In all honesty, I can’t remember how I first found myself listening to Bloc Party. Beyond the latest releases from The Beautiful South, Simply Red and U2, my parents didn’t listen to new music, so the likelihood is that I came across the band through the unglamorous route of the snowboarding and skiing Playstation 2 game SSX On Tour (which featured “Banquet” on the game’s soundtrack). Or maybe the Year Eleven students who, three years my elders, adopted me into the back-seat row of the bus we rode to our secondary school.
What I can remember though, is how the London band stood out. Specifically: the Christmas Holiday of 2005 when I cycled through the snow listening to Silent Alarm at six in the morning, delivering newspapers to earn the £10 I needed each week to go to the cinema for the latest Adam Sandler epic, or to save and buy my family reduced price toiletry gift sets from Boots for Christmas. I remember “Blue Light” the most; there’s a guitar riff in there that sounds just like a chiming Christmas bell.
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So while Bloc Party may remind people older than me of different and maybe less satisfactory memories, like proclaiming them the next Radiohead through the naive drunkened reek of their Student Union bar, the band innocently takes me back to being thirteen years old and handing out copies of the Daily Express to homes in a sleep-ridden cultureless suburbia.
After two years away, Bloc Party are returning with their fifth album Hymns, to be released in January. Yet in their current iteration, they’re almost an unrecognisable beast – claws removed, no longer the matriarch of their tribe, with replacements for their infamously razor edged rhythm section in the form of a new bassist and drummer. That’s not the reason I’m not looking forward to their new record though. It’s more to do with the fact that, while Bloc Party are still going, I am not on the journey with them. Life changes, and so it is only natural we like certain bands for the period of time when their music fits with our own experiences. For me: that era is centered around the end of Silent Alarm, which turned ten this year, and more explicitly, the group’s second album, A Weekend In The City, which, if you consider the infamous leak (the album hit the internet three months before release date) also turns ten next year. That second album reminds me of moments that, in an overarching way, are even more relatable to life now than they were back then.
Looking back on the reviews when A Weekend In The City was released, it was seen as an album that drowned in big ideas – issues with a capital I. Yet when you’re young, you don’t care for these reviews; you read them but don’t listen. You form your own opinion. And so, to me, as a fourteen year-old living in Basingstoke, A Weekend In The City was more about a life that lay in the distant future than a band grappling with more serious subject matter. What is East London like and why is it a vampire? What’s it like to swallow a pill? What the fuck is a Kreuzberg? What will it be like when I am old and can experience these things? Who will I be? As we listened to the album in our SAT and then GCSE art classes, making paper-mache molds of figurines from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, these were the questions I would subconsciously ask myself. Because even though Kele sounded miserable at times, his stories breathed life.
The main takeaway from A Weekend In The City is that its emotional metropolis was constructed with the static discontent the group felt from living in London in the mid 2000s. Living in a small town submerged between fields and the service stations of the M3, the idea of living in London and then hating it was strangely desirable to me, just because it was so far from the reality of disliking being in the middle of nowhere.
So, when I finally moved there two years ago, the sound of that album rang in my ears. I experienced the line about East London being a vampire and sucking the joy right out of me; maybe not in the way Kele intended, but as a poignant summation of what I feel each time I look at my bank balance, walk past an estate agent, or ride a bus through the area on a Friday night. Where Kele’s joyless experiences of East London were perhaps more trivial, based on social dissatisfaction, they are now more real. I foolishly hoped the UK’s capital city would one day suck the joy out of me, just because it was an end-goal to aim for, but as an adult, it became freakishly real. Too real. The reality of being a young person in a capital city – be it New York, Paris, increasingly Berlin, and not specifically East London – can make you sink into a blackened purposeless cloud. If I have no money, should I do a more fulfilling job, like helping abused kittens find new homes? Why are my parents not rich like everyone I know?
I heard the album everywhere. “I’ll love you in the morning when you’re still hung-over”? That one rang around my head after nights out. “Grinding your teeth in the middle of the night with the sadness of your molars”? Think of it whenever someone sleeping next to me gurns in their sleep. “Let’s go to Brighton on the weekend”? Whenever London feels too much. But the permeance of this album isn’t just held in my own experiences.
Strictly, A Weekend In The City is about “the contrast we saw between being away on tour and being home”. That’s what the group’s bassist Gordon Moakes told Filter Magazine in 2007. “We would see that London wasn’t changing really and that the people we’d grown up with were part of that”. Ten years on though, and London has changed at a staggering pace. In 2007 the up-market Les Trois Garcons restaurant Kele mentions on album opener “Song For Clay” was an anomaly – one of the only bouji establishments on the Bethnal Green Road. Now it’s the norm. That same end of the road is littered with the upper-echelon of “affordable” flats (the ones with a concierge), members clubs, and the great bastions of gentrification that sell pizzas topped with veal and scamorza. So, A Weekend In The City should be an album that exists in a cultural vacuum: a specific listen relating to a very precise time. Yet the points the band draw upon are perhaps even more relatable now. The disdain in “Song For Clay” is heightened with the disparity between those in East London who earn and those who don’t. The idea of going away for the weekend in “Waiting For The 7:18” after trudging through the mud of a long and endless January, and wanting moments that are more than your job, is perhaps even more alluring (and less covetable) than it was ten years ago.
It feels like Bloc Party yearned for London to change, and it did, but maybe not in the way they would have hoped for. In fact, some of the things they talk about haven’t changed at all. They’ve got worse. Even if it was cack-handed, one of the more political songs on the record, the track “Hunting For Witches” (which talks about terrorism and the media’s subsequent responsive control over the public’s fear) holds greater relevance in the face of perceived threats to the United Kingdom. The line “The Daily Mail says ‘the enemy’s among us / Taking our women and taking our jobs’” is even more powerful when you consider their reaction to the migrant crisis. And then there’s “Where Is Home”, a track Kele wrote about a “cousin”: the teenager Christopher Alaneme who was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack. “In every headline”, he says, “we are reminded that this is not home for us”.
Kele said he “wanted [A Weekend In the City] to be a snapshot, a frozen moment in time”. Yet, while Bloc Party aren’t exactly the wise indie harbingers of global politics they perhaps hoped to be when the album was released, the snapshot Kele talks about has transcended the last decade. As I sat around in my bedroom at fourteen, chatting on MSN and learning how to play “I Still Remember” on the guitar, I fetishized the London they talked about on the record. It was dark, yes, but it was also a fast-moving, ever-changing, pioneering place. Yet the things Kele says on that record, the statements that were often kneecapped with Kele’s lilts of gauche teenage lyricism – they’re still hanging around, and they’re even more prevalent. People want to leave London because the pressure of “Waiting for the 7:18” is too much. East London is a vampire, but more so now, as property developers leech on the high-capital blood of the area; in fact, some people are heading to Brighton for something more long-lasting than the weekend because of house prices. And the police force Kele talks about on “Where Is Home” faced 245 complaints of racial discrimination between 2014 and 2015, yet found no case to answer for any of them.
As Bloc Party continue to go on and change like the band’s of yesteryear, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, et al, and release music their original fans no longer like, A Weekend In The City will always be there. It is a narrative for the past and the present as, in a freakish way, the stories it tells are moving closer to our reality. It was easy to chuckle at Kele and his brooding lamentations toward the city he lived in: not just because it was a better era, but because the band’s second album was sold to critics and fans as the band “Back to Save Britain: From Racism, Terror, and Sell Out Rockstars”. Yet with the advantage of hindsight and passing time, it’s hard not to nod along in agreement with the image Kele presents. And as this time passes, it will grant the band tangible moments that are everlasting and growing, more so than any memory of riding a bicycle as a teenager. So I don’t really care about Bloc Party’s new music, because next to this, it doesn’t matter. This album is a lifetime in the city.
You can find Ryan Bassil on Twitter.
