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AMSTERDAM – Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke could finally express his love for club music with his solo release The Boxer. After completion, the 28-year-old musician from England found the need to play in a band again. “Now that I have this outlet to do music by myself, I think I'll be more excited by the idea of being in a room with the other guys from Bloc Party”.

For a long time that feeling was absent. “I was over the idea of being in a rock band. Now I'm kind of excited about the possibilities and limitations that it brings. I'm excited about the idea of jamming, us all being in a room and jamming together. Because we haven't done that for a while”, Okereke says.

After touring with the third album Intimacy (2008), Bloc Party decided to take a break for a while. That was the time for Okereke to practice his other passion: electronic music. “I've been excited by electronic music for the last ten years.”

The electronic direction was already noticeable on Intimacy. “I've been moving towards that kind of way of thinking for a while”, confirms the musician. “The idea to make a solo record came last year, when we decided to take a year off from Bloc Party.”

“There wasn't really much of a game plan, other than that I didn't want it to sound just like Bloc Party or like another guitar record. The biggest goal was to make something that married synthetic, electronic music with something slightly more organic.”

The two would collide in several ways. “I play the guitar: that's the first way that I can relate to music. So the sound of live instrumentation is also very important to me. I didn't want to make a pure club record. I wanted you to hear percussion, xylophones, glockenspiels and acoustic guitars as well. The instrumentation is just as acoustic as it is electronic, I think.”

Okereke tried to challenge himself with the lyrics as wel. Instead of writing the music and lyrics separately and melt it into one piece, he decided to improvise during the recordings in New York. “I literally just sang about the first thing that was in my head the morning I went to the studio. I didn't really plan anything, I just let it come out completely naturally to shape it around the music that way. I think the Genesis was freestyle.”

Although Bloc Party is going to start some new recordings very soon, Okereke doesn't see The Boxer as the end of his solo adventure. “I'd like to make more records like this. It feels like there's still more that I can do.”

Text & interview: Kristiaan Asscheman

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