneled walls, red vinyl booths and a framed, autographed picture of Mötley Crüe nailed above the bar. Today, as every day, frantic, sweaty servers in black pants and white shirts are slamming plates and saucers into dish bins, hollering into the kitchen and shoveling French fries onto chipped oval platters.

“I Will Survive” is playing on the radio. Okereke is distracted, fiddling with his phone, periodically asking me to taste his water, and whispering about whether the dark-haired man ordering at the counter is actually Al Pacino. Okereke is willing to talk about Bloc Party, although he appears infinitely more interested in conversational strains that have less to do with emergent British rock bands and more to do with Joanna Newsom’s new record or modern American pop music or Beyoncé or the scope of the Waverly’s dessert menu. An hour later, I know that Okereke doesn’t like pumpkin pie or Bob Dylan, but I still can’t quite figure out what it must have felt like for his band to be declared the newest occupiers of Britain’s ever-tenuous rock throne.

Just a few days earlier, after getting injured playing American football, Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong pounded through the band’s set with a collapsed lung and landed in an Atlanta hospital, where doctors intervened, treating Tong and advising him not to travel for several weeks. So Bloc Party was forced to cancel its remaining U.S. shows—22 dates in all—with Panic! At the Disco. “[Tong] was working out so hard for the Panic! dates that he actually destroyed his lung,” Okereke sighs. “He’s a real monster when he plays.” Okereke isn’t numb to the poetic nuance of a musician soldiering through injury, hunching over an instrument despite being barely able to breathe. “It’s a shame it was for a room full of Panic! At the Disco fans,” he snorts, before mumbling something about 13-year-old girls.

Okereke and Moakes jetted to New York for a handful of press days before retreating to London; the cancellations (including two sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden) were devastating to the band and its American fans but, today, Okereke seems almost a relieved to be heading home. “This short stint touring reminded me that we’re going to be going for the whole year next year, so any time at home…” He trails off. “It can be hard being away from loved ones for a long time, but [touring allows for] a very immediate response to what we create. Playing to a room full of people who are losing their minds is a great thing.”

A Weekend in the City is based loosely around the pacing and noise of contemporary urban life—the crush of public transportation, the skronk of horns, the hot hum of 10,000 simultaneous conversations. “I think the actual physical space of the city is fascinating,” Okereke nods. “The speed at which people move—I’ve always been inspired by the rate of cities.” New track “Hunting for Witches” opens with a stream of blips and static, bits of found sound and samples fading into a prickly guitar melody; the cumulative effect not dissimilar to trying to cross town and listen to your iPod at the same time. “It starts with a field recording of me on a train,” Okereke says, “and then walking to my house—it kind of morphs into a song, catching the [exterior] sounds and incorporating them [into the track].” Still, Okereke, who has lived in London since 1988, is now prepared to ditch the city for more novel climes. “I would very much like to leave. I’ve been living there all my life. Everyone I know in London has come to London from other places, for university or for work. I had my love affair [with the city] earlier than most people,” he admits.

A Weekend in the City features all the spindly, textured guitars that earned the band a deluge of comparisons to Gang of Four and Franz Ferdinand, but it feels warmer, richer and bigger than its predecessor.

“I think ultimately there are certain musical tics that are very much a part of our sound, and they’re still there,” Okereke explains. “But I think there’s more texture and a larger palette [on the new album]. But it’s still very much a Bloc Party record. It’s not really scratchy or minimal. The first one wasn’t, either. The first one was very layered and atmospheric.”

Like any member of an emerging band, Okereke sounds alternately tired and defensive of Bloc Party’s presumed influences and the ways in which they’re hollered, incessantly, by the press—as plenty have since pointed out, in 2005 it was hard to find an article about the band that didn’t also mention Franz Ferdinand. “I don’t think [the comparisons] necessarily hurt us,” Okereke says. “If anything, that sort of labeling really made us conscious of this new record, to do something sonically that was as far from that as possible—from Gang of Four, Franz Ferdinand, New Order. The aim was to make something that didn’t sound like anything from the past. You know, to sound like a rock band in the 21st century, just as inspired by [those bands] as modern pop music.”

After lunch, Okereke, his publicist and I stuff ourselves into the backseat of a cab, scooting up Sixth Avenue to Atlantic Records’ New York offices. Okereke has another interview scheduled, so I meet up with Gordon Moakes. Along with Okereke and the other journalist, we’re escorted into a conference room with two leather couches, a couple of electric guitars and a glass coffee table with a big pair of scissors on it.

Moakes, sipping bottled water, appears equally ambivalent about the premature finale of the band’s U.S. tour. “It was the longest tour we were ever to have played. It was a real challenge for us. We felt like we stood out slightly on the bill, in terms of being a bit more left-of-field. But I think we were making an impact. It was so early, we had hardly gotten going, so we have mixed feelings about [the cancellations]. We did talk about [finding a replacement drummer] because our drum tech is quite familiar with the songs, and it could have worked. But it just wouldn’t have felt right, not having Matt there; it would have felt weird. So we felt that the best thing for him was to relax and recover, not worry about trying to get back to finish the tour.”

Bloc Party signed up celebrated producer/remixer Jacknife Lee to man the knobs for A Weekend in the City, banking on his experience tweaking a startling variety of bands and sounds—from U2 to Run DMC. “It’s funny, because in the beginning of last year, we knew we had to start thinking about [a producer],” Moakes explains. “We knew we wanted to try something new. There were several names that came up, and his was one that registered with me, kind of vaguely, and then I forgot about it. We tried out a number of people. And then we got around to actually having the record written, and we were still trying to decide and somebody said ‘What about Jacknife Lee?’ The Snow Patrol album [he worked on] is a really interestingly produced record. And I had been a huge fan of Compulsion, which was [Lee’s] first punk band. And he’d obviously done some DJ/electronic things, so it worked for this record. He sort of spanned the gap.”

With most tracks already written, demo’d, and tested live, Bloc Party settled into Grouse Lodge Recording Studios in rural Ireland, eschewing the record’s main inspiration—London—for the hushed calm of Rosemount, a small village about an hour outside Dublin. Moakes didn’t miss the buzz: “The flat that I’m about to move out of was super noisy, on a main road in East London. The noise of the street seems to echo up from a back alley into my room; it’s just that loud of a place. Shouting, drunkenness. We get a lot of ambulances and police cars and sirens. It’s hard to tune it out. We started the songs on the road, but we wrote most of the record in the heart of East London. The funny thing is that the recording was done in the countryside. After spending all this time in London, thinking about London and writing about London, we wanted to make it in London. But when we sat down with [Jacknife Lee], he said that he had to have us in isolation for four weeks. ‘I want your absolute concentration, I don’t want you drifting in and out. You need to be there, on hand, at every moment, so we can record at all times.’ So we went out into the country, in Ireland, and it was the complete opposite of what the songs were about. Complete peace and quiet.”

After a full year of nonstop press (and an album directly inspired by urban noise), the idea of Bloc Party heralding some unexpected quietude isn’t particularly shocking. It seems only appropriate that the band hole up in the countryside, block out the buzz and reconnect with its sound. The product, A Weekend in the City, is much like the process —starting in stillness, growing louder and louder until it’s teeming with sonic bustle. It’s a declaration that Bloc Party is back, and ready to let its noise echo through the streets.