KEY POINTS:
Kele Okereke had a late one last night. He's sleep-deprived and a little scratchy as he heads to an east London pub for another interview about his life in the band Bloc Party, which is him, Russell Lissack (guitar), Gordon Moakes (bass), and Matt Tong (drums). The band head to New Zealand next month, following the release earlier this year of second album A Weekend in the City, a quasi-concept album detailing Okereke's thoughts on life in London in the 21st century.
"East London is a vampire/It sucks the joy right out of me" - the climax of the album's opening track Song For Clay (Disappear Here) - is but one of the many startling images in Okereke's lyrics.
But while he can get the message across in his songs, he's never been a comfortable public speaker His stammer is probably only a small part of this; he may be given to the odd grand statement, but Okereke hardly radiates the swagger we normally associate with the singer of a rock band.
"That's partly true," he says, "but the thing that makes frontmen most attractive to me is half-ego, half-vulnerability. You want to see that they're scared. You want to see that they're tapping into something that is frightening to them.
"I don't think the bravado of frontmen a la that guy from Kasabian or the one from Razorlight really resonates with people, that super-exaggerated arrogance ... they're gonna be a footnote in history in 10 years' time. There's no battle in them. There's no conflict."
Okereke, on the other hand, knows a lot about conflict. The 25-year-old grew up in the county of Essex, east of London, but was born in Liverpool, to Nigerians who came to the city to study. Mum is a midwife, Dad a molecular biologist. He was "saddened by the struggles of his parents, with their strong accents, in a system that is institutionally prejudiced".
No, he says, he is not proud to be British. But nor does he consider Nigeria, which he last visited when he was 14 (his strongest memories are of begging on the streets and police corruption), as somewhere he belongs.
As a black teenager growing up in Essex he "always felt something nasty could happen in the pub". On the streets of Bethnal Green, where he now lives, he feels that racist aggravation is, daily, a heartbeat away.
There are his tensions over religion - he was raised in a devout Catholic household and only able to stop attending church when he left home, aged 20.
"And that's absurd," he says. "I never saw the sense in going to this building once a week and sitting there for an hour bored out of your wits to hear someone pontificate. Then to go back to your life during the weekdays and be as mean-spirited as everyone else ... "
He's up and down about drugs, too. The video for the album's first single, The Prayer, was set in a club and features imagery - rippling faces, wobbly bodies, sweat - designed to suggest that the band are high. Another song, On, refers to "rolled-up twenties ... you make my tongue loose, I am hopeful and stutter-free, I can charm them all ... "
"Cocaine is such a seductive drug," Okereke says. "In a time when so many people feel they can't communicate or feel hemmed in, I can see the appeal of cocaine to young professionals who are doing jobs they don't really like. It's that extra kick that will make you put up with shitty, obnoxious people when you go out ... I tried not to make [On] a moralising song about using cocaine, more an explanation of the appeal, and of the comedown."
Most problematic of all are Okereke's issues with sexuality. During interviews Bloc Party gave in 2005, as debut album Silent Alarm went from critical rave to million-selling commercial hit and NME's Album of the Year, the subject of whether Okereke is or isn't gay was the pink elephant in the room.
In a musical form that is usually boorishly white, male and heterosexual, the possibility that Okereke was a different kind of role model meant that for many fans the focus seemed necessary rather than just prurient. Nonetheless, he refused to be drawn on his sexuality.
But A Weekend in the City is a record full of intriguing lyrics and scenarios. Two songs, I Still Remember and Kreuzberg, explicitly explore homosexuality. The former is about a crush between two schoolboys. The latter is about gay promiscuity. So has Okereke decided to talk about his sexuality?
"I think I'm going to have to. With the first album I didn't think it was essential to the experience. I didn't want to have to talk about it in a tabloid way. It wasn't there in the songs, so why did people need to know? But yeah, there are songs on this record that do feel like they're about desire, longing. So yeah, I am gonna talk about that."
Okereke is, justifiably, nervous about all this. A Weekend in the City is his unflinchingly honest depiction of a world of drugs, racism, religion, suicide, gay sex, violence, youth in hoodies and white vigilantes. This is London, it says.
Bloc Party originate from when Okereke bumped into Lissack, an acquaintance, at the Reading Festival in 1999 and the pair decided to form a band, writing songs together in their bedrooms. In 2000 they placed an advert in NME, for a bass player who shared their enthusiasm for "Sonic Youth ... Joy Division ... Pixies ... DJ Shadow ... "
Moakes answered and joined the nascent line-up. They gigged around London under various names and with a succession of drummers. In early 2003 they met Tong, Bloc Party's ninth and final drummer.
In 2004 they released their first single, a clattering disco-punk tune called She's Hearing Voices. Two further singles on small labels followed before the band landed a record deal with Wichita, a more established indie label based in Shoreditch.
Of all the new British guitar outfits that emerged after Franz Ferdinand revitalised the indie-band form, Bloc Party were seen as the clever ones. Their website featured a manifesto ("Bloc Party is an autonomous unit of un-extraordinary kids reared on pop culture between the years of 1976 and the present day ... ") and quoted from Bertrand Russell. In interviews they often came across as intense and glum.
Yet for all that art-rock posing, Silent Alarm was a raucous record. The momentum seemed to rocket the band round the world - Bloc Party were one of the few new British bands to do well in America. But there was little substance to the words.
Okereke determined to give A Weekend in the City more sign-of-the-times heft - "to weave a tapestry of lots of different views and issues and perspectives to create an overall sense of what life in a metropolis is like in the 21st century".
This means the highs and lows of weekend hedonism, from the Saturday-night exuberance of The Prayer and On to the morning-after hangover of Sunday, a beautiful song in which Tong's pounding drumming thumps like a headache. It means the loneliness and despair of SRXT, a chiming ballad named after the antidepressant Seroxat. It's about suicide.
"It was inspired by the fact that in 2005 two of my friends told me that they tried to kill themselves after leaving university. I thought that was really sad. These people had been through the education system and they decided life wasn't really worth it. Opting out was more attractive than the idea of enduring a life."
The line: "If you want to know what makes me sad/Well, it's hope, the endurance of faith" - where did that come from? "From watching my parents: my mother is incredibly religious. I always thought it was so sad the way that she always wants to put matters in God's hands. Let's pray that something will help us, that something good will come."
Rather than take charge of your own destiny?
"Exactly. It's depressing. Life is shit and you have to look it in the eye."
Harsh realities are also rammed home on other new songs. Where is Home begins at the funeral of Christopher Alaneme, the black teenager stabbed in small-town Kent last April. Okereke says that ultimately the song is about the fostering, by right-wing newspapers, of a fear of black youth in hoodies. And how that then means opportunities denied.
"I just feel that every non-white teenager will know what I'm talking about when I say that certain avenues in this country are closed to you. Whenever I walk into a pub in London I feel frightened." He and his flatmate, a white Austrian girl, have been abused by bigots who thought they were a mixed-race couple. The multicultural melting pot, Okereke concludes, is unworkable.
Also, there are the songs about sexuality. Is I Still Remember autobiographical?
"I guess, partially." Can we call it a gay love story? "Yeah, but is it a love story? It's one person longing for somebody they can't really have. But it's not consummated. It's not a mutual thing. It's weird - a lot of straight women that I know have confided that they've got it on with other girls. It seems quite a healthy part of their sexuality. Whereas it seems that the same impulse is apparent in heterosexual men but there's no ... I can't tell you how many times I've been propositioned by straight boys."
Really? "Yeah, yeah. It happened a lot before all this [the band] started happening. This is probably a contentious issue, but I swear that I could always see it in people, in the way that guys would need to be touching other guys. You could see there was something they couldn't say aloud.
"And I saw it when I was at school. And I guess I Still Remember is an attempt at trying to confront ... that unspoken desire.
"Not two gay boys," he continues, "but the idea of two straight boys having an attraction, or there being an attraction that's unspeakable - that was the idea of that song. When was the last time you heard an interesting pop song that actually tried to give you a different perspective on desire?"
- Observer
Who: Bloc Party
Albums: Silent Alarm (2005) A Weekend in the City (2007)
Playing: TelstraClear, Manukau Wednesday August 8, 2007
