Catching Up With... Bloc Party

photos by Steve Gullick

After its critically acclaimed sophomore album, A Weekend in the City, climbed to no. 2 on the British sales charts, Bloc Party’s knee-jerk reaction was to dive back into the studio as soon as possible to record a raw counterpoint to the band's previous atmospheric rock and jagged chord play. The result is Intimacy, a record Bloc Party digitally released only three days after announcing it online.

Paste caught up with drummer Matt Tong to discuss the group’s musical evolution, lead singer Kele Okereke’s political reputation and whether the music industry is a progressive and equal environment for a rock band with a black lead singer.

Paste: Many of the bands that started around the same time as Bloc Party haven’t experienced the same level of continued success. Why do you think Bloc Party survived?

Tong: I guess for us, success has to be judged on the fact that we’ve gotten to a third album and people still come see us play. We consider ourselves really, really lucky to have gotten this far, but I also think that we’ve put a lot of work in as well.  We understand that you can’t actually control the amount of hype that surrounds what you do. That’s something that’s hamstrung a lot of bands, to make that first album and move beyond it.

We have a fairly good reputation now as a live band. It all comes from touring, basically. We don’t normally get played on the radio very much. Touring is the only way we can actually connect and bring our music to our fan base. You also have to take into account the blogosphere now, as well. That one’s more of a recent development, but it’s one you shouldn’t ignore.

Paste: Do you think you’ve benefited more with the spread of blogs then you did initially on mainstream radio?

Tong: I think we have. You still have to take some of that with a pinch of salt, because one of the unfortunate side effects of the Internet is that, now, everyone’s a critic. I would never deny the right of someone to express an opinion, but I think sometimes people take things a bit too seriously. A lot of stuff has been written by people who aren’t necessarily qualified to be critical, but, you know, you get used to it.

Paste: Your second record did very well critically and financially despite an early Internet leak. What was your reasoning behind releasing Intimacy without any previous marketing?

Tong: I think the leak was the main reason behind the decision.  We were trying to reclaim ownership over what is we do in the sense that by the time we finished the second record, we were just sick of the actual record itself and talking about it. It came with a weight attached to it months before its release. We kind of thought it would be an interesting experiment in injecting some spontaneity back into it and trying to ditch traditional thinking when it comes to a record release.

Paste: Radiohead, Saul Willliams and Nine Inch Nails did the same thing outside the confines of a record label. How cool was your record label with the idea of this? Did they see this as a financial liability at all?

Tong: No, not at all. They’ve always been really supportive and they were keen about the idea from the outset. A lot of the planning that surrounded this release was done in tandem with our record label, Wichita, back in the UK.  I think they were just as excited as us to get the record out soon as possible. We were lucky to be able to choose our label; not every band gets that. Sometimes you just have to make do with what you have. 

Paste: The first track off Intimacy, “Ares,” sounds like it took inspiration from The Beatle’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Was it a direct influence?

Tong: It was more inspired by The Chemical Brother’s song “Setting Sun” and the big drum sound on the record, and I think they sampled “Tomorrow Never Knows.” [Editor's note: Although legal action was taken against the perceived sampling at the time, The Chemical Brothers did not directly sample the beat to “Setting Sun.”] That’s me playing the drums, but it’s been cut up and sampled. 

Paste: On that topic, you’ve stated before that you don’t necessarily define Bloc Party as a rock band.  Intimacy definitely has more of an electronica feel to it. Are you going to explore a more guitarless, techno direction in your future work?

Tong: That’s a really good question. Normally when we’ve written a record, we’ve already moved on to the next thing, but we’re not really writing at the moment. The plan’s to take a really long break after the tour for this record. It’s certainly true that the making of this record has broken down a lot of boundaries for us. I don’t think four years ago it would have been possible for us as a band to step back, and we’ve to learned to leave our individual anxieties aside for the greater good of servicing a song.

There’s always this very strong pop edge that underlies what we do even if it’s not always completely obvious. There isn’t really anything we can’t do if we want to attempt to do it.

Paste: Intimacy sounds a lot more raw and apolitical then your other albums. What were you going through when you recorded?

Tong: Kele felt that the political reputation that came with A Weekend in the City became a real monkey on his back. He wasn’t trying to make an era-defining concept record; he was trying to process the way he saw it. It elevated and became this thing where he was supposed to be this spokesman of a generation, and people were challenging him at every opportunity to justify that, when it was never his motive or ambition to speak for other people at all. He was just trying to make sense of the world for himself.

With this one, he just wanted to step back a bit. There were a few things happening in his private life that he wanted to work out. It is an emotionally raw record, but I also think some of that might be spending three or four years on the tour bus. It’s hard to find an interior world when you constantly have to put on a front or a face for your immediate touring party.

Paste: In light of the incident with Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, have you found the entertainment industry and rock ’n’ roll culture to be as progressive and open-minded as it’s generally perceived?

Tong: No. I don’t want to answer this question on behalf of Kele, but personally speaking, I always thought being a musician or wanting to do anything great was recourse to escaping  the things about the world that might be hard to digest. I see bigotry all the time in the music industry. It’s still a very macho environment; it’s always been boys in the road swilling Jack Daniel's and womanizing. Rock 'n’ roll and feminine influence have been mutually exclusive. I heartily disagree with that. I constantly meet females who operate in this world who still struggle with archaic and counterproductive attitudes.

When we first started, the fact that Kele was black was really intriguing because we didn’t make hip-hop music. It was a lazy labeling of a group of people because of their ethnicity. Especially now, there’s a tendency to categorize things we see very quickly because we have so much information thrown at us with the Internet and cable TV. In the early days we were asked a lot of questions like “What’s it like being a black guy in an indie band?”  We come from England where there’s this mingling of all sorts of different people from different backgrounds. Surely this isn’t exceptional. We didn’t even bother answering those kinds of questions, we just kind of moved on. You can’t take anything for granted.