Guy or Gay !?
Я прочитала эту статью и так и не поняла : Келе гей или бисексуал!?
Kele Okereke is tired. It was a late one last night. Lasted until morning, in fact. He's sleep deprived and a little scratchy as he walks through the streets of Shoreditch, east London, on this September afternoon. Unfortunately for his mangled brain, the Bloc Party frontman has loads to do today.
He and the rest of the band - Russell Lissack (guitar), Gordon Moakes (bass), Matt Tong (drums) - are in the final stages of mixing their second album. There's sleeve imagery to be decided upon: Okereke is looking at work by German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg. He likes one of her aerial images of west London's Westway, the road lit by the orange-sodium glow of street lamps, the adjacent five-a-side pitches brilliantly spotlit. The photograph will be perfect for the band's new record. Entitled A Weekend in the City, it's 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 declamatory climax of the album's opening track 'Song For Clay (Disappear Here)' is but one of the many startling images contained in Okereke's lyrics.
Now, as he heads to the pub, Okereke must face up to his first interview in quite some time. He's never been the most comfortable of public speakers. His stammer is probably only a very small part of this; he may be given to the odd grand statement, but Okereke hardly radiates the confidence and swagger we normally associate with the singer of a rock band.
'That's partly true,' he concedes, before adding, '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. Perhaps now [it does], but they're gonna be a footnote in history in 10 years' time. There's no battle in them. There's no conflict.'
Kele Okereke, on the other hand, knows a lot about conflict. There are his issues over home and race - the 25-year-old grew up in Essex but was born in Liverpool, to Nigerians who came to the city in the late-Seventies 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, Okereke will say with some vehemence, 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.
There are his ongoing concerns about personal safety. 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 was 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', is set in a club and features imagery - rippling faces, wobbly bodies, sweat - designed to suggest that Okereke and his bandmates are high. New song 'On' contains references 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 comments. '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.'
And then, most problematic of all, there are Kele Okereke's issues with sexuality. During the many interviews Bloc Party conducted during 2005, as their debut album Silent Alarm went from critical rave to million-selling commercial hit, from Mercury nominee to 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 beerily, boorishly white, male and heterosexual, Okereke was a refreshingly different kind of indie icon. The possibility that he was not just unusual but unique - a black, gay role model for indie kids - meant that for many fans the focus seemed necessary rather than just prurient. Nonetheless, just as he hated being reduced to 'black guy in indie band', he refused to be drawn either way on his sexuality.
'I didn't talk about it when I did interviews for the last record because it wasn't an area really reflected in the music; I didn't talk about race for the same reason. Why was that still a discussion point? The only reason it was a discussion point was because of the racial prejudice that exists in the mainstream media.'
But A Weekend in the City is a record full of intriguing lyrics and scenarios. Two songs, 'I Still Remember' and 'Kreuzberg', seem to explicitly explore homosexuality. The former is about a crush between two schoolboys ('We left our trousers by the canal'). 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,' he concludes, 'I am gonna talk about that.'
In the Shoreditch pub, Okereke gulps at his glass of wine. He 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, and this is now. The record doesn't presume to have all the answers; it is as confused and confusing as life is for young people. It also sounds terrifically exciting, a crunching mix of guitars, electronic beeps and multilayered vocals; a great leap forward for British music.
The fact is A Weekend in the City will make Okereke one of the hottest - realest - British youth icons of 2007. The question is: is he really ready for all that that will entail? Being recognised wherever he goes ... the endless trawling though his life and times?
The forming of Bloc Party
Kele Okereke and his sister (now a maths graduate studying to be a teacher) grew up on the cusp of London, where the city's eastern suburbs meet Essex. As a teenager, he knew Russell Lissack through mutual friends. They bumped into each other at the Reading Festival in 1999 and decided to form a band.
For a long time they wrote songs together in their bedrooms. Then in 2000 they placed an advert in the NME, looking for a bass player who shared their enthusiasm for 'Sonic Youth ... Joy Division ... Pixies ... DJ Shadow ...' Gordon Moakes, from Milton Keynes, answered and joined the nascent line-up. Under various names, including Union and The Angel Range, they gigged around London with a succession of drummers. In early 2003 they met Matt Tong. He had come to London from Bournemouth to study music technology. He became Bloc Party's ninth and final drummer.
In 2004 Bloc Party released their first single, a clattering disco-punk tune called 'She's Hearing Voices'. If you listened hard to the oblique, muttered lyrics you could discern, just about, that it concerned a paranoid schizophrenic (a friend of Okereke's, it transpired). Two further singles on small labels followed before the band landed a record deal with Wichita, a more established indie label based in Shoreditch.
Throughout this period Okereke had been studying English literature at university in London. He knew music was his 'vocation' but he had kept it quiet from his parents that he was in a band. It was only once the record contract was signed that Okereke told them he was giving up academia for rock'n'roll. Even then it would be some time before they accepted their son's 'job'.
'They really weren't that supportive up until it started ...' As often happens, Okereke's tumbled words fall over each other and a sentence skids to a halt. 'Matt was telling me that it was his mum's advice to travel to London to start a band, 'cause he was just floundering at home. "Just do what you love," she told him. I'm so jealous of that. If I'd maybe had that as a child I'd probably be a lot less secretive ... a lot less ...' He stops again. '[If I'd had] an unconditional sense of "We love you and this is what you do, this is what you are", I'd probably be a very different person.'
Of all the new British guitar outfits that emerged after Franz Ferdinand revitalised the indie-band form - including Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park and the Rakes - 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. They wore their pretension heavily, and in their interviews often came across as intense and glum. As Liam Gallagher hilariously observed, they looked like a University Challenge team.
Yet for all that art-rock posing, Silent Alarm was a raucous record. The songs were fast and furious and sounded a lot like the voguish reference du jour, cult post-punk band Gang of Four. The momentum seemed to literally rocket the band round the world - Bloc Party was one of the few new British bands to do well in America. But there was little meaning, little meat, to the words.
'One of the things I was most disappointed about with Silent Alarm was I was hiding behind abstraction,' Okereke concedes. 'Then I really got into the Smiths. The lyrics were amazing, so focused. There's no worse sin as an artist than hiding behind cliches and abstraction. If you have something to say, it should be able to be understood by everyone. So I wanted to make sure this album had a real centre.'
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 the worst headache ever. 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. The words to 'Where is Home?' begin at the funeral of Christopher Alaneme, the black teenager stabbed in small-town Kent last April. Okereke describes him as a cousin, although they weren't related by blood; their mums, both Nigerian, were very good friends. Okereke says that ultimately the song is about the fostering, by right-wing newspapers, of a fear of 'The Other'. That is, 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. There are certain activities that are still more predominantly white.' 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.
The lyric 'the buses have become cruel' in 'For England' was a reference to his memories of catching buses to and from school in Essex, and the terror unleashed by his fellow pupils on the top deck. The song then moves on to the horrible fate of David Morley, the gay barman kicked to death on London's South Bank - his teenage killers capturing his death on their mobile phones. The lyric 'England is mine, I'll take what I want' pinpoints a feral youth underclass for whom normal rules of civil society don't apply.
'The whole idea of happy slapping ...' Okereke stops and shakes his head. 'Filming you causing pain to someone, for your own amusement - that really repulsed me. That song is about the fear I have about what could happen on a night out. I have the feeling that it's only a matter of time.'
Also, as part of his stated intent to create a 'warts-and-all account of where my mind is right now', there are the songs about sexuality. Is 'I Still Remember' autobiographical?
'Not really,' he replies, before adding: '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 ...' He stops again. '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. I don't think that my sexual impulse is that bizarre or foreign. [But] the way that it's supposedly discussed in mainstream culture is [that] it's a crazy thing. But I know from my own experiences a lot of heterosexual boys had feelings or experiences when they were younger. And that's not really ever spoken about, that un-spoken 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?'
Good point, concisely made.
Kele Okereke and I meet again on a Sunday night in late December, at another east London pub. A lot has happened in the intervening three months. Their North American tour with emo band Panic! At The Disco came to an early halt in November after Matt Tong suffered a collapsed lung.
Final tweaks on A Weekend in the City have been completed, but 'For England' has been left off the final running order. I'm disappointed, I tell him. 'Me too. Lyrically it's a very important song in terms of understanding the record. But certain people around us didn't think it was musically up to par.'
Okereke has spent much of the past six weeks doing interviews all over the world. He got back from Germany today and is off to France tomorrow. Perhaps this is the reason he's hesitant and awkward tonight. 'I'm really on edge, actually,' he says, sipping his vodka and tonic.
Our conversation is difficult. He calls a halt to an early exchange about 'SRXT' - 'It's a really heavy way to start the interview.' His evasiveness feels at odds with the bold, challenging and anthemic songs he's written for A Weekend in the City. And at odds with his intention for it 'to be a real document, mentally and personally, of where I am as a person'. And with the fact that he's doing much of the Bloc Party interviews on his own now.
He's traumatised by the 'definite homophobic bias-slash-persecution' that he thinks informs most coverage of non-heterosexuals, and he mentions a particularly upsetting music magazine interview in 2005 which challenged him about his sexuality. He feels that an elliptical - but obvious - reference to his hitherto 'in the closet' status in the Observer Music Monthly's Gay Issue a few months ago is an example of the 'hounding' that still goes on.
He's aware that this is likely to be the most widely read interview he's done in the UK. Which is possibly why - despite him having given an interview to gay lifestyle magazine Attitude - he is now back-pedalling somewhat on any questions about sexuality.
'It's not something that I'd be inclined to talk about ...' His stutter is worse tonight. 'It isn't black and white. It isn't clear-cut. Britain has always had a love/hate relationship with gay public figures,' he says with some exasperation. 'They're treated as funny and inoffensive and camp. But then when a seemingly heterosexual person seems to display an inclination for the other team it becomes this real hounding situation. You're allowed to exist if they're [sic] seen as a kind of sub-class. Something ineffectual, a comedy Kenneth Williams character.'
But equally, his hesitation is understandable: he's protective of parents who 'in certain respects belong to a different era'. And it could be that, with early reactions to Bloc Party's album now in, Kele Okereke is beginning to grasp that he has made a brilliant album - and to worry about what that will mean in terms of personal exposure. A Weekend in the City will be a landmark release in 2007, a zeitgeist-defining record that rips up the rock rulebook. And one that will propel him - and the innermost thoughts of this sensitive, thoughtful and thoroughly likeable bloke - to a much wider audience. He knows that he's about to become a poster boy for the confused. And as he says, you wouldn't get such admissions of weakness and conflict from a Johnny Borrell, or even from an Alex Kapranos.
Does it please him, I ask, that he might be a role model for a 15-year-old Bloc Party fan in Essex who's unsure, insecure?
'I guess that's the only reason [to speak out], isn't it?' he says. 'To speak to young people in their impressionable formative years - and say something that could help them make sense of their lives. Lessen the sense of alienation and isolation that they might have. I think that's something that definitely ... I'd be proud of. That we could say that there are alternative ways of behaving, of living one's life.'
He goes on to cite a quote from groundbreaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall - it had a profound impact on him when he was writing 'I Still Remember'.
It takes a couple of hours - and my telling him that he's without peer, so no wonder he's a bit all over the place - for Okereke to offer further clarification. 'Well, there are some famous bisexuals. Brian Molko [from Placebo] I guess. David Bowie. Morrissey. It's not like that this is an impulse that's... Sorry, can I just get this?' His mobile has just rung, saving him more discomfort.
The next day Okereke emails Radclyffe Hall's words to me. 'You are neither unnatural nor abominable, nor mad,' it begins. 'You're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else, only you are unexplained as yet - you've got your niche in creation.'
