My Silent alarm kicks in at the very mention of Bloc Party, it’s an A list style celebrity panic room with 12inch thick walls of regret, coated in air-brushed titanium nostalgia… If I could get rid of it I would, but the elephant in the room needs somewhere to hang!
Kele and I became friends in 1994, through our mums love of going to a prayer group in East London and our love of Indie Music.
Our Mum’s loved, Jesus Mary and Joseph while we loved Suede, The Long pigs and Gary Numan. They enjoyed Mass, Morning prayer, Evening prayer and the Rosary, we worshiped Bjork, Talking heads, Elastica and Radiohead.
We went to our first music video together when we skipped school to be part of the audience for the filming of the Suede ‘Filmstar’ at the Island Ilford. We went to our first festival together ‘V festival 96’, to watch Pulp and Menswear and we made plans to be bigger than Suede. No longer would we be forking out pocket money to join the fan club, or queuing outside some shit hole in the rain hoping to get in a music video (consequently you can make out my elbow and Kele’s casio at 2.57) or sewing Suede logo’s on our t-shirts! because we’d get them free when they supported us. We started to jam and would spend days designing logo’s and learning the opening chords to ‘Metal Mickey’ instead of writing our own songs and preparing for our own superstardom.
That was the dream and unfortunately only one of us has had to wake up, which is why I am writing this and not reciting my memoirs to my PA or publicist smoking a fat cigar while I wonder around my New York loft apartment in a silk kimono! Our Butler/Anderson fork in the road moment came one Friday late 95 when we planned to hang out after school. I called Kele’s house to formulate a plan but was informed he had been grounded for stealing a kids handful of top shelf magazines from a local shop!
I was impressed at the height he had to jump to reach them and the fact that he had robbed from the corporate scum that was John Menzies Newsagents (a official quote from my Che Guevara faze) yet disappointed that we couldn’t hang out all weekend and secondly that I wouldn’t be able to purchase the material.
This was because of 2 reasons:
1) They had been confiscated
2) They were aimed at different demographic…
but in the heat of the snatch and grab, maybe he didn’t look at the theme, or maybe he did?
That weekend I went to a concert instead, alone, sulking and paid for by my mum because I’d been at the prayer group all day minus Kele. It was to watch ‘Oasis’ at Earls Court with support from ‘The Bootleg Beatles’ Post ‘Definitely Maybe’ and What’s the story’ had exploded! I turned up in a tight t-shirt and a floppy fringe, by the end of Liam singing ‘I am the Walrus’ I had swapped it for a “Quoasis’ t-shirt and was adamant on growing the sides and cutting a short fringe when I got home!
Kele and I drifted apart slowly from then on like Bernard and Brett. We would not ‘Stay Together’ and we were no longer ‘2 hearts under the sky scrapers’ and unlike our mum’s one denomination faith… I put mine in the church of Rock and his in the temple of Indie.
We didn’t see each other for along time after1997 until we met in a bar where I was making a music video for my band in 2002. I was the singer and had beautiful hair and a lot of ambition. If I’d known at the time it wouldn’t have been enough I would have done things differently. One thing I would have also done differently was that when your old mate Kele who’s band was not yet complete asks you to play bass for him and hands you a 2 track demo with rough versions of ‘She’s hearing voice’ and the ‘Marshalls are dead’ you probably should nt say ‘no’ and ‘it’s really cool mate but sounds abit to much like talking heads, I don’t get it mate…….you need to find your sound’!
The sound he found was Bloc Party
While I find any sound but Bloc Party
Do I regret it?….I don’t know life is a journ…….. course I fucking do!!!
-Kye Blackett
