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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.London kills them. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” If Samuel Johnson’s oft-repeated maxim is in fact true, 2007 finds Bloc Party pretty damn low on joie de vivre. Their new semi-concept album, A Weekend In The City, is an accusatory yet disarmingly vulnerable trawl through the sick-flecked streets of the nation’s capital, with Kele Okereke scratching his head and wondering exactly how his generation managed to slip into a seemingly unbreakable cycle of cynical hedonism and private anxiety. “We came back to London after touring with our first album,” says Bloc Party bassist Gordon Moakes, “and we could suddenly see our old environment very clearly. And it wasn’t looking particularly healthy. A lot of our friends seemed to be trapped in ruts, we all had our own personal issues, the city as a whole seemed a pretty grim place, and we just decided to use all of that as a motif for the new album.” The vapid, coke-fuelled style-mag set come in for a particularly hard time on recent single The Prayer, the video for which depicts the band lounging in a Hoxton-chic bar looking alternately revolted and bewildered. “We never really felt part of, or represented by, that whole Shoreditch thing to be honest,” asserts Gordon, deflecting any accusation that the band are biting the hand that fed them in their early days. “We sort of moved beyond that art-rock scene pretty early on in our career.”  Bloc Party, 'A Weekend In The City' In fact, it’s difficult to see which “scene” Bloc Party fit into at all these days. With today’s music press a-buzz with stodgy, lad-friendly bands such as The View and The Twang, an album as thoughtful and musically progressive as the electronica-tinged A Weekend In The City sticks out like a sore thumb. “It’s weird that that lad-rock thing has come around again so quickly,” Gordon sighs. “I guess these bands are the children of Oasis, in a way. It doesn’t really worry us, because people obviously still want cerebral music, because they buy our records. In fact, the popularity of those sorts of bands just gives us more room to breathe and be creative.” Not that Bloc Party are joyless misanthropes who spend their days sneering at the drunken masses and tutting at their lowbrow tastes. “The most common misconception about us is that we’re dour and serious people,” laughs Gordon. “I can see how that impression has come about – we’re pretty literate people who have things to say and can clearly express ourselves in interviews – but really, at the end of the day, we’re just fun-loving kids.”
Joe Madden
Bloc Party – A Weekend In The City, released 05 February 07 on Wichita.
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