ALL EYES ON KELE – Bloc Party’s transcendent energy a tonic for Midlands’ stupor, or anyone’s.

Bloc Party deliver a shot up the arm for the west-midlands in two live blitzes before the snow came flurrying down. Don Albert reports from the trenches.

I vehemently rejected the Smiths in the 1980s. Not the music per se, but the shoe-gazing self-pity of Morrissey, and his surprisingly straight young fans who clutched onto a painstakingly fey and pessimistic outlook that dwelled for the most part, on the challenges of being a gay lad in Manchester. Bleak, lovelorn and generally hopeless, it was the antithesis of my ‘day-glo’ surf-cultured exuberance south of Durban, but more to the point, it smacked of hypocracy to see clearly heterosexual men-in-the-making, emulating and sympathizing with a miserable poof. I hated the farce.

Fast-forward twenty years later, and how we have changed, middle-England and me. Whereas in the 1980’s Morrissey’s issues were not mine, somehow in the here and now they could be, and the closest rock star we have to fill those introspective shoes with a similar caliber of lyrical genius of is none other than Kele Okereke – six-foot, black, rightfully proud, and being worshipped for exactly who he is by a berserk crowd of fourteen to early thirty-somethings, at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall last night.

For those who don’t know, Wolverhampton is a university town, more west than Birmingham in England’s mid-west, or Wild West as it should be known. A largely intact hilltop town aired with the fresh breath of youth escaping from the franchised mediocrity of bombed-out Britain’s gaps, Wolverhampton is as good a snapshot of Bloc Party’s target market as any – a market desperate for meaning not artifice. No, Bloc Party are not the Human League, and the devotion they have inspired by telling it like it is, warts and all, is nothing less than maniacal.

Of course the music itself has something to do with it too. Razor sharp, bold of tune and percussively devastating – Bloc Party are a blue print of their own design, difficult to emulate, ever changing, and thankfully so. We only want there to be one.

It is practically snowing outside, but the temperature inside the 1950’s timber panelled Civic is beyond intimate, it’s positively nuclear. By the time the first five notes of ‘One Month Off’ come crashing from the guitars, the hitherto bambi and bookish youngsters of near and far have transmogrified the first twenty meters of the stalls into a mosh-pit the likes of which yours truly has not seen since Nine Inch Nails bust out ‘Closer’ in a New York stadium circa 1995. Within seconds the first waif has already body surfed his way into the arms of a bouncer upfront, per kind hand of amongst others, your editor-in-chief! And we are off…

Backed only by a minimal but impressive light show, Kele and the boys tear through recent songs ‘Talons’ and ‘Hunting for Witches’ before a brief pause for a confident chat and then into ‘Trojan Horse’ – as indie an English song as ever was written. The song’s trademark guitar solo being sung as designed, note-for-note by the crowd in an footballerish chant that conceals its homosexual subtext – deliberately so if one unpacks the title.

A song or two later, ‘Biko’ off the new album ‘Intimacy’ finds Bloc Party a little off guard, and accidentally morphs into a half-time rendition that clearly confused Kele. “Thanks…” he says sheepishly at the charitable response.

Fatigue is not one of Bloc Party’s foibles however, and they come back harder than ever in an armada of new and old material until the first of, not one, not two, but THREE encores totaling nine songs! This is proper rock and roll. Kele, who you might otherwise be forgiven for thinking of as a self-absorbed heir to Morrissey given his lyrics, is beaming proudly, amazed by an audience who are very much amazed with him. Kele toys with the froth he has whipped up, but in the most modest way a star can by teasing the “mammas and the papas in the balconies” for “not rocking hard enough”. You can’t fake that. This isn’t just showbiz - the band get along perfectly well without the mock-chumminess of a ‘Mick and Keef’ shtick, besides, given the virtuosity required in Bloc Party’s song writing, there simply isn’t time for patronizing bum patting and body space invasions.

Describing the experience of ‘Halo’, ‘This Modern Love’, ‘The Prayer’, ‘Signs’, ‘Ares’ and ‘Flux’ being played live by the one of the world’s tightest rock drummers - who emerged at the end naked save for dodgy day-glo shorts – could be more difficult than performing the drumming in question. Save to say; this reviewer has not been as impressed since witnessing Phillip Glass pounding a piano into submission in Los Angeles. Matt Tong on drums is a kamikaze you could time the Bullet Train to. Russell Lissack (lead guitar) and Gordon Moakes (bass, synths) complete the foursome with a clinical dexterity that does not bust a sweat, a minimal kind of metal that would make Kraftwerk cuss with jealousy.

Indeed, these lads should treat each other well because this combination of talent only comes around once in a generation. With only four albums under their belt they would be fools to loose each other now, or anytime.

Which brings us to Bloc Party’s biggest theme, loss. ‘Intimacy’ almost exclusively deals with the fragility of relationships and life as Kele pours his heart out in ‘Biko’ and ‘Signs’ (mourning a close friend who dies of cancer) and ‘Trojan Horse’, ‘Halo’ and ‘One Month Off’ (unrequited/dysfunctional love). To experience this potentially depressing material transcend into the cathartic riot that unfolded at the Wolverhampton Civic, and likely at every venue on their tour to date is, nothing less than rapturous.

Perhaps the same could have been said about Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana in their heyday, or Radiohead in theirs, but somehow there is something all the more touching about a fiercely intelligent, black, shy, gay, moody and really rather likeable man transposing his slice of domestic un-bliss for our entertainment today, charming us all in the process.

All eyes were on Kele at the Civic. His resurrection from secular misery could be ours too.

[photography : Don Albert, Dani Parmer & Brogan Jay Darby]