To be lost in the forest

Bloc Party, Lincoln Engine Shed, 12/10/09

To be honest, I wasn’t paying support act Grammatics the attention they deserved. You try concentrating on a band when you’ve got a two pinter of cider in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. This being the seventh time I’ve seen Bloc Party, I think I’ve written about the ins and outs of their live show several times already, so let’s talk about the past...

2005. It was a very good year.

On a personal level, it was exactly halfway through my time at Uni. After a muted start, I was finally starting to get out a bit more. This was partly motivated by living in a house full of people who were only living together because we couldn’t find anyone else to live with. You can imagine the chemistry. Oh, the fun times. We communicated via angry notes left in the kitchen. I hid my saucepans from them. That sort of thing. But something else was pulling me outdoors. The music. 2005 saw a rash of debut albums that provided dozens of spiky indie pop tunes, mostly produced by Paul Epworth, that made the sticky floored indie clubs (well, club) in Lincoln the most desirable of locations.

It was all coming together. A bunch of bright young things from various ends of the country were picking up guitars and actually making a decent racket again. Because “they” had to give it a name, “New Britpop” was coined, but that was doing it a disservice. Britpop of old can be boiled down to a North v South façade engineered to sell magazines (remember them?) and caused a million shit bands to get record deals (remember THEM??). Don’t get me wrong, Blur will forever be the soundtrack to this young Essex boy growing up, and Pulp’s Different Class will always be one of my favourite albums, but the rest of it? There were some good moments, but there was a lot of tack too. Enjoyable but a bit dated. Uniform.

Plus, I was 10 in 1995 so wasn’t really old enough to consume it all. By the time that I properly started getting into music – you know, buying NME and Melody Maker every week, recording sessions off Steve Lamacq, falling asleep to John Peel, taping pound coins to cardboard and sending off for rare vinyl singles I couldn’t even play – it was the end of the century, the arse end of Britpop. There was the occasional spark of brilliance, but nothing that inspiring.

Cut to 2005 and Bloc Party, Futureheads, The Rakes, Maximo Park, Editors, The Killers (I stand by Hot Fuss, ignoring what came after) and fucking hell even Kaiser Chiefs brought out debut albums just as I was getting into dancing on the heady rush of two 99p pints (I was a lightweight. Much has changed, of course). Without boring you with too much more of my life story, I wasn’t a happy boy before I left home, and my first year or so at uni was a hangover from this. But getting out more was the making of me, even if it was for being known as that tall guy who gets pissed easily. But at least I had a good soundtrack to it. Apply Some Pressure, Helicopter, Hounds Of Love...these formed the background noise to me finally getting a life.

Out of all of these albums, it’s Silent Alarm that I hold in fondest regard from that time. Bloc Party always did look, talk and act like they were the ones who would be doing something interesting for the foreseeable future. Maximo, Rakes and Futureheads all released sophomore efforts that were beyond decent, but they have offered diminishing returns since then. Then there were the also-rans. The Others. The Dead 60s. Hard Fi. The Ordinary Boys. Where are they now? Fuck knows, but there was that one song we all liked, and will probably still dance to it if the cider is doing its job.

I put on Silent Alarm for the first time in ages the other day, and my God it certainly still packs a punch. It instantly transported me to that lofty house in Lincoln’s West End (Leeds folk, think Hyde Park but a quarter of the size and more horse shit on the streets) with its blocked drains and faulty heating (“It’s so cold in this house” never rang more true). There isn’t a duff song on there, and that’s before considering the two singles that came either side of the album, Little Thoughts and Two More Years. The former being the sound of young men writing a song together for the first time, and sounding all the more fresh and spunky for it, and the latter being a gorgeous ode to a decaying relationship. Two of their best songs, and they don’t play either of these at this gig. Nor do they play Blue Light, Halo, I Still Remember, Two Months Off...obviously, there is only so much time that they are allowed to play, and it’s best to leave wanting more. They are, essentially, A Big Tease*.

Bloc Party are finally becoming the band they always promised to be. Kele Okereke has gone from a shy geekboy mumbling insults to indie nobodies, to beefcake showman, owning us all with just a raise of his eyebrow. He is now confidence personified, backed up by his boys who have a lot more toys to play with these days. Russell Lissack is all fringe and pedals – a Johnny Greenwood in the making – and Gordon Moakes spends most of the gig prodding at keyboards and glockenspiels.

It’s the encore, Flux is coming, we all know this. Then I hear it, in the background. A noise. Is it my ears ringing? They did just play Ares. “We dance to the sound of Sirens”. No, it’s the fucking fire alarm. Ignore it, one more song, come on. The tour manager comes on stage. Kele lets him give the announcement. We have to evacuate the building. Now. Balls.

Not hearing Flux is equal to that time I saw The Chemical Brothers a couple of years ago and they didn't play The Private Psychedelic Reel. There was no excuse of a fire alarm to hide behind, they just didn’t play it. The fuck? Flux is a vital song. It’s important. Urgent. It rescued the tail end of the Weekend In The City campaign from slipping off into the night unnoticed. It is, to be frank, The Tits. We had all had a good dance that night, especially me on my ankle that I thought I’d broken. It would have topped an immense gig and made it a borderline classic. Instead we were left with the nagging feeling of being a bit short changed.

We shuffle out doors, swapping conspiracy theories, fed by some twat being roughed up by the heavies after fucking around with a fire extinguisher. Turns out it was one of the smoke machines that set it all off. The fire engines have shown up. We head off to The Glasshouse to dissect the evening.

Still, I got to watch a band I have loved for a long time yet again deliver the goods. I hear there will now be a hiatus, and there’s even mumblings of a split. If they do, it would be an incredible shame. Let’s hope this is just careless talk, and it won’t be too long before they come back to save the universe once more.

Kebab Watch: I think I’ve mentioned several times about Poppins, and the times we spent there, feeding our fat faces. Wherever we went that night (Topkapi? Somewhere on the High Street anyway) well it was never gonna come close. Most of mine ended up all over my mate’s floor. Sorry about that.

*I’ve just seen a site that compiles all the set lists from this tour, and they played pretty much all these tracks across several nights, so I guess it’s just luck of the draw. Fair play for mixing it up, the material is certainly there.