Despite the media ruckus the band’s second album caused, Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke has further opened up his personal life on their new longplayer Intimacy. Rip It Up talks lost love and public scrutiny with indie’s lead protagonist.
“I remember when I wrote Ion Square,” Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke recounts of the inspiration behind the last track on the band’s new album. “Ion Square is a park right near where I live in Bethnal Green [in East London] and I remember writing it when I was going home from a pub drunk at one in the morning and sitting on the swings and being in love with someone and feeling really safe. I guess it’s kind of somewhat misleading having it at the end of the record.”
Okereke is sitting backstage at a venue in Montreal, Canada, about to head on stage to play one of the London group’s first shows since the online launch of their third album Intimacy, months before it finds a physical release. Speaking in fast, strung-together sentences, tonight the often notably word-cautious singer is unusually open, perhaps out to set the media on the right track in the “interview onslaught” to promote the record. While queries pertaining to his widely reported run-in with Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon’s entourage in July meet a short dismissal and a request for a “nice” question, the highly personal lyrical content of Intimacy is entirely up for discussion. Hence the talk of Ion Square, a song that describes the singer in a whirl of romance. As Okereke alludes, the track is no indication of how he felt while writing the rest of Intimacy in the latter part of 2007. Where a couple of songs on Bloc Party’s second album, A Weekend In The City, caused a music media stir surrounding Okereke’s partial ‘coming out’, at the time causing him to put a media ban on asking any questions about his sexuality, Intimacy is largely a documentation of a relationship breakdown.
Upon A Weekend In The City’s release, he was critical of songwriters who wrote about their own lives, calling them “narcissistic”.
“Ahhh, busted!” he laughs when the matter is brought to hand. “Yes, I said that, I remember saying that. But, you know, there’s nothing more powerful than going through a break-up, and this is my method of counselling. This songwriting is how I work through my anxiety. I think it was quite a naïve thing to say when I said that initial comment, because it is one of the most powerful and potent psychic events, going through a break-up. I think it may have been naïve of me to say that – I was saying that from the distance of a happy relationship.”
Despite the grief A Weekend In The City’s divulgences caused him when journos came knocking, Okereke says he hasn’t been concerned that mining his own life, and particularly his love life, so directly for Intimacy was going to put him under even more intense personal scrutiny.
“I’ve never really been worried about what people have thought because, as I was saying, it’s how I rationalise my anxieties. Some people go to therapy or go to the gym or go to see life coaches or something; for me, I put all my worries in a song. That’s something I’ve always done and I’d be lying if I didn’t write about things that were closest to me. I’d be a fake if I didn’t write about the things I was worried about.”
Does he care what the other half of his break-up thinks of the album’s lyrical content?
“I can’t really talk too much about that,” he strains, carefully. “I had to let the people know, because obviously the record’s coming out and it’s kind of a two-sided story. I had to warn them because there are elements of the life that we shared that people would be able to recognise, and it wouldn’t be fair not to warn them. Maybe that’s kind of the price… that’s what you must expect when you go out with a musician, that aspects of your life will become other people’s property.”
With Intimacy released digitally just four weeks after recording finished and Bloc Party already out on the road, it would be natural for Okereke to feel a fresh connection to the songs and the heartache they sprung from. He says he does, but declares that, even now, he doesn’t find it difficult or exposing to perform the songs live.
“I’ve always been able to separate myself… You write songs about things that you’re passionate about and you commit it song, but once I start singing a song out on the road I completely deaden myself to what people must be thinking. It’s weird because I am exposing a lot of my inner self, but the way that I get around it is that I just don’t think about what people are thinking or how they’re responding to it. That’s one of the things, actually, that I really pride myself on: I’m not really too interested in what fans say, I’m not interested in what critics say, because I’ve been true to what I want to do and that’s all I can do. It’s nice to hear that people have responded to what you do, of course it is, and I’m always amazed.
“We met some girl in Detroit who had tattooed some of our lyrics onto her arm and I was so moved by that, that somebody would want to adorn their body with something I’d written. But, you know, generally I don’t meet the fans, I don’t speak to them, and I don’t really know how our music slots into people’s lives. I think it’s a good thing not to know; it’s good to just go out and do it. That’s what my job is.”
Bloc Party play Thebarton Theatre on Sun Nov 23. Intimacy is out now through Shock.