Up, down, out and about

>> With their sophomore smash A Weekend in the City, U.K. dance-punk darlings Bloc Party rock around the clock, taking in the good times, bad vibes, wasted hours and magic moments

WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND: Kele Okereke (2nd from L) and Bloc Party

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

With 2005’s Silent Alarm, London’s Bloc Party sounded a very loud one. Machine-gun drums and shock-tactic guitars backed singer Kele Okereke’s panicked abstractions, alerting the neighbours to the fact that England had a horse in the dance-punk sweepstakes. By the time the apocryphal yet excellent Silent Alarm Remixed was released in September of that year, Bloc Party had been shortlisted for a prestigious Mercury Prize and their spot on the U.K. pop charts cemented.

The anticipation, in the U.K. and increasingly over here, ran high for the band’s sophomore album, A Weekend in the City, released a little over a month ago. Ran high, and was rewarded. The record not only expanded the band’s arsenal of moods, tones and tempos, it also displayed new depth and clarity in Okereke’s lyrics. As the title suggests, it examines the width and breadth of human experience in lil’ ol’ London town between Friday’s 5 o’clock fuck-off and the misery of Monday morning.

There are the highs—“On” is a non-judgmental riff on cocaine, “Sunday” a tranquil celebration of intimacy. There are lows, like the teen alienation in “Uniform,” the suicidal impulses in “SRXT,” and the racist violence lurking in “Where Is Home?” and the explosive “Hunting for Witches” (Okereke’s Nigerian extraction lends these a first-person impact). And then there are points in between. “Song for Clay” and “Waiting for the 7:18” bemoan the treadmill of hipster ennui, seeking emotion where it’s been tamped down. In “The Prayer,” Okereke begs for respite from his social anxiety (his stutter, over the phone, only accents his eloquence), while “Kreuzberg” and the gorgeous “I Still Remember” sketch out the fragility of young gay love (provoking unwanted media attention to Okereke’s sexuality).

A Weekend in the City provokes a week’s worth of questions, and Okereke was kind enough to answer a few of the Mirror’s.

Mirror: Lyrically, on Weekend in the City, you’ve challenged yourself to resist abstraction, and instead articulate some pretty weighty topics and ideas in a clear and defined manner. This is a challenge because of the risk of sacrificing the poetic to carry a point. Was that a notable part of the writing process?

Kele Okereke: Making sure that things didn’t appear too naïve in print? No, I think you can be incredibly powerful using simplistic language. You can convey some very interesting, complex idea without having to dress it up. It’s something about the power of the idea, really. I’ve always been a fan of that which uses very simple, childlike language to convey really interesting ideas about the world. There’s a way that some people won’t be able to see past that—some people assume that, to be good, the lyrics have to be verbose and hard to crack, but I don’t think that’s the case, really. I’ve never really thought that about art, about literature—having to hide behind heavy language for it to have weight.

M: Certain songs on the album can be partnered up with one another, to a degree—informal correlations, if you want. What “Uniform” speaks of, the passivity and withdrawal in so many young people, is countered by “The Prayer”’s hunger for confidence, ambition and self-respect. Another connection I draw is between “Where Is Home?” and “Hunting for Witches.”

KO: That’s funny, because someone pointed that out to me quite recently, that they’re essentially flipsides to the same situation, in that someone—the character, me or whatever—feels like he’s being persecuted, whereas the character who’s doing the persecuting has decided that he’s read one too many hate-inciting articles in the press, and so he takes matters into his own hands.

Watching Big Brother

M: They both speak, at their core, of a fear of sudden, random and entirely unjustified violence. The difference, with “Hunting for Witches,” is that paranoid, one-man-militia mentality, which I’m actually seeing a lot more of in Canada—

KO: Really!

M: Yeah, it really creeps me out. If you put the two songs together, you have this feedback loop of fear, where the fear of one increases the fear of the other. It’s this frighteningly out-of-control momentum, and one I’m not sure how to counteract or defuse. What are your thoughts on this?

KO: I think the point I make with the songs on this record is that these situations are pretty heavily ingrained in the public consciousness. The attitude that certain ethnic groups have towards one another is something that’s really, really resistant to change, and for all the lip service that is paid towards this being a multicultural society, there is still an increasing number of racial attacks occurring in the U.K., and a lot of that, I guess, is what precipitated the songs. My cousin was killed in a racist attack a few years back, and I think this needs to be discussed more in society, rather than swept under the carpet, or people pretend that it’s not happening, that it’s not there.

Recently, with this show Big Brother, there was this huge, international fury about how these very ordinary, working-class English females were treating an Asian actress, Shilpa Shetty. The thing that was most frightening to me, watching that, was that those women couldn’t see why there was something racially insensitive to their actions. That was the most frightening thing, really, because those three girls weren’t any different from any other working-class girls you’ll get in England—like the sort of girls I went to school with. I could completely, immediately see those prejudices and hate, which reminded me of going to school in the suburbs. The beliefs that they had, I believe a lot of people in this country have, and it looked like, for a second, there was actually going to be a debate about this.

That’s the most saddening part, in all the press coverage—it looked like people were going to start talking about race, but then it kind of degraded into this witch hunt where the three girls left the house and now have become public enemy number one. But there’s no discussion about why these girls have these views. It’s just a case of the complacent media’s witch hunt. Nothing is really being said other than that these people are bad. That’s a depressing thing, really, because the idea of race in society is such an issue that, rather than call into question or examine their behaviour, they just get vilified as racists. I just find it frustrating that nothing’s really going to come of this huge, national situation. Nothing’s going to change.

Dispassionate about the Passion

M: On a different note, I understand that you became engrossed in Pendercki’s “St. Luke’s Passion,” leading up to this record. I’m someone who’s resisted religion and its organizations from a very young age. As such, sacred music is something that’s at once deeply resonant and painfully foreign. What are your feelings on the matter?

KO: Well, I grew up going to church as a child and singing in choirs. So I’m not a practising Catholic now, but I guess I was when I was a youngster at school. There are still certain pieces of choral music that are nostalgia for me—it reminds me of being young. I’ve always been fascinated by the power of religious singing. I wasn’t so concerned with the subject matter of “St. Luke’s Passion”—I knew, obviously, what the story was, but I was more concerned with the formal qualities of the music, as opposed to the religious significance. It’s the same to me as when I listen to a lot of modern R&B. I’m not so concerned with what this rapper is saying about wearing lots of gold. I don’t listen any further than the sound. Some people think that’s odd, but I think it’s a very good skill to have. You can separate what you find exciting about music—the best of everything. So everything is imbued with a sense of possibility. I can listen to heavy metal and be impressed by the musicianship on display. It’s not music I’d listen to often, but I can still see that there’s worth in it.

M: The record explores a lot of grim and unhappy territory, leaving me hungry for notes of hopefulness—I think that what people everywhere need now is hope, in whatever tiny morsels they can get. So let me ask, is there anything or anyone out there right now that gives you hope?

KO: To be honest, I feel most hopeful when I’m around my friends, my loved ones and my family. I’m constantly reminded that with all the bullshit in the world, all the compromising I have to do, with all the complications people have to deal with, there’s no substitute for that feeling. That’s what “Sunday” is about—the only real moment of hopefulness on the record. It’s about waking up and being hungover on the last day of the weekend, before you go back to work and do the whole thing all over again. It’s that moment when you feel connected to someone, and that’s the most important thing in life, to me.

With Albert Hammond Jr. at Metropolis
on Tuesday, march 27, 7:30 p.m., sold out