A Comprehensive Guide To
'A WEEKEND IN THE CITY'
CONTENTS
1. 'A
WEEKEND IN THE CITY' OVERVIEW
"'A Weekend in The City' is inspired by lead singer Kele Okereke's
interest in what he calls 'the living noise of a metropolis'. On 'Weekend...',
the band captures every detail, from the ebullient to the mundane, of daily
life in a modern city, and the quiet desolation that suffuses everything from
commuting to casual sex, from going out on a Friday night to the long ride home
in the early hours of the morning. These are songs desperate to understand the
meaning that pulses under the moments of our everyday: they are bursting with
tension, paranoia, sadness, love and an intense need for reason as to how city
life has become so displacing."
1. Song For Clay (Disappear Here)
2. Hunting For Witches
3. Waiting For The 7:18
4. The Prayer
5. Uniform
6. On
7. Where Is
Home?
8. Kreuzberg
9. I Still Remember
10.
Sunday
11.
SRXT
Cover
photograph: Rut Blees
Bloc
Party's sophomore album, 'A Weekend In The City', is set for release on February
5th 2007 in the
2.
RECORDING PROCESS / TIMELINE
January 2006: Bloc Party went into the
studio at the turn of the New Year, beginning 2006 by rehearsing songs and
working on three or four new tracks each day. A lot of the new material was
written whilst on tour the previous year. They aimed to shortlist around 20
different song ideas for demo. At this point the album was due to be in shops
by “September at the latest!” Asked to
sum up the sound of 'Bloc Party Mark Two' in one word, Gordy said
"direct", adding that it'd also be "streamlined" and
"layered".
February 2006: On Valentine’s day, we
were informed that the band were going to choose between Steve Dub or Jacknife
Lee to produce their next album, and were going to make the choice based on a
demo they'd recorded with each prospective producer. Some potential track names
were revealed: 'Hunting For Witches',
'Day One', 'Death
Of A Century', 'Blue Moon', 'Waiting For The 7:18', and 'Uniform'.
Gordy
described the new direction by saying "...we've retained some of that
jerkiness [from Silent Alarm] but we didn't want to do anything that we've
already done. There's a lot of gentle stuff, but we don't want to have a gentle
record." He hinted that some of the new material would employ electronic
processed beats and also added that the band hoped to make a textured record,
creating music out of quite difficult sounds.
'Uniform' was billed as a
people-pleaser, 'Atonement' as a possible
centerpiece of the album and 'Wet' as a
brooding, druggy, dancefloor piece that could even feature strings!
March 2006: the band set out on a
small club tour around England, debuting many new songs for the first time: 'Waiting For The 7:18', 'Hunting
For Witches', 'Uniform', 'Wet', 'Blue Moon',
'Atonement', 'Machine',
'It Started In An Afternoon', 'Rhododendrons', 'A
Momentary Loss Of Control'…ten new songs over eight gigs! An early
favourite was 'Wet' which featured possibly the heart-warming lyric of all
time…“you make my tongue loose”.
April 2006: A few possible album
titles emerged. The first was developed sort of by accident. Kele described the
main theme of the new songs as 'Urbanite
Relaxation' and this got adopted by the media as a possible album title.
Kele admitted: “That's what I'm thinking the title of the album should be, but
I've got to speak to the others first really!" Bootlegs from the club tour and a huge
charity gig at the Royal Albert Hall started doing the rounds, which soon
spread like wildfire amongst the hardcore Bloc-heads.
Jacknife Lee was then chosen to work on the album, after his
production of 'It Started In An
Afternoon' was enough to win him the job over Steve Dub (who worked on 'Day One'). Gordy spoke about the selection:
"You know the clichés about second albums; for us it has never been a
consideration to somehow re-capture the 'magic’ of ‘Silent Alarm'. We want to
make a more accomplished, better and different-sounding record. And we've been
looking to work with someone who can dig that record out of us, although as
much as anything it's about finding someone who you'd want to spend six weeks
in an enclosed space with.”
Later
in the month, a bootleg of the rare song 'Into The Blue' surfaced. It was written as long ago as the
beginning of 2005, but Kele scrapped the title around the time a film
of the same name came out. It was the first new song played live
after the release of 'Silent
Alarm', being premiered at the Magic Stick in
The
next update on the album was the announcement of more new song titles: 'Kreuzberg', 'Cruel',
and 'Merge On The Freeway',
with the first likely to be about the violent district in
A post from Kele on the official Bloc Party fan space “Marshals” brought some
inside perspective to the recording process:
“Lyrically a lot of the abstraction has gone, the ideas are clearer and
braver. The new record will not be called 'Urbanite Relaxation', I told a journalist that would be one of
the main themes, not the title. After reading 'Society Of The Spectacle' by Guy
Debord and 'A Critique Of Everyday Life' by Henry Lefebvre I literally became
obsessed with these minute details of everyday life in a modern capitalist
society. Commuting, working, drinking, watching time slip by. It's not a dance
punk record, that shit has been done to death. Dance punk will not be a noose
around our necks. The songs that stand out for me are: 'A
Song for Clayton', 'Kreuzberg', 'Sunday', 'Perfect
Teens' (formerly 'Machine'), 'Wet', 'Seroxat'
and 'England' (formerly 'Blue Moon').
The atmosphere of this next record is going to be dark, we cannot deny that,
but if we get it right it will not be aloof, it will be funny, warm and real as
well.”
To
finish it all off, Kele warned fans not to get too attached to the new live
tracks (and their bootlegs) as anything could be overhauled. Playing the song
'templates' live was a way to get the fans to help decide what worked and what
didn’t.
May 2006: After an appearance at the Coachella music festival in
Interviews revealed that 'Hunting
For Witches' was written as a
reaction to the media coverage of last year's London bombings and 'Waiting For The 7:18' is Kele's observation
of the effects of the working life on his post-college friends.
June 2006: Kele revealed that Bloc
Party were about halfway through the recording of their sophomore effort.
Another album name was floating about, but 'Sympathy
Tranny' was nothing more than a joke, inspired by Nadia, the transsexual
Big Brother winner.
He
confirmed that the new album would feature the songs 'Waiting For The 7:18', 'Uniform', 'Perfect
Teens' (formerly 'Machine'), 'England' (formerly 'Blue Moon'), and 'Song For
Clay' (formerly 'Merge On The Freeway' and 'Song For
Clayton'). The latter was inspired by the main character of Bret Easton
Ellis' novel 'Less Than Zero'. The songs 'Cells Shaped Like Stars' and 'Kreuzberg' were also being
considered, but weren't definitely going to be included. Kele mentioned that Bloc
Party planned to bring in a string section and guest vocalists to contribute to
the album!
Kele
also started an underground movement which was dubbed the “Amerie Movement”,
when he constantly proclaimed his love for her song '1 Thing': "One of my
favourite songs of the last ten years. I was literally obsessed with that song.
The thing about that song, what I find really inspiring about modern R&B,
is it really sounds like it was assembled on the computer, the pickings of
samples and building the song around that. There's a sense where it seems to be
just stuck together, and that's something that I'm hoping we can try to somehow
bring out in the record that we're making. Essentially, yeah, we're a live
band, but I'd like to get some bricolage going on." The FBI is currently
investigating Kele's connections to Amerie's promotion team.
He
also stated in a newspaper interview that he wanted to define Bloc Party’s
sound, something that was perhaps not clear on 'Silent Alarm': "That was always the
intention, to be in a rock band that alluded to more than just the Velvet
Underground or Led Zeppelin," he said. "For me, this band is about
mixing ideas from contemporary dance music and contemporary R&B and electronica and somehow trying to find a happy
medium because that really is a lot of the music that really inspires me. It's
not your big rock bands. So with this record I'm trying to make that clearer
because I'm not quite sure how clear that was on the first record."
Gordy then listed some special things to look out for on the new album: Matt and Gordy playing drums simultaneously, R'n'B-styled beats, Russell's guitar put through a 'Big Muff' pedal, the sound of a guitar amp being thrown off a first-storey balcony, an unplayable guitar solo, piano, glockenspiel, and strings. Appetites were duly whetted.
July 2006: After a few more shows
in the US to debut new songs, Kele made a huge announcement to BlocParty.net by
naming the 13 tracks that had been recorded in sessions with Jacknife Lee: 'A Prayer To The
Lord', 'England', 'Hunting For Witches', 'It
Started In An Afternoon', 'Kreuzberg',
'On', 'Seroxat',
'Song For Clay (Disappear Here)', 'Sunday', 'Uniform',
'Waiting For The 7:18', 'We Were Lovers' and 'Where
Is Home?'. Now we would just have
to wait to see which ones would make the cut, as the band hinted that not all
of them would make the final cut.
August 2006: Kele revealed the
influences for 'A Prayer To The
Lord', which was originally called 'The
Bolero': Busta Rhymes, and the traditional Bolero dance, which involves
stomps and hand claps! Kele said:
"The initial idea came from watching the Busta Rhymes video for 'Touch
It', where there are these young majorettes that are going through this kind of
cheer pattern. I thought that was one of the most amazing things I'd heard, and
I wanted to write a song that revolved around that sort of idea."
Later
in the month, a good quality demo of 'Song For Clay
(Disappear Here)' was posted on the Always New Depths unofficial forum, and
subsequently spread like Anchor Butter on toast. The demo was taken from one of
the early sessions with Jacknife Lee and hinted at a
more experimental sound.
On
August 27th, the final album title was reported as 'A Weekend In The City',
although this was still unconfirmed. Following that, a one-minute video clip
from the recording studio was released on "Marshals" accompanied by a
few snippets from 'Waiting For The 7:18'.
October 2006: It was announced via a
"Marshals" update from Gordy (including studio pictures) that 'On' would feature strings! Then just days later,
the release date of the album was announced. It was bittersweet though, as
February 5th 2007 seemed so far away yet at the same time a concrete
date was finally reality.
In
late October, Bloc Party made their comeback official by announcing the album
title and tracklisting, along with a 20 show club tour of the
'SONG FOR CLAY
(DISAPPEAR HERE)'
'HUNTING FOR WITCHES'
o
Influenced by the terrorist attacks on
'WAITING FOR THE 7:18'
'THE PRAYER'
'UNIFORM'
'ON'
o
Kele: "It's about the lure of
drugs, getting drunk and dancing all night. Whenever I hear it, I completely
lose myself." (formerly known as: 'Wet')
'WHERE IS HOME?'
'KREUZBERG'
'I STILL REMEMBER'
o
Featuring electronically treated vocals which make Okereke sound female, this song sounds as confident and
epically uplifting as U2 and boasts a sparklingly catchy guitar line. (formerly known as: 'It Started In An Afternoon')
'SUNDAY'
'SRXT'
LOST SONGS / B-SIDES:
Jacknife Lee, aka Garret Lee, was born in Dublin and started
making music when he was 14. After four years playing punk rock guitar with Compulsion,
Lee began remixing, bootlegging and producing. He has a very impressive CV,
having worked with artists such as Run DMC, Eminem,
Longview, Badly Drawn Boy, Basement Jaxx, Kasabian, U2, Blur, Missy Elliot, Björk and The Raveonettes. Lee was
also the producer of the album that brought Snow Patrol into the limelight, 'Final Straw'.
Compiled by Owen Rees
Information
from BLOG PARTY and BlocParty.net originally posted by Jim Lloyd