With the big announcement yesterday, I decided to look back at Bloc Party’s music and how it literally shaped who and what I am today. I was 18, misguided, ever-confused and totally ready to have my eyes opened to the world. Their sound captured my youth, indulged my crazy bouts and told me that it was okay to be different. That there were people like me who felt the same and reacted the same. This is a love letter to four guys from London who made me the person I am today.
I wasn’t ever really good at school. I wasn’t the smartest, strongest nor the coolest person. I was average. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that I like people and I enjoy their company, especially people who are radically different to me and are able to enlighten me somehow. But back in those days I just felt it was easier to retreat into myself. During those moments I found music and I loved every second of it – people who know me well know that I listen to a huge amount of music and that I’m always looking for something new. I wasn’t always like that. I was stuck, I guess my life was stuck. When I left school, scraping the barrel to pass, I decided to go to film school. I love film and losing myself in it. During my final school holiday, I was searching the internet and came across this band… it was radically different to anything I had been listening to. It was fast and hard and yet heartfelt, the lyrics tearing at me. The opening lyrics:
Attention! Unbelievers
Fashion victims, opportunists
Blood sport, cop killer
Don’t trust art, don’t trust culture
stopped me dead. “Don’t trust art” has sat with me for seven years now, because what is art, really? I make it, you make it, we all make it, and whatever Kele was trying to say with the lyrics had a completely different meaning to me and it changed me. Next, the drum roll stole me. I literally stopped the song buffering and went back – now remember, that was suicide on a dial-up line, but I did it anyway. Then, around 2:48 into the song, all hell breaks loose and guitars started wailing and bass guitars flaring. It was this song. It was off a compilation CD called The New Cross on a small blog and the band was called Bloc Party.
I quickly started trying to follow this band. It was hard as I didn’t have internet at home. I had a car and I had energy so I started driving. I found a little internet café on Beyers Naude, called Naked IT. A place that I had no idea would have such a huge impact on my life. I found fast internet and Bloc Party’s first EP She’s Hearing Voices and streamed the living hell out of it. I couldn’t download it because, heck, you can’t do that at an internet café. After going there a few times, the owner, Jack, asked me if I liked anime and if I would like to get into it? At the time i thought nothing of it, but he kept asking me and he eventually gave me a DVD with an anime called Naruto on it. I remember watching anime at home on the Sci-Fi Channel and how I thought it was okay. I remember thinking that Ghost in the Shell was an interesting concept, but after that DVD of Naruto, I was hooked.
Now what’s this got to do with Bloc Party, you ask? Well, about three months later Jack asked me if I wanted to help him with an idea he had. He wanted to start South Africa’s first anime and lifestyle magazine. He called it “Otaku“. I worked and wrote for this magazine for three years. It shipped all over the country and had a huge readership. I worked with the strangest people you’ll ever know and they were amazing. They opened my eyes and changed me for the best. I learnt so many lessons from them and will never forget the experiences I had.
While this was going on, I had started studying film and with it, a huge information burst entered my life. At film school I met even stranger and more interesting characters, part of me realizing very quickly that I wasn’t normal by any standard and that I had a lot to learn from these people. There I met a girl named Sandra, a guy named James with his friends Angie and Nicki, who would forever change me. Sandra listened to music I didn’t understand and opened my mind to places I hadn’t been. James taught me about editing and introduced me to parties and friends who listened to all the same music which I had now stumbled upon. But we all had one thing in common, we loved Bloc Party.
By then Silent Alarm had released and we were in full-tilt love with the album, I think to this day if a song off that album starts playing, I can still recite every word. From the opening chords and warping guitars of ‘Like Eating Glass‘ to the final drones of ‘Compliments‘, 2005′s debut was untouchable. Highlights for myself were ‘Positive Tension‘, which kinda felt like a metaphor for every girl I knew; the pure build of the song, the energy. I remember playing it over and over and over: “So fucking useless“. ‘Blue Light‘ with its heartfelt lyrics: “The gentlest feeling” teaching me “if that’s the way it is, then that it is the way it is” and that “You are the bluest light” which I’ll get to a little later. I could talk about this album for hours, really getting into every little lyric and sound, and it’s meaning in my life for the first year of film school. But all in all, my favorite song off the album says it all “This Modern Love breaks me“.
Through this album I found myself in Jo’burg’s, at the time, very small Indie scene in Melville. I started frequenting (now friend) Riaan’s amazing recorded store Canned Applause. I loved this man’s store. All of the music I knew and all of the music I was to discover was in one place. There were people who liked the same things as me and the best of all: the same music. We danced the nights away at the now infamous Tokyo Star parties. Sometime around this time though, Nicki and her lovely brother Chris met Daniel. It was around this time that we were all into Myspace. Yep, Myspace.
We added each other and became friends quickly. Heck we became best friends. I loved Daniel, he loved Bloc Party as much as me. We used to get drunk and sing our hearts out to every single song we heard and we sang them everywhere. His older brother, Tim, was two years ahead of me in film school and he had the most amazing band called Wanton and we would go to all their shows. It really was the best time as we grew up and lived on the Meville streets, hopping between Ri’s Canned Applause and Nicki’s store Ke Ai, mostly to the sound of Bloc Party in my head and in the CD player of my old rundown brown Mazda 323 (RIP Judith). Life was good – a job, amazing friends, amazing school career. Turns out I’m really good at editing and making films (might as well be my real job).
During these times I met girls and had little flings, short meaningful one-nighters and so forth, But I had never met anyone before who really stole my everything. Boy oh boy Bloc Party, your greatness lead me to someone so amazing, I think I’m still in awe of her sometimes. You could say she was my bluest light.
Now this is something iffy in my life that I’ve recently gotten over, so it’s not something I’m gonna be able to go into deeply. But I fucked it up with the one person I really loved. I’ve gotten older and learnt a lot of lessons about myself from the mistake, and to say that it hasn’t defined me would be a huge understatement. During the happier times though, Bloc Party released their second album, my favorite album, A Weekend In The City. When I look back on that album, I think that I love it so much, because of how truly happy I was. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that confidently happy since, but “I’m hopeful” that I will be again.
The song that defines the album and is my favorite is ‘On‘. The lyrics fit perfectly with my life with her: “I know your name, I know your name, I’ve danced with you“, “Drunken I love you’s, on top of the world” and of course “You make my tongue loose, You make my tongue loose, I am hopeful and stutter-free, You make my tongue loose, You make my tongue loose… I am hopeful“. The bitter sweetness of this song will haunt me forever, but it is so beautiful and captures so much of who I am. I will “charm them all” and will forever be hopeful. ‘On‘ is my favorite song Bloc Party has ever written.
This album was something different for the band, it was a group of men growing and I was growing with them. ‘Uniform‘ fell around when I started to become more self aware, the way I acted and more specifically how I looked at others. The lyrics said everything about my mental state at the time: “So when you gonna realise Those are not your wrongs to right? Have another line, have another drink” into “I am a martyr, I just need a motive, I am a martyr, I just need a cause, I’m a believer, I just need a moment, I’m a believer, I just need a cause”. I decided that apathy was something I was not about and that I would push myself even harder. To this day, if I feel that I’m not doing something or trying something, I get frustrated. ‘Sunday‘ for me was another love song, perfect for my situation. “I love you in the morning , When you’re still hung-over I love you in the morning, When you’re still strung out, I love you in the morning“.
All and all I was growing up and so was Bloc Party, not satisfied with being repeat offenders they offered up to the world their growth and I fell ever more in love with them. Like the lyrics say “Lord, give me grace, and dancing feet, and the power to impress” and they truly had.
Around here things got dark for me. I was young and growing. I had finished film school and remember James? Well he gave me a job and that job was amazing. It allowed me to be where I am today, having worked on countless local feature films and even having edited a feature film myself. I was changing and my music taste had grown even more and was branching off into other sides of music. I was appreciating more and more. I started drifting into new territory. I met a fellow by the name of Barry. Little did I know that this man would become the most important friend I have ever had. I didn’t know I would stand next to him three years later as his best man. And I don’t think he knows he’ll be doing the same for me. He doesn’t love Bloc Party like I do, we actually became friends because of Death From Above 1979 and MSTRKRFT. I grew apart from my other friends and embraced my friendship with Barry. We started DJing together and I was working really hard. I guess that I connected with him because he was growing up slightly faster than I was.
Dan and me grew apart, but there weren’t bad feelings. But there was from the girl. She didn’t understand my friendship with Barry, or maybe I didn’t. I was changing and she wasn’t, which is not a bad thing because, if I look back, I loved her because of who she was. Around then, Bloc Party released Intimacy. Now Kele, Russell, Matt and Gordon don’t get mad with me, but we totally got your album when it leaked. I remember the night so well, because I was working till about 10pm and Barry had made me a copy of the album but had gone to bed, so he left it under his dustbin, outside his complex, in a plastic bag. I raced there after work, lifted the dustbin. Yeah gross, but… Bloc Party!!
I slid the CD in and ‘Ares‘ came on. The song starts with a drone and drum rolls straight into the familiar sound of Bloc Party, catching you off guard, completely going into even more grown up material. The album yet again showed that the band isn’t afraid to grow. I find the lyrics very ironic looking back at the London Riots “We dance to the sound of sirens“.
The next song, and probably my favorite song on the album, is ‘Biko‘. The song is actually about our very own Steve Biko. At the time I was working on set and the long hours were killing me and the simple lyrics of “So toughen up, Biko, toughen up, Biko, toughen up, This world isn’t kind to little things, You’re not doing this alone” kept me going. Little did I appreciate that I wasn’t “doing this alone” and had an extremely supportive girlfriend by my side. I was frustrated with life and took it all out on the one person I cared about. I still regret that every day of my life. And as much as ‘Biko‘ had his struggles, so did I, and I never stepped up and I will never not step up again.
The chimes of ‘Signs‘ were always a warm welcome. This song kinda represents the end of my relationship and friendships. ”The last time we slept together, There was something that was not there, You never wanted to alarm me, But I’m the one that’s drowning now“, I had hurt someone so badly they could never forgive me. I find it funny that at the time I only liked this song for instrumental aspects. Now with its lyrics it encapsulates a lot of what happened. I don’t know when it happened but I grew up with you, you didn’t grow up with me, but Bloc Party grew with me.
Why yes I do own all your albums
I could keep going, I really could, forever and forever. About stuff like how ‘One More Chance‘ was all I felt like after I had ruined something so perfect, about how much guilt I felt for hurting someone who loved me so much. Or how Kele’s solo project fell into when I was DJing and that I was there for the whole ride. But I’m not going to, because now it’s time for Four. I’m happy, I’m strong and have the most amazing people in my life, many of which I share this blog with. I learnt from my mistakes and will instead not look back but forward. Forward to the time I can connect these songs to new, happier memories.
It’s been three years and I want to see how you, Bloc Party, have grown and if we will share more things.
But to be honest I will love this album, because I have been waiting for three years. I don’t need to tell you that I’m your biggest fan, I’m probably not. All I need to tell you is that you changed my life, and that you were there with me through the last eight years of my life, like a big brother encouraging me and giving me insight. Thank you for all the joy, pain and enlightenment you brought me. Thank you for all the joy you have bought all of us. And thank you for coming to our country.
I will be there. And I will forever be hopeful.
God Bless Bloc Party.