Bloc Buster

IT seemed an odd thing to do. Riding high on the strength of three platinum albums, and on stage in front of an adoring festival audience, the very last thing you might expect of a band would be to announce their break-up.

But then Bloc Party have never been predictable. The message came, in suitably cryptic style, at last year’s Reading Festival.

After three years of appearances in the same festival slot, they would not be back in 2010.

The festival was an appropriate place to put the brakes on Bloc Party – it was there, 10 years earlier, that Liverpool-born, London-raised Nigerian Kele and guitarist Russell Lissack formed the band (as the less catchy The Angel Range).

And it was down the road at the Reading Hexagon that they launched their 38,000-selling number two album A Weekend in the City, which sealed their reputation as innovators.

So it seems appropriate it is to Reading that Kele now returns – though this time as a solo artist. And it sees him as we’ve never seen him before – as a dance experimentalist.

“We had gone pretty far,” he says of Bloc Party. “But for me, we had not gone far enough.”

So, signing off with a prophetic lurch on to the dancefloor with the piano house-infused One More Chance, the band went their separate ways for a sabbatical.

Kele – once voted Britain’s sexiest ‘out’ gay man – had planned to leave music alone for a year – concentrating on his new passion for kickboxing and training hard at the gym. But, guess what, he couldn’t. And instead found himself drawn back to the studio.

“It was just me and an engineer,” he says. “I plugged in synths with no idea what they would do. I began programming drum beats, which I’d never done before. It was completely back to the drawing board. It was exciting and terrifying. In most cases I sat down, pulled a drum beat out of nowhere and arranged stuff around that. This was as exciting to me as the first time I picked up a guitar.”

The result is solo debut album The Boxer.

“The key for the sound of the record was to take things to a really filthy place,” he explains. “It was to go as harsh and as physical as I could make it.

“These are the sounds that make me the happiest in the world.”

The standout track is the scuzzy electro-fried beat-fest of Tenderoni. But, he says, the key to the record is the techno meltdown of Rise.

“It polarized everything,” he recalls. “I genuinely believe that everything I had been doing in Bloc Party had been leading up to this moment. It felt like everything I had been attempting to do with music was just falling into place for the first time.”

But while The Boxer looks, sounds and tastes like a dance record, you’d be wise not to let him hear you call it that. “I’m a bit weary of the term ‘dance music’ because it rather suggests something that can only be appreciated in clubs,” he says. “The point of this record is that it is something to listen to at home… to completely fall in love with… to absolutely immerse yourself in. I prefer the term pop music.”

Kele has always pushed at the boundaries – even if that risked alienating anyone incapable of keeping up with him. In the case of The Boxer, those are electro-pop and house.

“As a second generation child of immigrant parents you see traditions that you’re not really a part of, and you want to understand the chemistry behind them,” he explains.

“With me, it’s always been about pushing down the walls of things that aren’t supposed to belong to you. Growing up a black child in this country, there were always perceived notions of what you can, and can’t achieve. With everything that I’ve done I’ve always wanted to stand against that and show that everything is possible.”

* Kele plays the Reading Festival, at Little John’s Farm, Reading, this weekend. The festival starts tomorrow and runs through to Sunday night.